Cost of Anime Production

A number of years ago, I was at a panel at FanimeCon listening to Hiroyuki Yamaga of Gainax describe the anime production process. What was striking was that he gave a number, something like $10K-$20K per episode. But after doing more research for the previous entry on the overall cost to make an episode, there is a big gap between what I remember and what I've found in articles on the topic.

Well, I recently came across two articles that might cast some light on the topic. One from the Telegraph and one from Asahi Shimbun. These two articles pin the $10K-$20K number as the cost per episode for the animation of a TV episode, further boiling the numbers down to the pitiful salary that most Japanese animators earn (as low as ~¥600,000/year or less than $6000). The Asahi one also pegs a low-end for the amount paid to an animation studio at ¥10M or less than $100K for a whole series, although not indicating if it is 13 or 26 episodes.

Assuming 13 episodes, that means <~$8K per episode, which is pretty cheap. But also doesn't include other production costs (like voice talent and sound engineering) outside of animation.

Since these figures are for bottom-of-the-barrel animation (at least that's the impression given in these articles), it would be hard to use them to determine what % of total production cost the animation is. The cheapest anime I've found so far is Pokemon at $100K/episode. But while Pokemon is no animation extravaganza, it is unlikely to be the cheapest late-night crap available (anyone remember the Eat-Man TV series which seemed to be barely animated at all with a pallete of maybe 16 colors?).

If I start making wild guesses like say, halving the cost of Pokemon to arrive at $50K/ep total for a cheap-ass show, then $8K for animation would result in 16% of the total cost. With a conservative halving and doubling range, I might be willing to place an estimate at 8-32% of cost, but you'd want to do some serious sensitivity analysis for any model you created based on this number.