Animated series are more popular than they’ve ever been. Once seen as a form of entertainment primarily for children, animation has since become a core staple of the TV and streaming content industry. While the proliferation of animated content over recent years has in no small part been due to the rise of streaming services that are capable of providing more niche content to wider audiences, many artists in the animation community have raised concerns about budget loopholes and tight deadlines imposed by content providers.
Snowballing into a larger social media movement for raising awareness of the animation community’s concerns, #NewDeal4Animation is illuminating some of the complex inner-workings that have affected and continue to affect fan-favorite animated shows.
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“Season-splitting” For Streaming Cartoon Series
Like all television and streaming shows, animated series are segmented into seasons of episodes for production orders and eventual distribution on platforms or channels. Customarily, animation workers receive pay boosts for series that are renewed for multiple seasons; this serves as a way to keep quality talents on projects and serve as leveraging power for the creators behind projects that fans have an appetite for. However, the way production contracts are negotiated for streaming services can sometimes engender a large number of episodes that are produced at once and artificially broken up into different “seasons” by the service. This has become a common trend for many streaming series, if unpopular with animation workers themselves.
According to one member of the Animation Guild who was contacted for an explanation for fans: “Companies producing content under New Media terms are allowed to pay lower wages and benefits to the people making the shows, more so during first seasons than in subsequent seasons. When companies order a season of a certain number of episodes, they get the discounted rates for that whole season, but what we’re seeing more and more is that the streaming companies are then breaking up that first season into different seasons for consumers. They’re making as much profit as they can by marketing smaller ‘drops’ or ‘chapters’ to the people watching the content, and they’re still benefiting from ‘first season’ discounts.”
Because the bargaining terms for “New Media” (i.e. streaming) were negotiated between studios and The Animation Guild in 2009, it can be hard to make them accurately reflect the explosive market growth for streaming content in the past decade. Negotiation terms first organized when streaming was something of a quirk are still used in a landscape where it has become, for many staff, the standard on which their livelihoods depend.
This issue came to light for many fans in the animation community following the announcement of a “second season” of the recent popular Netflix cartoon,The Cuphead Show! Earlier this month,a Netflix Twitter accountannounced the renewal of the show, although staff and artists familiar with the project reluctantly pointed out that this “renewal” was in fact going to be the remaining portion of the initial episode order. Similar experiences can be common with productions made for other streaming services as well; fans and creators took note of the contract issues regarding the popular HBO Max seriesInfinity Train. “Every season ofInfinity Trainwas a part of our ‘season one’ contract, including the unproduced [fifth season] script,”noted one writerfrom the show’s production. Although audiences just see the content before them, this marketing ‘loophole’ directly affects the conditions, and ultimately how much time staff has to put its best work into a project.
#StoryCraftUnite: The Challenges Faced by Storyboard Artists
In addition to the complexities surrounding season orders, another focal point in the animation industry’s recent discourse highlights the difficulties faced by storyboard artists on animated TV series. Common in all TV and film production and an absolute necessity for animation, storyboard artists are an essential role in drawing concise and clear documents of how a scene should look and feel before being sent for full production. Storyboard artists have been an essential part of the animation process since its earliest days producing theatrical shorts before feature films, although in recent years TV productions have drifted towards assimilating multiple distinct staff positions into one massive task load for the single job of storyboard artist.
“It’s become normal practice to ask one worker to perform what would have been three or four different jobs just ten years ago,” the Animation Guild member commented. “But it’s not normal - it’s completely unsustainable. Changes in technology have allowed animation workers to answer increasingly ambitious tasks with stunning results, but ultimately, the workers themselves still need to learn, understand, innovate with, – and sometimes wrangle – software to produce a finished product; that takes time.”
In addition to #NewDeal4Animation, artists and fans have started the #StoryCraftUnite tag to specifically highlight the intense work and ‘many hats’ demanded of storyboard artists. Storyboarders in the tag have shared several stories of the difficult deadlines and multiple roles they’re expected to wear, and a braced arm has become the impromptu logo for the tag, signaling artists who have had to wear arm braces while working to prevent cramps and pain from the long time spent working. Everything was on the table in these workers’ stories, from all-nighters to physical discomfort and anxiety. Bad-experience-bingo-cards flourish.
Bottom Line for Animation Fans
For fans, the gap between the TV screen and the show staff behind it can feel massive. In many ways, the specifics of affording additional time and salary for animation workers comes down to negotiations between workers and companies that feel out of the control of the average consumer. However, just being more aware of these issues and how they affect marketing is the biggest step. If the #NewDeal4Animation and #StoryCraftUnite tags are anything to go by, the talent in the industry is very, very supportive of just having these issues be better understood by fans.
The bottom line is that as digital animation adopts new production pipelines and streaming takes up more and more of the industry’s output, it’s important for consumers to be savvy on how their content gets in front of them. More production time and marketing clarity, quite simply, leads to better content from staff and more appreciation from the consumer.
