A couple of university students from a local Chinese university went all this trouble to make their own life-sized Transformers as part of the graduation project, as far as what I heard.  It’s a very interesting project for them to get into.  And it’s a 4500  USD project too.  That’s a great prize tag they put aside for this project’s funding.

Boy! They sure come out bigger than life, after looking at these amazing photos of 9-m tall monstrosity!

Such amazing detail of the character design based on one of the Chinese famous legends of “Romance of the Three Kingdom”.  For those who are not familiar with the Chinese folklore legend, there’s this famous general from a Shu Army whose name is Guan Yu during Chinese ancient times.  He’s one of the most powerful generals serving in the Shu army and many legendary tales have been fortold amongst the Chinese for many, many generations.  Chinese have profound religious beliefs tied with him and you can find a lot of statues of him around China and other Chinese communities around the world.  That’s probably why the Chinese students picked him as the favourite character.

If you ever played one of Koei’s infamous action game series Dynasty Warriors and you used this character. (see below)

This is him and that’s why the transformer’s color resembles a lot as the picture above, along with the halberd weapon.

And here’s the footage of the CGI animation of its transformation as well.

Pretty neat huh? ^^

Source: Kotaku, Gadgetsin, ClonedChina, All images and copyrighted by the source owner

Reading my news feed here, TV-adapted movie, Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, was announced the award winner of the 15th Asian Film Festival (AFF) in the best animation category in Lyon, France. Knowing that I was there in France on a long holiday, I’m familiar with the fact that sout-eastern parts of France are well-known for many film festival activities, be it cult or independent-related films.  Cannes is a good example for its Cannes Film Festival. I never had the chance to travel down there while I was holidaying around the French Riveria. Our tour group were scheduled to stay there for two short days only.

Pity that…

Nevertheless, it was a great experience. I’m sure Lyon would be a great city to travel as well.

While browsing about it online, I found the festival video link that featured all Asian films and amongst one of them is a TV clip from the early episodes of the Evangelion.

Parfait!! (excellent in French)

Source: MyAnimeList.net, FestivalFocus.org

State of anime - Shocked and Despair

While back in June this year, I made a news post expressing facts of the declining state of Japanese anime industry and things could look like the point of recovery is not expected to come by anytime soon. Already half year of 2009 went passed and several industries (including anime) across the globe are still battling down with their financial crisis, things are still not looking good for Japan after reading this article. As the anime industry is weakening on a day to day basis, career propectus for young people wanting to get into animation are getting more and more dimmer as the salaries/wages are getting a tighter squeeze than your average shoestring budget for a decent food grocery shopping each week. Right now, in Japan, the average salary an anime artist could only earn at this present economic state is 70,000 yen (USD $748.00). On a yearly basis that counts up to 840,000 yen per annum. The year before that is 1.1 million yen so that’s 20% less than what they earn before.

Ouch! That’s a pretty deep cut…. It’s definitely damn hard to make a living, especially if you live as a couple, let alone getting married and raising a family.

As many companies are no longer able to afford to fund anime projects in place for the remaining part of the the commercial year (and probably beyond), they are likely to force themselves towards the path of outsourcing in other parts of Asia just like how Toei animation took down that road with their outsourcing plans to Phillipines back in 2005 (see this link). Oursourcing is no longer seen a business strategy for them to capitalize their business growth in demand of anime. Rather, it’s seen as a survival tool for them to remain in the business (and hopefully produce more decent anime at affordable costs). And only the fittest (and luckiest) could get through these tough times ahead.

But even if Japan’s economic state were not that dire if it weren’t for the 2008 financial crisis, outsourcing was already the trend that buckled up the motion many anime companies took a long time ago, supposedly to bring them more benefits in producing a ratio of high quality shows vs low production costs in a medium to longer term timeframe. The crisis only fuels their need more and more to reduce expenses where there’s little money to go around to spend, within their commercial reason. And that gives many CEOs, and managing directors of anime companies to wipe their sweat glands off their foreheads in a less frantic state. However this little ‘glow’ of relief does not resonate well with the young animators whom are the very important people that makes the anime companies tick. With longer hours, lower wages, and lower standard of living in anime workplace makes things much harder for them to stay retained and new recruits will end up going back to the student job billboard, hoping to have decent career that could help them afford a living that’s worth more than just having a bowl of rice in a small dining table for one.

Distressing as it sounds, Tokyo government are trying hard to come up with their methods to stimulate the growth back into this shrinking industry by introducing more training programmes for new anime enthusiasts to get involved, specially funded. They also plan to open up another sector within the tourism industry and use anime themes as the main attractions. That approach is very good as I commended on their efforts of erecting a Gundam character in Odaiba park, not long ago. That can go a long way if they could concentrate greater efforts in making more monuments like these or other similar projects.

How that will save the industry (and the very fans who has profound interests in this) is remains to be seen. Naysayers already claims the doom and gloom is immenent across the industry and much little can be done by the government with their proposed budget to revive. Even their budgets are also getting a tigher squeeze as well, so there’s a sense of catch-22 here. IE, to have more people get into anime industry, government needs to spend more tax-payer’s money, but to have more tax-payers’ money to have a big budget, you’d still need lots of people to remain in the workforce, including anime industry to fill up that budget. With redundancies already happening and unemployment rates have skyrocketted into new highs since post World War II days, it will certainly be a long while before things improved if the industry, the government,  and the economy (and let’s not forget people responsible for concept of convention centres) see that they’ll get through this. We can only watch and hope things will turn out for the best.  Cause right now, luck and timing is the best resource they could rely on.

Source: The Mainichi Daily News, AnimeNewsnetwork.com

With much of  the world’s financial markets entering into what we now know as the worst recession since the Great Depression, many businesses from all walks of  sectors are getting hurt deeply.  You hear echoes of bad news all too familiar.  Costs-cutting, redundancies, lost working hours, higher unemployment rates etc etc.

And anime business is no different either.  Many forums I come across read things about the doom and gloom of the industry, particularly in Japan where the pool of hiring talented animators and artists is rapidly shrinking with animation agencies are simply lining up to join liquidation queues. Agencies forced to cut down so much adversting costs and sponsorships all over the country, it’s little wonder that aspiring talented animators will be less motivated to stay on in making a living in this profession.

You can find more news on this story:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090304f1.html

Though, some even suggests that this occured even way far earlier before the financial crisis in 2008 due to the growing presence of ‘fansubbing’, a new term to describe anime fans get to watch free anime online, legitly, using a very popular video-streaming site, Crunchyroll.com.  In this report from AnimeNewsNetwork.com, it states

” Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) cites unauthorized net distribution, including fan-subtitled videos on streaming and file-sharing sites, as one reason for the decline in DVD sales. In January, TV Tokyo began streaming popular anime on the Crunchyroll video site to paid subscribers on the same day as their Japanese airings, with free streams available seven days later. Yukio Kawasakii, TV Tokyo’s animation business manager, said that the company curbed illegal distribution and responded to the needs of fans who do not want to wait to watch anime.”

Even a few companies are taking legal action against such firm in order to stop the fim from continuing this infringed business practices.  This is a real worry indeed.  I learned from another source that salary earnings for a ordinary animator in Japan are one third less than the American counterparts (base salary of US $17,000 vs US $31,000 respectively)*. I could not fathom after reading this link from AnimeNewsNetwork, animation didn’t sound like a very lucrative career path for many anime enthusiasts out there wanting to achieve their goals of producing their own animation.  News like these is very discouraging and we never realise how much we have ‘exploited’ the internet media stream to get free anime when the animators are the very same people who worked hard to produce great anime shows.  I feel that we’re downright putting their countless hours of animation work in vain and we make things worse and worse for having the company studios suffering low sales, cannot distribute profit to its employees, all because in the internet community we involuntarily decide to watch streamed anime shows for a penny-less.  How selfish can we be, as harsh as it sounds.

Even though, where I stand in my personal blog on robot anime only and they are not that many that falls in this subgenre as far as I can see, I still want to express that anime was never to be a ‘free substance’ just like goods or services you buy for your enjoyment.  Now after learning the not-so-great truth of animator’s earning potential, I feel it’s not right to watch streamed anime such as the ever growing presence of fansub community like Crunchyroll.com.  The animation industry could be saved (or at least gradually spared) if we played our part responsibly as well ie not support downloads of anime videos, regardless they’re legit or not. Unless there’s a proven commercial method that suggests anime downloads benefit both the industry and fansub community through branding or marketing (which I’ve yet to see), then we oughta keep our right-mouse clicks stay away from hitting the ‘Download’ button.

After reading this blog’s article (www.altjapan.com) on the dire state of anime industry in Japan, it made me wonder the amount of guilt I built when watching free new anime for countless hours on Youtube for the past couple of years…