American artists complain that the Japanese animation industry is not done by people

Determined to pursue a career in Japanese animation, American animator Henry Thurlow moved to Tokyo in pursuit of his dream, and it took him four years to finally get the job he coveted as an animator from a studio. Unexpectedly, the working environment offered by the company was very different from what he expected, and in an interview with the media Buzzfeed, Thurlow compared himself to slave labor, saying that he really couldn't accept the cheap salary of $25 a week:

"Let me be clear first: this (referring to Japanese animators) can no longer be said to be a "hard job" and is simply a "demanding industry that cannot be legally tolerated". They give far less than the minimum wage, and employees until they vomit at work, and even have to go to the hospital to buy medicine. Not only do you have to be on hand before the deadline, but we also have to deal with not having a day off for more than a month when we get to the end of the deadline, and then you have to go back to the standard 10-hour workday, 6 days a week. No one chats at work, doesn't meet for lunch or anything, and colleagues just sit in their seats and do things silently, without the slightest thought of changing the working environment. ”

According to Thurlow's description, he spent three times in the hospital for overwork or discomfort during his time at Nakamura-Productions and PierrotStudios, and surprisingly, Thurlow found these work experiences to be rare and valuable, because he believed that as a creative worker, The job I have been exposed to in Japan is still more satisfactory than in the United States:

"When I worked as an animator in New York, I was paid enough to afford a place to live and have extra money to buy what I wanted, which is called "livealife", but my love of art was never satisfied, because I couldn't produce high-quality animation or well-known series through my work. Now, even though my life is so bad that I can only describe it as horrific, the soul of the artist in my heart can be fully satisfied. ”

Thurlow explained in more detail the cheap treatment of Japanese animation studios in the "Ask Me Anything" section of the Reddit forum (AMA):

The amount of money you can make varies from day to day, depending on how many pictures you can draw that day. On Mondays, I might pick out a stack of drawings and make corrections (adding special effects that other animators had forgotten to draw, or glowing effects like "air"), so that I could draw 40 drawings at the end of the job, and even earn more than $150 a day, depending on the price of the work. From Tuesday to Thursday, I might have to work on the intricate close-ups of Tokyo (which, by side mention, it was really fun), but as a result, I was only able to draw about five pictures a day during that time, and I was only paid about $12 a day. I was getting about $1,000 a month at Pierrot, but I was only making $300 a month at the "sweatshop" where I used to work.