Animation involves more than cast and crew, though we have them, too. Animation calls for the highest grade of professionals in the field. Anyone who has ever built anything with an inferior team knows both the challenges and outcome. An animation employs hundreds, at day rate, salary, and beyond. Great teamwork that’s established, ready-to-run a full-production line, is not built overnight. Which also means it costs money to sustain and entertain; creative skillset isn’t an on-demand, for-hire-when-you-want-to kind of easy Jobstreet find.
The people are already here. Headline unemployment sits at over 500,000, and approximately 270,000 are youth unemployed. Meanwhile, over 2 million graduates are working below their qualifications. That is not a shortage of talent. It is a shortage of places to put it.
An animated feature is not just one job. It is 14 to 16 professional disciplines running in sequence and in parallel, each with its own labour market, day rates and training pipeline. When a title gets made, all of them get paid. When the slate is empty, all of them go somewhere else. Most of them go abroad.
Finally, animation is for high-concept stories where, in this market, to hire a known-name and hit that VFX would cost Hollywood numbers we just don’t have. Money that could otherwise sustain a 200-person studio, the size of Malaysia’s own Upin & Ipin production house.
No time is ever the right time
Would I recommend anyone to get into the field and risk their capital, creative energy and sanity? Probably. Because if you’re passionate about culture, the arts of any and all form, then it is a matter of when and what rather than how. Passion that greets discipline will always find its belonging. But consider everything, including the near 22-step process to even be eligible to start raising funds.
Next: the 22 steps between a finished script and the right to ask for money.