Over on his fine, must-visit website, Cartoon Research, my pal Jerry Beck has some comments about the state of the animation business. On the whole, I agree with him but I have one area of polite disagreement that I thought might be worth mentioning. First, for those of you too lazy to click over there, here are some excerpts from Jerry's essay…
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1986, the animation industry was pretty dead. In Hollywood, animation work at DIC, Hanna-Barbera, Marvel, and Filmation was seasonal. Most of my artist friends worked for six months, then waited, unemployed, for six months until more work could be had…the only TV outlet for new animation was CBS, NBC and ABC on Saturday morning.
In 1986 we had three networks who programmed 4 hours of kid-vid (mainly animation) – Today we have three conglomerates: Disney/ABC – Cartoon Network/ Kids WB -Viacom /Nickelodeon /CBS. Each one of these operates at least two 24 hour-a-day kids cable networks entirely reliant on kids programming, in addition to weekend broadcast program blocks.
Now then: I concur with his thesis that we now have better, more varied animation being done. I'm not sure I agree that life is any better for the journeyman animation artist, and I base this in large part on talking to a lot of them at recent holiday gatherings. During the network days, a small number of buyers controlled the market and, yes, much of it was seasonal. But it was also rather predictable: Each year, you knew that between around January and August, X number of hours of new animation would be produced in L.A. to feed ABC, CBS and NBC, and artists could plan their lives accordingly. The talent pool was rather constant in size because the available work was rather constant.
The current situation seems to me much less predictable, as witness the on-again, off-again nature of production at studios like Nick and WB TV Animation where they seem to have no particular pattern to the production of new programming. One day, they will decide that new shows aren't a good investment; that reruns are vastly more cost-efficient. That's when we see, as we've seen often lately, mass layoffs that annihilate what had been a thriving studio. Six months or a year later, someone will decide that they need a new show for competitive or merchandising reasons and, suddenly, they'll be starting all over, trying to reconstruct some sort of studio operation. It's an enormously inefficient system and one that also nukes any feeling that a writer or artist may have that he or she has a future with some company. (I am all for creative folks not submerging their identities and becoming too trusting of their current employers, but it's also tough to thrive in an environment where everyone is expecting layoffs at any moment.)
As I said, I base this on a lot of conversations at Christmas parties. The folks who fall into the category of "the last to be laid off" all seem to be functioning with an attitude of, "If it doesn't happen today, it'll happen tomorrow." No one seems too confident that their studio will still be investing in new product once the current project, whatever it is, is completed. I find this uncertainty to be less healthy than what artists had to endure back in 1986.
For years, one of the ways the animation studios could get by without paying residuals and rerun fees to most of the creative personnel was due to the continuity of work. It was like, "No, we're not going to pay you when your work is rerun but you'll have steady income from the next show we do and the one after." Now that this pattern is broken…now that so much of the industry is geared towards creating a "library" that can be rerun repeatedly in lieu of new production…it is less excusable that writers and artists are usually not compensated for reruns. Such payments are, I believe, inevitable…but there may be, at least in some quarters, a long and bloody battle to make that the norm. When that happens — or when studios plan far enough ahead so that they're willing to offer long-term contracts to their key creators — then I'll believe the business is truly better off than it was in '86.