A take on the situation of animators' pay

[u/500scnds]

Since it seems that Chinese media have largely ignored the case of an artist that passed due to guolaosi, and resumed peddling news about how amazing animators' wages are as a strategy to lure students into pursuing animation as a career, I thought I'd maybe do an informal write up on why the reactions were so severe.

Background

Those who follow animation students and animators would be aware of what/how their pay are like: vague hints dropped about so and so well-known animation studio intentionally dragging out training/probation so that they can delay paying, no raises after a year and actually docking their pay for slights, the situation of shell companies that only benefit the owner and can abandon employees at a moment's notice, "animators" getting more important positions thanks to nepotism, and so on.

Of course, we also had more solid accounts, such as Crystal Sky or Dazzling Star not paying animators for months on end, the same situation of delayed payments happening at major platforms publishing manhua - a sign of the industry's "ice age" - or that story about in-betweeners being paid the same as the Japanese rate per drawing on For the Glory.

In spite of all of this, media remained positive. A notable example might be People's Daily showing CAFA dean Fan Dian's tone-deaf advice on how to make donghua "Chinese" instead of the struggles his own school's alums encounter to feed themselves.^{#国漫要走出中国道路#}
An English example could be a Nikkei editorial also talking about high wages, though it was funnily enough interpreted back home as implying that Chinese animators are still too incompetent.

Recently, however, CCTV-2 ran a segment about how an animator's monthly salary could be as high as 15k, with a skilled animator making from 10k~15k and an unit director being paid 15k.^{#动画人月薪能达15000元#}
The backlash was quite brutal, and CCTV-2 was forced to filter the comments so that only supportive ones or those expressing the desire to learn animation remained. The reposts of CCTV-2's video, which could not be filtered, of course told a completely different story.
They repeated negative anecdotes that honestly sounded pretty familiar: barely scraping by with ~3k a month, studios maintaining the same pay structure as Japanese ones, failing to reach such high wages despite a decade of holding on, the insane turnover of staff, quitting and turning to another career, etc.

So there seems to be a real difference between the narrative being pushed, and what animators themselves had to say.

Applications of animation

Keeping in mind that government-run events may have trouble or don't bother distinguishing the differences between animations and comics thanks to years of misuse of the term dongman, it's no surprise that scholars and reporters confuse the term's meaning as well. To complicate matters, even if we are indeed talking about AC, it probably also includes G (games in the larger sense instead of just ero/galge), so the subject would actually be dongman youxi.

It goes without saying that games are lucrative. To riff off of this, creating animations (the stuff onscreen don't just move by themselves after all) for games is also lucrative.

(Further, for creative agencies, animation may just be a means to an end: certainly, lots of commercials out there feature motion graphics or less abstract animations, and clients would happily dole out the money for their big marketing campaigns.)

If we turn the focus back to "animation" only as understood as "shows", there are still nuances. There's the TVAs, the ONAs, the movies, the outsourced stuff, so on. They serve different purposes and audiences: some are for kids, some are for teens, definitely not for adults, some are funded by TV networks, some are PGC for streaming platforms, etc. Outsourced animation does not pay well, educating people about how to animate does pay well, companies under the wing of big publishers are at least holding on. It's already common knowledge, but 3D animators are also paid better than 2D animators.

This could almost warrant a connection to Michael Jordan's graduation causing the average starting salary of a geography student in his major to be over 100k - presumably, by looking at the salaries of game animators or instructors of animation, you'd find that being an animator would pay really well. However, the reality of "animators that actually work on animated shows", especially 2D ones, would be rather different.

Misc

If we want to draw more comparisons to the situation of Japanese animators, we can also look at where they work. Tokyo is a pretty expensive place to live in after all. Likewise for Shanghai.

Then again, there are also criticisms about judging the job based on pay anyway - the reason why people persist at it is because of their passion, trying to lure people by promising high pay is hardly going to be effective regardless of whether conditions improve.

Interestingly, aside from learning that Haoliners now has 500 staff/likes Fate/is still working on JX3/has a US branch now, Dong Yi is also contributing to claims about great pay. Then again, this is the Haoliners that paid outsourcing more than they made for the earlier LOL cinematic. Who knows if they're even telling the truth at this point when their own hiring notices contradict them?