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One of the first thigns you learn when looking more seriously at literature is not to mistake a work of fiction with a textbook. It is difficult not to fall into that trap in the case of the Animeta manga serious, where today I'll concentrate just on volume 1 with some glimpses into volumes 2 and 3.
The story sets out with nineteen-year-old Miyuki Sanada being thunderstruck one night by the particularly great animation of a scene in one of her favourite anime. Spontaneously she decides to seek her future as an animator, a job in which you have to draw frame by frame the pictures that make up an anime. At her age, she has mainly her enthusiasm and her quick eye going for her. As one of 250 applicants for this job class in a famous studio she scrapes through the first round, only to fail in the second due to her lack of artistic training.
She hasn't failed, though, without catching the attention of at least one member of the selection jury who invites her to come back in spring, presumably to give her more time to hone her artistic skills.
Interspersed with the story itself are notes and diagrams that give background on the functioning of the anime industry. We learn in the "idiot's guide to producing anime" that an animator's job sits between storyboarding and colour-selection in the overall production workflow.
It is these types of additional information that hopelessly blurs the boundary between fiction and reality. In fact, one such infogram follow each chapter, giving background information on production workflows and specific subtasks or other facts of interest. Beyond this, a number of pages are accompanied by boxes giving additional explanations on certain terms or types that a normal reader couldn't expect to be aware of.
One recruited, Miyuki starts out as an "inbetweener" under a strict mentor, Fujiko Fuji, together with two other newcomers who have much more polished skills. Inbetweeners are pretty much what their name suggests — they sketch all the intermediate frames between two key animations, thus making the animation flow (the colouring of these frames happens at a later stage and by different actors). They at the lowest rung of the ladder, and Miyuki as a newcomer is below even that. What is more, while she might have ambition, fascination, and latent talent, her skill level is abysmally low even compared to other newcomers. She's not only painfully aware of this herself, almost everyone tells it straight to her face.
What our heroine has going for her, however, are her stubbornness and willingness to learn and work hard. Since she doesn't even have the illusion to know something already, she doesn't hesitate to ask and seek guidance. Still, working hard here really means working absolutely crazy hour, with 15-hour days, 7 days a week being the norm and allnighters not the exception.
The manga doesn't pull any punches when it comes to describing the work conditions in which all but two of Fujiko's twenty mentorees over the last two years have quit (the two survivors made it to key animators, though). Not only is the stress level enormous even for accomplished artists, the pay is beyond pad. We learn that the inbetweeners would be paid for work done, and that one frame would be paid at a rate of 210 yen (significantly less than €2). Even a fully trained inbetweener could hop to create "only" 500 frames per month, meaning a paycheck below a living wage even in the best of cases. Only after having passed this stage to "inbetween checker" and beyond on the corporate ladder, employees even of famous studios could hope to feed themselves and maybe even a family.
Only the love for anime and animation as the art can counterbalance these horrid working conditions for Miyuki. Chapter by chapter we see her trudging along. This is not an "ugly duckling turns magically into a swan" type of stories — Miyuki and her colleagues have to sweat their way up in their art, with most quitting or being terminated on the way.
Even purely as a story this manga has its charm. However, for once the author Yaso Hanamura clearly intends us to read this series also as a documentary on the industry. It is as such that I can recommend this read to anyone interested to learn more on the often brutal industry to which we owe great art.
Website of the manga (in Japanese)
Manga page in the j-novel club (English translation)
Hidden Gem Manga: Animeta (Manga Review)
Wikipedia page (only in Japanese)
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