Friday, June 5, 2009

Avatar: The Last Airbender is Korean?

Okay. Lets talk a little about outsourcing. Did you used to watch Rugrats? How about anyone watching The Simpsons? Are you a fan of Futurama? How about Ed Edd n Eddy, or SpongeBob SquarePants, or The Powerpuff Girls? Well, that animation is more than likely Korean. Actually, the shows I just list are Korean.

Hold up. These are American shows. Their creators are American, as well as the voice actors, writers... whats up!?

Well it started long ago with a well known animation studio that has received a bad reputation for "ruining" cartoons. You see, animation was a theater only thing. They were short and the cost to make an animated film was incredibly high. When the first animations spilled into theaters, they were primitive and cheap and usually double billed with another film. Thus a tradition of seeing a cartoon before a movie began. A tradition that is no longer practiced. Soon cartoons started becoming more sophisticated with better techniques and technology. One of the sole contributors to this advancement in the field was Walt Disney. He kept pushing his animations to become better and better. He pushed so much, that they also became too expensive. Their was little business left in the area of the short subject cartoon. So the leap to feature length animation occurred. More profit was made by this decision, and soon Disney practically stopped making short subjects. The studio who still benefited from the short animation was Warner Brothers with their Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies series. These cartoons still made money because they were a bit more crude and it brought costs down. They survived until the 1960's. More demand for cartoons came, but the issue was they were providing less and less money to produce them. So, one studio decided to make a jump from the silver screen to the tube. The biggest problem that prevented animation studios from taking the leap to television was the amount to produce animation grossly overshot the any possible profit. Until Hannah-Barbera. They cut costs by making huge changes in the way they produced their animation. They would have still characters with only one small portion of them moving, use the camera to fake a movement rather than animate it moving, write scripts that relied a lot on verbal comedy almost like a radio drama, and finally... they OUTSOURCED! Ever since then animation, for television especially, has been outsourced to a Malasia, Korea, China, and India. It's the price you pay to put cartoons on T.V.

Well, is outsourcing bad? No. Not really. It's actually quite good since it has made it possible for many of our favorite cartoons to be produced. The current burst in the industry is because we can make it so cheaply.

I don't like it. Here, lets take a look at what exactly gets outsourced. What part is American made and what part is not.

Most often the setup is this:

-AMERICA-
\\Someone thinks up the show idea.
\\Story is written
\\Character Models and Object Models are drawn
\\Storyboards are drawn
\\Speech it recorded
\\Extremes are drawn from the storyboard
\\Timing is placed on the Extremes

-KOREA-
\\Backgrounds are drawn
\\Extremes are in-betweened
\\Animation is cleaned up
\\Animation is colored
\\Effects are added
\\Animation is filmed

-AMERICA-
\\Review animation for any need changes
\\Add sound FX & music

Basically the studio here in the US does all the planning and ships it out for others to do the grunt work. Everything has already been planned out for the Asian studio to just follow the directions to put everything together. That's not too horrible, except it takes some of the love in hard work out of the job. Some things can also get lost in translation of not only language but culture.

Now lets go back to Avatar: The Last Airbender. What's interesting about this is the amount of responsibility that was given to their Korean studio.

-AMERICA-
\\Someone thinks up the show idea.
\\Story is written
\\Character Models and Object Models are drawn
\\Storyboards are drawn
\\Speech it recorded


-KOREA-
\\Extremes are drawn from the storyboard
\\Timing is placed on the Extremes

\\Backgrounds are drawn
\\Extremes are in-betweened
\\Animation is cleaned up
\\Animation is colored
\\Effects are added
\\Animation is filmed

-AMERICA-
\\Review animation for any need changes
\\Add sound FX & music

Only two things are moved into the workflow of the Korean studio, but if you look at the content of them, you realize it is a lot.

Animators make drawn pictures move. They look at the storyboards, fill in key movements between one storyboard frame and the next, time it out, and then once it is in-betweened you'll have animation. For Avatar, no one in America touched the animation. Storyboards laid out what the shot would be and a guidline for what the animators should do, but the actions, motions, everything that moves was planned, timed and executed by Korean animators!

An article in the NY Times reported how the storyboards sent to the Korean studio only had a man fainting, but since the Koreans were in charge of connecting point A to point B, they produced a man who excitingly foams at the mouth before fainting. The piece was completely created within the Korean studio with no American making the decision to do it. Now I actually found that scene absolutely hilarious. I am also not saying that all this is a bad thing. Avatar is a great series! What I am trying to get across is that this isn't American animation. I guess you could argue that no animation that is outsourced is truly American, but at least the movements are planned out by American animators, and the other studio just follows the instructions.

It's like this:
An engineer is commissioned to design a business building, the big wigs tell him what they want. He makes the blueprint that instructs a construction crew exactly how to assemble the building. Someone else also furnishes the building.

Well the Engineer and his employer is like the American Studio, while the construction crew and furnishers are the outsourced studio.

For Avatar, the Engineer is apart on the outsourced group.

Now, this example is not exact. There are many other things that go on besides what I've mentioned. But the basic gist is there. Avatar was thought up by two Americans, but they went to Koreans to animate it for them.
Why does this bug me? Well where does the animation industry's future lie if animation studios are starting to shift more responsibility to outsourced studios? Will I have to move to Korea to land a job!? I don't think anything that drastic is going to happen. At least not anytime soon. But it does make one wonder. I want to animate. I want to make things move! I think I'll live with someone else filling in my blanks so long as I can plan out their job. But the job I want to do, was not done by Americans in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

7 comments:

Jaz said...

I'm constantly on the fence about outsourcing. On the one hand, like you said, it saves money. But when I talk to people who work at studios, a lot of times they say that they only animate a little bit. They create the backgrounds, the characters, and sometimes even the flash puppets, but the actual animation gets shipped off for someone else to do. Nick Jr. seems to be pretty good with doing a good portion of the grunt work, but they still outsource, as far as I know. It seems like the only way to get to actually animate is to freelance, or start your own studio.

Anonymous said...

This is a great post. I had no idea. I'm an animation student myself and it does bug me a little to hear that a lot of the work is being outsourced.

Anonymous said...

Well if Anonymous were really into animation, he would've known about the outsourcing. We may be a decade apart but I knew about it in my teens.

Anonymous said...

Pretty old entry, but I'll still comment. Good points all and all.

I still wouldn't call those shows Korean just because they are animated in Korea...Else it would be more correct to say American Korean (like me!) since both countries are involved. I'd give credit were it is due, and say this is a fine example Korean Animation, but strictly speaking it's a American creation and production.

That said, I hope you had some luck getting into animation. Animators can get into other markets such as video games to throw that out there.

DanK said...

Well, I started googling about the possibility of being Korean because of the drawing style.

It has the anime-ish style, but not quite anime. It looked more manhwa style (The korean word for manga).

Actually the first thing that reminded me was The Boondocks... which also has the anime-ish style and now that I dig a bit about that show it turns out that it is not just also produced by a Korean firm, but also THE SAME studio that also makes Airbender.

The Korean style is pretty much identifiable to me, very distinct from Japanese cartoons.

With the boondocks I thought it was a genius idea to use Asian style cartoons in stories about black people... I thought it was a conscious design choice by US americans. Now realizing that it is the fruit of being outsourced, I am way less impressed and more disappointed.

Archius said...

Not sure I'd call the style Korean. The designs, from what I've seen, is all or mostly American. Perhaps they have a particular style of animating things, but let's not confuse the animation with the style of drawing.

Archius said...

I gotta say, though. Ki Hyun Ryu is 1 bad mofo!