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SHIROBAKO
2014 · TV series · 24 min episodes · 1 season
In a school in northeastern Japan, five friends in the animation club, Aoi, Ema, Shizuka, Misa, and Midori swear to complete a new anime called "Shinbutsu Konkou SHICHIFUKUJIN" with some donuts. Since then, day after day, the five spend all of their time on anime production. The awe of going from rough sketches to animation, and the awkward acting in the after-recording session... The final product was finished at the cultural fair six months later. After they graduated they still pursued animation and swore on some donuts that they would make another anime together.
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4 comments on Hacker News
> Because Shirobako was popular.
It's been widely used long before Shirobako. But otherwise yeah. It's the subdivision of a season of a show (group of episodes produced together) that fits within a season of television (around 12 weeks). The options in English are too clunky or not specific enough for the context in which people say "cours".
I always get a kick of hearing people hesitate when deciding whether to pronounce it French-like, English-like, or Japanese-like.
Because Shirobako was popular.
Well, or rather, consider the following (Ascention of a Bookworm S3): a 26 episode series airs in fall and winter, making it a two-cour anime; it's not a two-seaon anime because it's actually the third linearally related show.
We could call it the second sequel instead of the third season, but this doesn't seem to happen.
I don't know about in-depth, but a cursory google search brings up plenty of results regarding animator wages[1,2]. If you want to know more about how the industry operates, not so much salaries but how production works, working conditions, who's responsible for what, etc, then I highly recommend that you watch the anime Shirobako. It's an anime about anime production, and it's both very informative and simply very good in terms of storytelling, humor, etc.
[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2005-11-02/animator's-salaries
[2] https://80.lv/articles/how-much-do-japanese-animators-make/
> The process doesn't so much start again, as it continues. As the production ramps, multiple episodes are in development at once, with every step of the process constantly overlapping. You understand why the writers — and everyone else involved — would need a retreat.
The Japanese animated series Shirobako is an excellent depiction of this phenomenon, and it details almost every aspect of the OP's article - an anime about making anime, it follows a project manager at a small studio needing to make tradeoffs between allocating resources to the current deadline vs. falling behind on the next one. (Which should be familiar to all of us!)
The tightness of this pipeline is much more aggressive than many might realize: this diagram https://i.imgur.com/xRVd3xW.jpg (translated supplementary material for the show) depicts an ideal situation.
For any fans of animation with sufficient time, I highly recommend watching the show itself; it's highly illuminating and entertaining: http://www.crunchyroll.com/shirobako
As a side note, the supply and demand for labor in the anime industry is at a very interesting point. There's a significant bubble keeping animator salaries essentially at the poverty line in Japan: animators do the work for such low prices out of passion for the art, but in turn fewer individuals are training for the positions while demand for production is at record levels, so there may be a crisis that changes this pattern. As in software, offshoring can only go so far when end users demand a certain level of quality and consistency with prior work. See: http://goboiano.com/anime-industry-faces-animator-shortage-crisis-that-could-damage-future-productions/ and another salary comparison chart from Shirobako that demonstrates how deep the problem goes: https://i.redd.it/uwirci3iubvx.jpg