Ask John: Why Does Anime Continue to Use Limited Animation?

Question:
I’ve watched many bad anime over the years & always noticed a lot of the same traits, e.g. limited frame rate, very angular character designs & bad ideas. Japan seems to be pumping out a lot of bad anime over the years. Why isn’t more money put into anime like classic American animation? The limited frame rates annoy me the most, the worst example being the Dragon Ball Z TV series. What do you think of all this?

Answer:
Without specific examples, I can’t address accusations about “very angular character designs & bad ideas.” I’ll concede that conventional anime does have typical character design characteristics – large eyes, hair that clumps together into thick points rather than individual strands, smooth angles rather than pronounced cheekbones or square jaws, lots of light reflections and highlights. However, I don’t believe that character design is a reliable signifier of the quality of an anime. For example, films like Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days, Akagi, and Gigantic Formula have poor, awkward, or simply strange looking character designs, but are still good or excellent anime. At the same time anime like Burst Angel and .Hack have attractive character designs but idiotic or uninvolving narratives. Character design is only one part of anime, so other strengths can compensate for weak character design.

I also can’t address “bad ideas” without example. Narrative concepts like the “harem anime” are often cited as cliché, but harem anime like Love Hina and Ouran High School Host Club are still popular, enjoyable, and even manage to overcome the conventional limitations of their genre. So I can’t refute vague accusations that poor quality anime are characterized by “angular character designs & bad ideas,” but I personally prefer to avoid making broad statements about the quality of anime. I don’t hesitate to call bad programs bad, but I think that trying to create arbitrary stereotypical patterns common to “bad” anime encourages narrow mindedness.

I can discuss, in detail, the question of limited frame rates common to Japanese animation and why the problem is not corrected. Even in today’s age of digital animation, anime is still hand drawn; it’s just not commonly hand painted any longer. But contemporary anime still starts with individual artists who manually draw frames of animation which are then colored and sequentially animated via software programs. Typical anime employs a frame rate good enough to make anime appear fairly smooth and natural to average viewers. Occasionally there are contemporary anime, like Mushishi, that exhibit especially smooth and fluid animation, as well as shows like Kissdum Engage Planet and Shining Tears that have noticeably stilted, limited animation. Anime developed its tendency to use fewer drawings, fewer “frames” of animation, as a method of cutting production expenses. To a large degree, that remains the reason why anime has less fluid animation than American cartoons.

To provide some context, in 1988 Akira cost $7.5 million to produce. As of today, Steamboy is the most expensive anime film ever made, with estimates ranging from $22 to $26 million. The first season of the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex television series may be the most expensive anime television series ever made, having cost 800 million yen (roughly 6.5 million dollars). These figures seem astronomical, but they’re miniscule compared to the production budgets of American animation. The 2D SpongeBob SquarePants cost 30 million to produce. Disney’s 2002 film Lilo & Stitch cost $80 million to make. Disney’s 2003 2D animated film Brother Bear had a production budget of over $90 million! In fact, American 2D animation costs more to produce than anime even earns! Japan’s highest grossing anime film of last year, Studio Ghibli’s Ged Senki, earned only 7.65 billion yen ($61.6 million). Obviously it would be foolish to invest $80 or $90 million into producing a film that earns back only $60 million.

American animation invests a lot of money into its animation quality because American animation is very profitable. Anime, on the other hand, is not nearly as profitable as many foreigners seem to believe that it is. During the forty years that contemporary anime has existed, Japanese animators have developed techniques to disguise limited animation and compensate for shortcomings. Anime may sometimes employ photorealistic backgrounds, or use highly cinematic camera angles, or put a tremendous amount of detail into single shots and scenes as a way of emphasizing areas of animation production apart from frame rate and animation quality. Films like Paprika and Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo may not have animation quality that rivals the fluidity of American animation, but these films have a creativity and an artistic integrity that mainstream American commercial animation can only dream of.

I have little doubt that there are some Japanese artists who appreciate the limitations imposed upon anime production, as those limitations necessitate creativity and ingenuity. There are also Japanese animators like Katsuhiro Otomo and Mamoru Oshii who push for bigger budgets and use more money to put increasing sophisticated visual imagery on screen. But regardless of the wishes of Japanese animators or viewers worldwide, the production quality and production budgets of anime will always be limited by anime’s commercial potential. As long as the most profitable anime releases ever still earn less than the production cost of American animation, anime will never get production budgets that rival American animation. For some individuals, limited frame rates may be a matter of artistic choice, but for the whole anime industry, limited frame rates are an unavoidable necessity due to the small production budgets of anime. And anime production budgets will continue to be small because the revenue that anime earns is relatively small.