Animation is striking for a better industry

If, like me, you’re on the art side of social media, you might’ve seen “union yaoi” taking over the internet. They’re here with a purpose: to raise awareness for the ongoing strike and negotiations held by the Animation Guild. The dynamic duo started in short videos made and distributed by Animation Workers Ignited, an independent group of animators dedicated to “sharing memes, info, and educational content about the animation industry,” as stated in their Instagram bio. In these shorts, a pink-suited, bow-tied man named Umbert Actually (Adam Conover, “Adam Ruins Everything”) explains to a green-shirted audience insert named Misterman Guyfella (Alex Hirsch, “Gravity Falls”) about the dangers the animation industry is currently facing, from the massive layoffs to the looming threat of generative artificial intelligence. Although the videos are lighthearted and fun, animators have very real and serious reasons for striking. 

The animation industry — from video games to movies and TV — has been struggling. According to Cartoon Brew’s layoff tracker, there have already been 11 notable companies with layoffs this year and 20 last year. Pixar had its biggest layoff in May, with the studio cutting 14% of its animators. There are a few reasons for these recent layoffs: The animation industry is infamous for treating their employees poorly with subpar pay, inhumane working hours and an established crunch culture that has ruined many worker’s mental and physical health. It’s disheartening to read news articles about employees getting screwed all the time. Despite my love for animating, I decided against making it a career for that exact reason. The effects of these conditions on your body alone make it near-impossible to make a life-long career — trying to keep up to industry work standards as a prospective student landed me with carpal tunnel syndrome and a wrist brace. This industry standard also makes it easy for company executives to trim down their workforce to save on cost and pile that work onto the remaining employees. In the words of Zach Mulligan, experienced animator and CEO of ZOPStudios, “This disparity is creating an immense sense of frustration and the feeling that the burden of the industry falls disproportionately on the artists who are creating the content,” rather than the executives or the company as a whole.

However, the primary reason for these massive layoffs is the outsourcing of jobs overseas. Motivated by foreign tax credits and lower wages, U.S. studios have moved much of their production to third-party studios. This was the case around six months ago in the sudden massive layoff of Dreamworks animators and the subsequent partnering of the company with studios such as Sony Pictures Imageworks in Vancouver, Jellyfish Pictures in the U.K. and Mikros Animation in India, Canada and France. Of the three Dreamworks films set to release in 2025, only one will be worked on in the U.S., with that one being a collaboration between stateside and international animators and the other two fully being made by partners of Dreamworks overseas. It’s needless to say this trend of gradual outsourcing of domestic labor will only continue, with workers being laid off in a way that prevents them from even getting severance. 

Consolidation and the bursting of the streaming bubble are also two factors to blame for the layoffs. Streaming was inevitably a losing business model in the long run, and the industry is feeling the brunt of it now. The method and production of streamed shows mean that workers are employed based on contracts and not long-term, and the lack of reruns means cast and crew are missing a huge part of their revenue in the form of residuals (last year, writers and actors went on strike for a similar reason). To keep up with the demand for new content, companies buy up smaller properties and studios to put on their platforms and, as a result, everyone loses in the long run when the company can no longer afford to keep a sinking ship afloat. A real-life example: Over the summer, AWI kept the hashtag #RIPCartoonNetwork trending across platforms to raise awareness for the systematic disassembling of U.S. studios. Although Cartoon Network is not actually dead, the studio recently merged with Warner Brothers and as a result, shut down its studio building to move in with WB’s animation department. Warner Brothers shut down the CN website a few days later, now redirecting people to the streaming service Max instead. Around the same time, WB also laid off many of their own animators. 

Another major demand of the AG strike is protection from generative AI in animation. Generative AI is what we call systems like OpenAI or DALL-E. It functions on the premise of taking data, finding trends and using those trends to make assumptions about new information. It has rapidly gained the attention of executives in creative industries looking for a way to hire less real humans who need to be paid to live. Right off the bat, there are a few glaring issues. First of all, generative AI has quickly garnered legal troubles in commercial use. Due to many of these models being trained on data scraped off the internet, often without the owner’s knowledge or permission, they have become a conglomeration of licensed material. 

Most importantly to the industry and the art form, it’s completely ineffective to use in a commercial workflow. Usually, an artist in a studio would be given a task such as creating 5 character designs for the love interest character. They would then make the designs and send them into the executives for feedback. This feedback could range from the design not having the correct feeling or vibe to more technical concerns, such as the designs being too expensive to animate or too hard to color. The designer would then take that feedback and incorporate it into another round of designs that are submitted. This cycle continues until everyone is satisfied with the outcome. Studios that have experimented with bringing AI into that workflow have run into a major issue — since AI relies on pattern recognition and doesn’t actually understand any of the prompts as requests with a reason behind it, trying to prompt the exact change wanted is an arduous process. I’m not an industry artist, but I freelance on the side and use the same method when communicating with my commissioners. I’ve also commissioned artists myself. Honestly, these personal experiences just baffle me about why anyone would try to replace artists with AI commercially. Unlike AI, I can understand concepts and ask clarifying questions. I can make minute and specific adjustments quickly. Even outside of moral arguments, it’s simply more cost-effective and less frustrating to just work with a real designer rather than hiring an “AI prompt engineer.”

There is sunlight through the clouds though; artists all over the internet have rallied behind TAG and AWI. Fan art of Actually and Guyfella, the stars of the Jellybox-produced animated shorts explaining the issues the guild faces, as a happy couple can be found among hashtags such as #NoAI, #standwithanimation and, of course, #unionyaoi on Instagram, X, Tumblr and more. They have fanfiction on Ao3. There’s even a zine in the works to raise funds for strikers. The AG and AWI have also given their seal of approval through reposting the art and posting this edit on the AWI Instagram. It turns out that the only thing artists love more than a chance to dunk on AI art is a chance to draw yaoi — and it’s working. The online digital art community, whether creators or just fans of the medium, are proliferating the guild’s message through this ship, of all things. More and more people online are hearing about the strike through these posts going viral — I myself learned about TAG’s demands through their shorts that were reposted on Tumblr, and I’ve seen comments under my own yaoi art of people learning about the strike from the silly little drawing I did.

Animation has given the world countless beautiful and life-changing stories. It’s made us laugh, cry and reflect on parts of our existence that are indescribable without the multimedia nature of the medium. Many of us have grown up with animated characters that felt almost as alive as any real person, and for all of that we must thank the animators who breathed their hearts and souls into these characters. Unfortunately, we’re in a situation where industries driven by love and passion are often the ones easiest to exploit, and the ongoing exploitation of animators has driven the industry to a possible breaking point. Animation is no longer something a person can make a long-lasting career out of and in an industry that relies on experience to lead, it spells doom. Students and prospective students in art should be allowed to make their hard-earned skill and passion into a livable lifestyle, just like any other skillset. It’s time we repaid artists for the decades of joy, and stand with animation. 

Daily Arts Writer Lin Yang can be reached at yanglinj@umich.edu.

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