alright, so critics are praising this movie for its “low budget” animation turning over a profit, but as an animation student, let me tell you how much of a scam this all is
how is 30 million USD low budget
1988′s Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo has an estimated $10,000,000 in it’s production, that includes equipment and pay and commercialization and production, and is considered by most to be the best-animated movie of all time, with a huge budget put into animation, an animated film with a low budget would be something like that Lord of the Rings animated movie from the 70s, or a Ralph Bakshi movie, only a couple million dollars.
Digital animation has advanced to the point it’s effectively cheaper, faster, and easier to produce than hand drawn cel animation, providing less animators and less cost. There are even reports that half of the Sausage Party animators were overworked and barely paid at all, too.
This has me to believe that most of the $30,000,000 didn’t go into the actual production, pay, advertising, the real number would be around $6-8 million dollars, the rest of the money being embezzled to producers like Seth Rogan, Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon, Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and Evan Goldberg and the studio itself
in short, even though they had a $30,000,000 budget, which is 3 times the amount of the best-animated film of all time, cut down by 30% due to digital animation technology efficiency…….. they haven’t even paid or credited most of their animators, and even overworked them, most of the money went to Seth Rogan and his cronies in a classic Adam Sandler/Happy Maddison Productions style Hollywood-embezzlement scheme
one of the biggest fears for American animators is the industry turning into piss-poor conditions, like seen in Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan, where animators work in sweatshop conditions, are overworked, and get little pay for a job that requires a 4-year college Masters degree
PLEAAAAAAAAAAAASE actually spread this around, because not only is this just a shit practice at all, it damages a relatively-small, niche career type by encouraging massive budget animated movies while the actual animators themselves receive less wages, and more hours, and if these blockbuster budget animated films are made, and they don’t receive the money needed to actually turn a profit, film studios will abandon animation studios. Unions have never worked well in the animation industry, since it’s a niche industry and not something large scale like a factory manufacturer, with practices like Walt Disney Studios actually accusing Unionized animators of being communists during the McCarthy trials of the 1950s, or studios dropping entire animation departments as a whole and replacing them with outsourced animators in Taiwan. You’ll be really helping an entire industry improve in quality just by the general public knowing how much of a toxic practice this is.
