I'm being asked a lot of questions over what appears to be a jurisdictional dispute between the Writers Guild of America and The Animation Guild. From what I can tell, the argument as it's being depicted in news articles such as this one is not exactly the argument that those two entities are having in real life…or at least, the WGA position is not being accurately represented.
Here's an example. The above-linked article in Variety says, in part…
In addition to a ban on any guild-covered work in features and TV, a draft recap of the WGA rules said the guild plans to prohibit any writing for new media and declare that writers can't do animated features — even though that realm is not under WGA jurisdiction.
That's not true. The recent animated Simpsons movie was written under a WGA contract [Correction] and others have been or are pending. The press coverage so far has made the mistake of acting like all animation work is covered by the Animation Guild, and that's not true, either. There are animated projects where the writers are covered by the Animation Guild. There are animated projects where the writers are covered by the WGA. There are also animated projects where the writers are covered by neither.
What union has jurisdiction over a given project? It's the one that negotiates a contract to cover that project. It isn't automatically the WGA or the Animation Guild or the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo. So to the extent that the WGA is asserting jurisdiction over areas where it has a contract — or even projects where no one does and the WGA is attempting to stake out its turf — the WGA position seems entirely reasonable to me. And with regard to the part that has some folks upset, I suspect they're either not reading properly between the lines or not understanding that in time of war, you stake out the widest possible position and then negotiate down from there as necessary.