Writers trying to convince Disney execs not to cancel Nimona, Owl House, and many other IPs:

It's almost laughable how ironic this scene is with what a dumpster fire Wish turned out to be

Have you ever regreted letting certain things go on air?

Like a scene in which you noticed something off that either could be improved upon or maybe something you just realized ruined the overall flow.

Oh yeah. All of the time.

TV Animation schedules are not for the weak of heart. Most of the time, by the time it's your turn to touch something, it's already on fire. I just told the story about how we had maybe two weeks and no resources to create our main title, and that's not unusual.

There were SO many times (especially in my early seasons) where something would go wrong or come back from overseas looking weird, and we just wouldn't have the time or resources to fix it. All of those Mandys smiling in Season One? I was having a hard time convincing board artists that Mandy should literally never smile, so they'd throw them in. I'd remove them, but I'd occasionally miss a panel and she'd come back smiling. Due to the vagaries of dealing with overseas studios, it fell to us to fix the problem and at the time we didn't have any actual animation staff.

Later in the series, I'd take stuff like this, screen-cap it, and reanimate it. There's an entire sequence in Big Boogey where I personally took two days to add burn marks to the characters. Is that something a show runner SHOULD be doing? Probably not. But when you're the last line of defense, you've got to do it yourself if you want it done.

TV Animation is a collaboration. But it's also (at my level) a compromise. There will never be enough money, time, or staff to really get things where you want them to, so it's all about finding the solution that gets you most of the way there.

me posting my twitter ramble here

We all have a part to play in building a healthy and sustainable working environment....but the people who are higher up like the directors and producers ? 100% their choices can have a HUGE impact on the team. The recent talk about the spiderverse production may have a large scale just in terms of the project, but its a fairly uncommon story in the industry... Keep this in mind as you enter the industry, and as you grow through it - dont put your head down. The pressures of the audiences expectations can be large - but we cant let it get to us to the point of forgetting that we have an entire team of passionate people that can be effected if we make choices based off of that pressure.  

as someone who is in a leadership position i think it is *PART OF WHAT COMES WITH THE JOB* to take responsibility if your team is burnt out/unhappy - we should always strive to do better.  you will hear ‘ this is how it is ‘ from some people and they’re not wrong, it is how it is..but thats ONLY BECAUSE EVERYONE KEEPS ..ACCEPTING IT. I dont , its weak energy honestly . 

Trying to be better about posting more about my animation work on tumblr so let's kick it off with Castlevania haha. I got permission a while back that I could post my work I did for the newest Castlevania series over on Netflix so wanted to share it here. This was my first time doing pure action animation so it was a good challenge for me! I wanna thank Samuel Deats (director) for bringing me onto the show, I never thought I'd get to work with Powerhouse (let alone Castlevania haha).

HI LOVELY ONES!

I honestly took a while in opening this one hahaha, but it will mostly be animations and videos of process of my work and hopefully I will get to talk to you all about the animation industry and also my life.

If anyone is interested in a more chill and silly stuff from me, then please take a look at my tiktok and give a follow , I will be making giveaways very soon!

tiktok: @debbiebalboa

The company I work for, Make llc, is now using AI to generate backgrounds and imagery for our animated work. Our industry is normalizing the use of ai generated imagery which will vastly phase out the use of human artists to render artwork.

If you are aspiring to be a commercial artist I would strongly discourage going to school/college for any of it. Schooling will set you on average 100k+ in debt in an industry that nearly most animators will never see above 50-60k in yearly wages on the high end. Animation is a high debt, low income industry and it is only becoming more so.

My advice is to stay out of debt and ensure you have career/life-trajectory flexibility.

Haven't watched Disney's Wish yet but this is my own interpretation based on the reception

when you have an overly enthusiastic director

Hi finch! I hope holidays are treating you well :))

As someone who’s already stressed in the whole rushing portfolios for unis, having found an account that posts people venting about jobs in the animation industry it has made me feel pretty discouraged.

If it's not too much of a personal question, are you able to live comfortably with your job? And do you know any insight on how the general conditions of the field are?

hh this is a very hard question to answer tbh ToT it depends on a lot of things and what you prioritise. Remember those accounts that share people venting about work ARE for venting yknow, there are imperfections with every job, though it has been a particularly bad year with cancellations, layoffs, ai etc.

I think most of the time it doesn't pay a ton, but it doesn't pay minimum either. I'm on a fairly comfy wage at the mo, maybe a bit above average for the UK but maybe a bit below average for London, though animation is contract based so it can fluctuate depending on who you work for n what their budget is. LA people seem to get paid loads to me, but the US has a biiig wage gap from the UK so it's hard for me to compare.

If you get into a role that's got less competition and really desirable, like 3D rigging or pipeline developer or something, you'll find it easier to get work and will be able to negotiate more for better pay etc.

There's not a ton of 2D animating left in the US but it exists a lot elsewhere in the world (bc the US has high wages, studios tend to outsource most of the heavy labour like animation) but there's still other roles in 2D such as BG paint, storyboard, design etc.

It's contract based, so very rare that you'll be working in one place for more than 1-2 years. Sometimes contracts are a few months, sometimes longer. Sometimes they're PAYE (they give you payslips and do your taxes for you, paid holidays and sick days) or freelance (you have to invoice for your pay and manage your own taxes, pay-per-day kinda), and the pay can fluctuate depending on those things (like I had a very short contract last year but it paid really decent to compensate for that). This makes things tricky as your earnings can be different month to year, and you may have to move a lot in the beginning to chase work

You have to be good at communicating and work with lots of people a lot of the time, which can be a great thing! You meet so many people n it really feels like a community sometimes. Going to festivals like Annecy really helps

I think lots of other animators have shared their opinions online on youtube and stuff so it's worth having a poke around! I think Toniko Pantoja made a video too, I'd like to make one eventually. I made a 1yr in animation video n would like to make an updated one now that I've been in it 5yrs.

In the end, if you reaaally really love it, love working with other people, and can't think of doing anything else, then you'll be fine!

Some shameless POS literally used AI to steal my friend's animated film

I usually don't post stuff like this but this shit's insane and downright insulting. I graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2022, a pretty well known animation school in the US, and every animation student on their final year of college has to make an animated film for our final thesis. If you have any idea of the animation making process, you would know that making an entire film by yourself in one year is batshit insane and extremely exhausting, to the point where I'm still feeling the effects of the process on my physical and mental wellbeing 2 years after I graduated. Once more, my friends and I did it during the covid period, which was another level of hell. I was literally watching my grandfather's funeral while working in the labs at 2am because I couldn't fly home to attend it because we had to make this film. This film was our lifeblood, the culmination of 4 years of hell at school which was suppose to be our gateway into the industry. Tldr, it's fucking difficult to do, especially on your own.

So imagine 2 years later and I wake up to a bunch of messages on our alumni chat where a dear friend of mine posted a link to a tiktok video of someone literally stealing her entire film and superimpose it shot by shot and claim it as their own ad for their AI game. As animators, we aren't unaware of people stealing our films and reposting them elsewhere. Heck my own film "The End" was stolen from our school vimeo and posted on tiktok BEFORE IT WAS EVEN OFFICIALLY RELEASED, and that tiktok got hundreds of thousands of views while a year after my own real release my film is still struggling in the thousands.

But this

This is a fucking new low.

Can you imagine? A fresh graduate going through literal blood sweat and tears to make a film on their own that is so important to their future in the industry, to get them a job, with a film that represents a part of themselves to the world, just used as fodder for some stupid tech assholes? It's infuriating. It's insulting. It's literally a big fuck you to the hundreds of students who spent their lives toiling to make these films from the heart who are just desperate to get into the industry.

The animation industry right now is in complete shambles. People are graduating from animation schools with thousands of dollars in dept only to be met with a wasteland of minimum wage and lack of funding and competing for jobs with people who have already been in the industry for years affected by the massive layoffs not only in the movie but also the gaming industries. These films we make for our thesis aren't just films made for fun, they represent our lifeblood, our only opportunity to get a job as a graduate in this sea of hell. If you didn't make a good film, chances are you're never even stepping foot in the industry ever. It's our golden ticket that we would put thousands of hours through, sleepless nights and pushing through no matter the circumstances of sickness and pain it caused us.

And now some dumb fucking AI using dickbags see that and decide it's worth nothing.

Here's a link to my friend's real film. Please go watch it and support her work. I'm not even gonna link the other piece of shit tiktok because I don't want that video to even get a single extra view but here's a recording my friend made so you can see this malarkey side by side.

It's heartbreaking to see my friend's film barely getting any views while the stolen garbage is already in the thousands. I hope the person who stole my friend's work and made that shit dies in a fiery car crash and go straight to hell.

I cannot emphasise how we must not let this shit continue to happen. We're living in a fucking dystopia and unless we do something about it and support those affected by it it's only going to get worse. They're already expanded from stealing people's still art to stealing people's entire films, if we don't stop this nothing we create would ever be safe.

My friend's film:

The shameless fuckheads who stole her film:

Would you trust ANY Korean studio for hand-drawn animation today? I ask because, when The Powerpuff Girls came back in 2016, I noticed how slow and stiff the Korean animation was. Since then, most Burbank cartoons animated in Korea, namely Cartoon Network shows, have been like that — mostly on 2s & with less inbetweening. Look at any Digital eMation episode of Victor and Valentino or Samurai Jack Season 5; do they animate as loosely and smoothly as Digital eMation episodes of Billy & Mandy do?

Sure I would. It would all depend on the studio and the circumstances. There are good studios and bad studios, and either of those will treat your show differently based on their perception of how valuable it is to their client. In the early 2000s Rough Draft was a top-notch studio. One of the reasons I switched over to eMation from Rough Draft was that I felt like Rough Draft was putting all of its resources into making Samurai Jack look beautiful, and we were still calling retakes on three year old issues. I knew we weren't a priority to Rough Draft, and I knew that stemmed from Cartoon Network's negotiations with them, so my griping was only going to get us so far. It seemed to me that I needed a studio that was smaller and scrappier like we were. We were putting in a lot of work on our end to make cool stuff and it wasn't ending up on the screen, so we needed people who were just as hungry on the back-end, and eMation stepped up.

There's also the fact, though, that animation itself has changed a lot in the last fifteen years. Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack's animation always seemed to have an air of "motion comics" to it. And frankly, that's part of what I love about it. It was all a throwback to the old UPA cartoons, which were built on strong, clear poses and made for the cost equivalent of a turkey dinner. Likewise, CN storyboard artists usually had around four weeks to write and draw their boards on paper, so there just wasn't time to take the effort to do anything too complex. It was all about snapping between those 300-ish storyboard drawings and momentarily savoring them for their humor and design mastery. Now we have tons of digital tools that make the basics of animation a lot more accessible to everyone, and have changed the entire studio pipeline. Things just won't look like they used to because nobody makes them that way anymore.

When I've had to choose an overseas animation studio, the network's production arm usually gives me one or three choices and tells me that's all there is. Deals have already been made. (Sometimes they make you pick two to save on costs, which (IMO) usually results in two studios that are less functional than any one of them would have been.) The studios usually have reels, so that gives you a basic idea of what they can do. You can (hopefully) find some other show creators who have worked with the studios and get an honest review. It's an important enough decision that it's worth whatever research you can put into it. Even over good bones, an ill-fitting skin can ruin the mood.

The most important thing to remember, I think, is that it's your job and your crew's job to make animating the show as easy as possible. Really, it's everyone's job to make the next person in line's job as simple as they can. Ideally, there shouldn't be a lot of questions because the materials you sent down the chain are clear.

So... yeah. I'd still trust Korean studios as much as I'd trust any overseas or domestic animation studio. You get out of them what you put into them by feeding them money and your own labor. It's quite possible that the shows you mentioned didn't do enough of either.

I imagine the overseas studios are hurting right now, so who knows what that landscape is even going to look like in a few years.

As with every step of the process making a TV show, you just sort of have to weigh your options and find the path.

Hmm. That got long.

That time when working in animation made me realize I needed therapy

Since we're on the topic of overworking / being passionate in animation and blah blah blah.  I want to share my story about working on the first season of Hilda (for context I was the animation director), specifically..how completely garbo my mental health got because 

I INSISTED ON WORKING MYSELF INTO THE GROUND. 

This is a story I've shared when I've had a chance to do lectures or talks, and if there is one really awesome thing that comes with ..weird ..animation clout, its that you can use those powers for good in terms of teaching people about the BS that comes with the job...anyway.

The reason why I like to talk about this is because I insisted on doing it to myself, and that was really got me thinking about the factors that do lead us into over working. Because heres the deal

Hilda season 1 was, without getting into too many details, a heckofatime...especally for the core crew. we were a small group, doing something new because most of us haven't worked on a show before that included pre production. My entire career up to that point had been working on service work for shows that were created in Burbank, so the new pipeline had a ton of challenges. We did all care, and we all believed in the project SOOOO much. I would tell people not to work over time, because I want my team to leave on time - but I was there...a lot. Leaving the studio by 11pm , working through the weekends..it wasnt an uncommon thing for me. sure , it wasnt all the time, but this stuff spans years sometimes so it went in waves. But whenever the challenges came up, i doubled down. because I super believed in it.

  And the thing was - other people told me to stop. I had a lot of valid concerns given to me by my friends and team members who saw how I was burning myself out at both ends. And I thought like, well , its my *choice*.  Its my chance to have a voice and be creative and try to do something different and we all have to push ourselves and yes its HARD but. THATS HOW YOU DO IT RIGHT? surely if I just make sure I’m the one overworking and my team isn't.. that's fine. 

Well, no, I was immensely effecting my team maybe I wasn’t telling them to work late, but they were seeing me get more and more tired and stay later and later.  I thought they would still approach me for help, or if they struggled. But the issues they had they kept to themselves without wanting to put more on my shoulders. Because they *cared* , just as much as I did ..and we all took more on our shoulders then we should have and there were a lot of things that I could have solved had I fostered a better communication environment.  I became really resentful in my head over the smallest things, I actually saw myself becoming a more hateful person and easily annoyed. I came home every day rambling about the frustrations. Now, let me preface this by saying - my mental state did not only have to do with overworking. I had and have things still to unpack, but the control I had over work and the validation I got from it was a coping mechanism for me. I really didnt think i had any worth as a person outside of this job. It basically was a very nasty cycle that didnt stop until ...well I had gotten so bad I had to.  By the end of the first season I was actually incredibly close to quitting . I was in big anxiety attack territory because I was so worn thin- I had started therapy but eventually moved onto getting medication as well and that was what allowed me to stick it out. ( I have the same therapist and I am on the same meds, it was very hard to do at the time, but i cant imagine my life now without making that choice ). After it was done I was immensely supported by the studio and worked part time as a trainer, which is what i requested to give my brain a break. (Only a few of my closer friends knew how bad I was getting but it was pretty obvious I needed to rest) I'm really proud of the work we did and we keep doing on the show, ..and some other people may have gone through something similar and found it was worth it, but thats not me. I still struggle not to fall back into that mindset, but it helps knowing that if i keep myself out of it , i can help my team out of it, because I know they care about this show just as much as I do. I’m not a martyr, I am a leader, and its up to me to keep myself healthy so I can keep my crew healthy.   I always strive to be better, but i get to decide what that looks like - and for me ..better has nothing to do with the image on the screen. Its got more to do with the experience of the people around me. Readjusting those priorities has helped a lot with keeping my head above water and not add to the pressure that makes it so hard not to get sucked down in the first place.  I do think its good to talk about though , how our passion and language and drive can lead to a lot of us being a part of this cycle. And if theres one good thing about the challenges, its sharing them so at least others can learn faster then you did ;) . take care of yourself friends.

I Worked on Jujutsu Kaisen PART 2 Apologies for the long wait, everyone. Hope it was worthwhile!

Here are a few of my favorite color designs used during the production of “Leo”. As immeasurable as the brilliance of our lord and savior Adam Sandler may seem, Leo wouldn’t be the masterpiece that it is without all of the insanely talented people in the animation industry busting their asses.

Pics are posted with permission from their creator: Henry Wong. In addition to contributing to the world’s greatest feature film about a geriatric tuatara, he’s done a ton of other awesome work in the animation industry, with recent projects including Under the Boardwalk, Blue Eyed Samurai, and Across the Spider-verse.

Be sure to follow him on IG @/henrywongdraws !

(Source)

Animation is DYING, But We Can Save It 

This is getting ridiculous now, I am not happy and am getting tired of News Like this, if you feel the Same, you know what to do, spread this around as much as you can, Spread. The. Word.  #NewDeal4Animation, i don’t know if this is still a thing anymore.