Anime Pay Gap Splits Risk-Taking Studios From the Rest, Says TIFF Advisor

Compensation for Japan's animation professionals is rising unevenly, and the divide runs between studios willing to risk their own capital 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 told Variety.

His argument inverts the usual causal story. Hits do not generate profits that trickle down to the people who made them. Instead, the money flows the other way.

"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 said.

What does this change for studios?

The practical consequence: studios must commit more of their own money and shoulder bigger business risks to compete for talent as overseas demand for anime grows. Some can. Others cannot. Fujitsu is blunt about what follows.

"How to bridge that gap depends on how individual companies choose to run their businesses," he said. "If we simply lump everything together as an 'industry-wide problem,' we risk obscuring the specific factors at play."

That is a caveat worth holding onto. An advisor to a major festival is declining to name an industry-wide fix — and is instead placing responsibility on individual companies' balance sheets.

Nine films, one spectrum

This year's Animation section screens nine new Japanese and international works. The Japanese side pairs auteur projects from major studios with commercial track records — Nishigori Atsushi's "Grotesqqque" and Natsume Shingo's "Ghost – End of Night" — against 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 said.

The four Japanese titles, he argues, may be closer in genre than their production setups suggest. Placing them side by side is designed to make audiences ask whether a line between commercial and experimental animation exists at all.

Women directors, without the label

The section also runs a focus on women animation directors: 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 said, and its aim is not to define what women bring to animation that was previously absent.

"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 said.

Women have directed animation in Japan since the 1980s, Fujitsu noted, but their ranks began to swell in the 2000s, partly because more women joined production teams throughout the business.

The funding squeeze on originals

Streamers are pouring money into anime and theatrical franchises are drawing huge crowds. Fujitsu said the risk that original features without established IP will struggle to find financing and distribution is "definitely there." Public money for animated features in Japan is scarce, which makes originals hard to finance.

"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 said.

More Japanese animated films have reached international festivals in recent years. Fujitsu partly credits festivals' own tastes, but also credits Japanese professionals' growing interest in festivals, overseas markets and co-productions — a workaround to the funding problem, not a solution to it.

A new award in 2027

Fujitsu will moderate 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, they agreed 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 it becomes an occasion for the animation business to celebrate the year's work.

"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 said.

That spotlight on individual crew members — not studios, not franchises — is consistent with his diagnosis. If pay follows talent, the talent will need to be seen first.