Nezha 2 had a budget of 80 million while Inside Out had a budget of 200 million. There are several other examples where Asian animations with a lower budget and with the same quality as American animations manage to achieve the same results or even be superior.
Labor is significantly cheaper in Asia compared to the US. Simple as. If you compare the budget of an anime compared to an average American show, it’s night and day.
This isn’t a good thing. Eastern animators are often overworked and earning less than minimum wage compared to the U.S.
I cannot express enough how true this is. The key animators in a lot of Anime studios are overworked, but there are also “grunt farms” which handle the heavy work of filling in the animations. Even US (and really, everyone else) studios farm out a lot of work to these houses, who take the barebones stuff the main staff have assembled and turn it into a polished product.
It’s why a lot of American cartoons like The Simpsons or Futurama are animated in Asia, usually Japan or Korea. They might have American animators do the key frames and then pay Asian animators to do the tedious in-between frames, or just send it all to Asia.
This also puts a downward pressure on American wages, with the threat effectively being, “take a pay cut or lose the work entirely.” Seems to be what Hollywood is hoping to do with “AI” also.
Not just animators, salaries can differ for voice actors.
Marketing budgets also tend to be larger for something like Inside Out.
money wash
Asian countires have invested billions of dollars in the education/training/and infrastructure to support animated films do make them as efficiently as possible. Economies of scale, lower labor costs, etc., etc.
Conversely, American film production for the last ~30 years has been nothing more than a way to circulate a few billion dollars between a handful of studios/executives with no real concern for efficiency. Not saying that Asian animation studios are without controversy (they are), but budgets just have not recently been a concern for American studios like they are for foreign productions.
