originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/692379...
the webgen animation ‘community’ for want of a better term is… a lot of things! for one it’s impressively international - i think I’ve met people from just about every continent, for once Europeans/NAmericans are in the minority. it’s also also terrifyingly young.
I’ve heard of people landing anime jobs as young as 14, vercreek is 18 or 19 iirc, roadsign is 18, a 19 year old made this, I’ve been talking to another 18 year old who considers this sort of pace the standard and feels frustrated that he can’t keep pace despite clearly being well on his way. and these kids, from the phillipines, from singapore, from germany, from china, are incredibly hard working… not necessarily in the healthiest way. I’ve heard of a server where you get kicked out if you’re deemed not to be grinding hard enough.
and to be clear, nobody’s getting paid for this - it’s all for the love of the art form and the sense of competition. nor is it any sort of workplace training - the teaching is mostly informal, peer to peer, drawing on the many different art resources (and anime specific ones) that exist on the internet now.
i think the instinct of most of my friends would be to feel sorry for these kids, struggling so hard for what is objectively a pretty terrible job. and yet… i don’t think they have illusions about it. sakugablog articles about the woeful state of the industry go around all the time. i saw that 18 year old say recently, “i hope i can get a job in the anime industry before it collapses.” (he’ll probably pull it off, the rate he’s going.)
it’s also not true that all these kids value is flashy action shots, overuse of smears rather than moving. these things are common in beginners, but among the hardcore grinders, if anything, they could be accused of overemphasising the ‘drawing fundamentals’ with the aim of achieving naturalistic fullbody movement with weight, proportion, anatomy all tight. “do your figure drawing practice.”
and don’t get me wrong! there’s certainly a love of the elements of old school kanada school showiness - background animation, big action shots, people definitely still think yutaka nakamura is GOAT at every level - but if anything i think the real prize is to achieve work like this by bahi jd (one of the very first international webgen animators) or the kaguya-sama ED that vercreek directed and largely key animated, or indeed weilin zhang’s way of drawing fighting (admittedly Weilin is loved as much for his effects, his ability to combine them with this kind of weighty action, and just all round talent).
so, to take a look at one of these examples: it’s lively constant motion, but with a different attitude to stylisation and timing than the old full animation of Disney, perhaps more akin to the ‘full limited’ of Mitsuo Iso.
and in a way I would say, this is ultimately the sakugabooru generation of animators! i feel like it’s hard to understate the influence of that website on self-taught animators today. it’s not just that we watch a lot of anime, it’s that now watching anime for animation, and paying attention to its technicalities, stylistic motifs, etc etc. is now very strongly established. ‘sakuga MADs’ are the gateway drug; some proportion of people will go from just watching to setting the mission of making the sakoog themselves.
an interesting consequence of this is that despite the massively international nature of this movement, certain stylistic hallmarks are very common across the whole field. we can trace them to the influences of what’s big in sakuga fan circles. we could also perhaps credit Hyun’s Dojo, a mostly stick figure oriented site which was home to Weilin, Vercreek and Telepurte when they started out.
so, all over the world, people are drawn by the same flame. what prompted this thought is that i recently saw someone promoting an African Animation Association and if you watch their stuff… it’s mostly classic webgen and stick stuff: sticks having flashy martial arts battles, figures smashing up yutapon cubes in a flat plane, explosions…
the sense of rivalry leads to some odd inclinations. for example, I’ve seen novices worry about where they’ll debut, if it’s a cool enough anime to earn respect. (this got shut down pretty quick thankfully). people have to be reminded not to prioritise flexing to look cool on sakugabooru over the actual needs of the production. and of course, there is constant discussion of the dangers of taking work before you’re ready from a desperate production assistant, turning in bad work, and getting informally blacklisted.
it is in short… complete chaos! but it’s going to be curious how it will shake out. anyway, increasingly some of these non-Japanese (I won’t say Western, bc many aren’t from the West) webgen animators are now finding work on Western shows like Castlevania, or in projects like Studio Grackle. meanwhile, with the demise of Western traditional animation, the anime pipeline, and anime visual styles, have overwhelmingly become the central reference point for 2D animation worldwide, influencing works from donghua to French animation such as Peepoodo.
that brings me around to the current small controversy in animation circles which is these “boards” for the Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, animated by Kevin Molina-Ortiz. here’s a sakugabooru link if you prefer! unfortunately I can’t embed it. and here’s the version of the scene that made it to the film.
as many people have said, these are not ‘boards’ so much as rough animation. the reason is basically union-busting: Western studios prefer to outsource ‘animation’ jobs to cheaper countries like South Korea and the Philipines, meaning puppet animation, cleanup and inbetweening. But wanting more control, and with artists fiercely competing for a small set of jobs, the studios demand more and more detailed storyboards until they approach what would be considered ‘layouts’ or ‘first key animation’ in Japan.
and, like, clearly Kevin Molina-Ortiz is driven by the same impulses as these webgen guys. his animation is packed with sakuga references: you have an Itano circus, you have allusions to Yutaka Nakamura’s sequences in Mob Psycho 100 and Birdy the Mighty Decode (mentioned by someone on sakugabooru, can’t figure out which specific cut they have in mind).
this allusion-dense approach to animation feels similar, in a way, to Flying Bark’s clear inspiration Hiroyuki Imaishi, who also peppers his work with Dezaki references and Kanada dragons and similar allusions. the audience will no doubt think it’s cool as shit, but it is also a wink and a nod to other animators and sakuga fans. nowadays it’s more possible than ever to have a personal reputation as an animator, to be a tiny ‘charisma animator’ at least in your niche.
for studios, this is… if not exactly a dream come true, since managing this rambunctious new generation of foreign animators unfamiliar with the industry practices is proving a bit of a headache, at the very least a welcome life ring in the current desperation. they can keep paying their miserable rates and throw people into rushed projects on life support, and still trust that people will bend over backwards to work for them.
all the same like. animators want to animate. that’s not, I think, a bad thing! although sometimes it does seem like animation is a form of collective insanity, in which we all perform monk-like discipline and asceticism in pursuit of a rather abstract ideal.
‘objectively’, teaching yourself animation with the aspiration to work on anime is one of the least sensible things you can do with your life. for the price of thousands of hours of effort, you can earn your way to freelance work with no protections, an income rising from ‘poverty’ to ‘modest’, endemic crunch and barely any reliable training, conducted in a language you probably don’t speak yet. but! you’ll get to express yourself in this ridiculous art form, so maybe that’s worth it.
why do anything, really?
anyway, these young people seem to have found their answer. and i’ll be honest, i kind of admire them. i want to have their skill, but more than that, i want to be able to consistently apply that level of commitment. to anything, really. and there is an incredible satisfaction in learning a skill, finding you have capabilities you didn’t before, to feel you’ve worked hard at something. i don’t think these things are wrong. given the choice between grinding in a videogame or developing my real skill at animation, i eagerly choose the latter… so I guess we’ll have to see if ‘webgen animator at age 30′ is a plausible path for a life to take. [note from the future: it wasn’t, at least in the ways I imagined. but I’m glad I pursued it anyway!]
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