Animation Budget History

Like most people involved in animation these days, I read a lot of blogs. Sometimes I think if animators spent less time reading and writing blogs, or gathering old art jpegs, and actually made cartoons we would all be better off...the hypocrite typed into his blog editor.

Awhile back, in one of these blogs, I got interested in the quasi-debate about the state of animation. I think these sorts of arguments are as much a part of our industry as inbetweens. There were probably very similar arguments with every step of the industry's development/devolvement, since Gertie the Dinosaur. The internet has just made them easier to have over long distances without worrying about catching a fist or a paperclip in the eye. Animators are an opinionated lot.

Most of the conversation revolved around a comparison of Flash production vs. classic feature films, such as Disney Classics. To me comparing those two things is kind of akin to comparing what it feels like to drive a Ferrari, to riding a bicycle. I didn't realize that anybody was confused about one being better than the other.

Some of the arguments, made me feel the same way I do when folks compare 3d and 2d animation in a Highlander “there can be only one,” fashion. I never understood this argument. Sculpture and painting have existed side-by-side for centuries. Isn't the relationship between 2d and 3d animation similar. The real difference between the two have more to do to how capitalism has affected the artform in the past two decades.

Nonetheless, I got interested in the capitalism of it all, (see blog's name), and thought it might be interesting to look into budget variations and the quality of animation, so I started reading.

While I was reading, I decided to make a spreadsheet that took inflation into consideration, and compared the budgets of great works of animation, and standard bearers of trends, and figure out how much it cost per minute to make various animation pieces throughout the past several decades. I also tried to figure out what it cost per foot, just to confuse younger people with antiquated terms.

I have been working on this for about a year, and since the year is about to come to a close, and the economy is going to hell, I need to put this up before the current inflation calculations become irrelevant...

Don't read too much into this. I wasn't really trying to prove a point, but I thought it might shed some light on the state of the industry.

The life blood of the animation business, (and it is a business), is money. When an “art” takes long amounts of time, and generally more than one person with specialized skill; the dollar and the "art" are intrinsically interwoven.

Salaries and budgets drive the industry. In our dollar driven world; the buck stops at the buck. If you don’t believe me, read the autobiographies. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with it, but there were times in reading their books that one might feel that Shamus Culhane, Joe Barbera, and Chuck Jones could tell more about what they made per week, year by year, than they could tell you about some of the work they created. I am glad they did, because it made it surprisingly easy to do research.

Before you click on the comments button, I admit I got some of my information from the internet, and everyone knows Wikipedia is a communist driven pack of lies...so take anything here with a grain of salt. If I got something wrong, please feel free to correct me, and I will attempt to keep things updated. Better yet, if you know what the budget was for something that you feel should be added, I would love to get as much information as possible.

I also know that sometimes what a show is budgeted does not necessarily correlate to what is spent on animation. Trust me, I know this very well. While doing some of this research I noticed some major discrepancies between what a show was "budgeted" and what I know some folks were getting paid to animate scenes on said shows. But these are the numbers that are available, and since I am using them for all examples, I feel it is fair for a poor man's overview.

Here is what I came up with (click in image below to open application):


What did I learn? Honestly, not much. Except that 2d animators these days have gotten the short end of the stick. Younger animators listen to older animators talk about the glory days, but can't really relate. Older animators lived through an apex in the industry pine for the good old days, and if you worked in animation when a movie like Treasure Planet was getting $1.7 million per minute of animation, who can blame you. But I think that same example can show why our industry became unsustainable in terms of the actual global market place. This graph does show where things started getting out of hand. Bad scripts exascerbated the downfall.

At the end of the day, I imagine most studios could make animation as good as Pinocchio, if not better, if they got the equivalent of almost $400,000 per minute of animation.

I think the results shown in this graph are what people would expect, and most people knew this without spending hours on spreadsheets or asking their wife to help look up old TV budgets on the Internet.

Animation budgets are at an all time low, and it can possibly be argued that the level of work in our industry correlates to that. That is kind of how one expects things to work, isn't it? I’m definitely not saying it is a good thing, just seems to be the case.

Here is some of the salary information I found: (click on the image below)

I should probably cite my sources, which I will hopefully will get around to soon. Also, I need to thank Krishna Jain for programming the Actionscript and XML that makes the graph work, and also thank him for being patient. I paid him to do this forever ago, and only am only now posting it. I also wanted to thank the great Amid Amidi of Cartoon Brew, and the always nice Aaron Simpson of Cold Hard Flash for sending me more examples of budgets and fill in some gaps.