Japan’s anime industry is in better shape overall, but gaps in pay and conditions are opening up largely between studios prepared to put their own capital on the line and those that are not, according to Fujitsu Ryota, programming advisor for the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Animation section.
“Given the high level of creativity demonstrated by animation professionals, their compensation is still not where it should be,” Fujitsu tells Variety.
He describes the link between hits and pay as a chicken-and-egg problem. As overseas demand for anime grows, the companies that can pay production staff properly, and so draw the talent they need, look best placed to make strong work and build a global presence.
“In other words, it’s not necessarily that a hit film generates profits that are then passed on to the people who made it. Rather, companies that can attract the right people in the first place are better positioned to produce a hit,” Fujitsu says.
That requires studios to commit more of their own money and shoulder bigger business risks, he adds. Some can. Others can’t.
“How to bridge that gap depends on how individual companies choose to run their businesses,” he says. “If we simply lump everything together as an ‘industry-wide problem,’ we risk obscuring the specific factors at play.”
The Animation section this year features nine new Japanese and international works. On the Japanese side, auteur projects from major studios with commercial track records, Nishigori Atsushi’s “Grotesqqque” and Natsume Shingo’s “Ghost – End of Night,” sit alongside independent productions, Kadowaki Kohei’s “We Are Aliens” and Kawajiri Masanao’s “Cherry and Virgin.” The international slate includes Louis Clichy’s “Iron Boy,” Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado’s “Forgotten Island” and “Walking with Animators,” a documentary by Alexandre Poncet and Gilles Penso about the making of animated films.
“I don’t see commercial and experimental works as opposing forces. There is a broad spectrum between the two, and many films fall somewhere along it,” Fujitsu says.
The four Japanese titles, he argues, may be closer in genre than their production setups would suggest. Placing them side by side is meant to make audiences ask whether a line between commercial and experimental animation exists at all, and the same goes for the international picks.
“Ultimately, what we’re looking for in TIFF’s Animation section are films with a distinct creative signature – works that make the creators’ voices visible and offer audiences something stimulating in a variety of ways,” he says.
The section also runs a focus on women animation directors, with Nagaoka Chika’s “Detective Conan: The Fist of Blue Sapphire,” Watanabe Kotono’s “Gold Kingdom and Water Kingdom” and Yoshimura Ai’s “The Rose of Versailles.” The program has been under consideration for some time, Fujitsu says, and its aim is not to pin down what women bring to animation that was previously absent. Rather, it reflects an industry in which the number of women directors is clearly set to grow.
“There might be a slight paradox here, but we’re focusing on women directors precisely because we’re in a transitional period, moving toward a point where there will no longer be a need to single them out as women directors,” he says.
Women have directed animation in Japan since the 1980s, Fujitsu notes, but their ranks began to swell in the 2000s, partly because more women joined production teams throughout the business.
With streamers pouring money into anime and theatrical franchises drawing huge crowds, Fujitsu says the risk that original features without established IP will find it harder to get financed and distributed is definitely there.
“In a way, the efforts we’re seeing to develop original animated films are also attempts to prevent that future from becoming a reality,” he says.
Public money for animated features in Japan is scarce, which makes originals hard to finance. More Japanese animated films have reached international festivals in recent years, he says, and while that partly reflects festivals’ own tastes, Japanese professionals’ growing interest in festivals, overseas markets and co-productions is opening routes around the funding problem.
Fujitsu is also moderating a discussion at TIFFCOM, the festival’s content market, on launching a new international anime award in 2027. In conversations with the team behind Tokyo Anime Next, he says, they agreed that an award should be “an inspiring message for creators – something that makes them go, ‘Ah, that makes sense!’ – as well as a breath of fresh air for the festival, the kind that makes people say, ‘Oh, such a film exists!’”
He hopes the Tokyo Anime Next award becomes an occasion for people across the animation business to come together and celebrate the year’s work, giving both professionals and fans a sense of recognition.
“Given that an award of this kind has not existed before, I think it could play a significant role, not only by recognizing outstanding works, but also by bringing individual members of the production teams into the spotlight,” Fujitsu says.