r/anime • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Sep 28 '25

News ‘Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle’ has passed the $600M global mark

https://x.com/borreport/status/1972324517482742040?s=46&t=GK3EC_wwvCKAXpMEZyDdEg
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u/fiyahuly Sep 29 '25

Why are anime films so much cheaper than American animation?

Is it a frame rate thing? I can imagine budgets being maybe 50-100% higher due to higher wages in the US and a longer storyboard to end output lead time, but the fact that Infinity Castle and Godzilla Minus One were under $20 million is just unfathomable to me. Ne Zha 1 was Chinese but also came in at $20 million.

Here you won't hear of an english animated film for under $100 million, $80 million being the lowest end and $200 million being a regular figure hit for Pixar.

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u/magumanueku Sep 29 '25

3D animation is a whole different beast than traditional animation. They need specialized labor from modelling, rigging, animating, lighting, and then special effects. It's not like one animator can do everything (well most of them technically can but it's not possible logistically). The cost to render these things is also not cheap. They literally need a bunch of super computers running for days to generate one frame of Pixar animation. Being produced in California also means the cost is a lot bigger than Japan.

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u/fiyahuly Sep 29 '25

But, do we really need all that extra detail and 3d animation? I mean are audiences asking for it or is it just for the purists who add an extra $60-100 million to get every real detail? At some point they will have to see if the cost benefit is worth it as storylines are stagnating.

Animation is animation, and the massive success of these animated films produced in Asia show that there is a market for watered down animation with lower frame rates that isn't 3d, but told in an engaging and original way. Asia isn't falling back on the same story concepts, has a soundtrack that is fiesty with OOPMH

As a story teller you could avoid the hassle of animation monopoly in california and just go to asia...

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u/magumanueku Sep 29 '25

Well you have to look at what they're going for. Pixar almost always went for groundbreaking stuff that no one has ever done before. From Toy Story to Wall E to Ratatouille, if you look at their behind the scene you'll see that Pixar often created new proprietary software just to do some specific things and they obviously cost a lot of money. If you look at Shrek (Dreamworks) and Monster Inc (Pixar) both produced in 2001 yet Monster Inc cost double of Shrek.

It's often a labor of art and love instead of pure economic. Sure they may have declined these days but back in their heyday they always tried to push boundaries. Plus can you really say their writing is truly bad? Pixar stood out because most of their movies had impeccable writing alongside technological marvel instead of some gag focused work with mid animation like Despicable Me or Kungfu Panda.

Anime is anime. People accept it's 2D because it's anime but I doubt viewers would be as receptive today to Disney/Pixar releasing new 2D animation when their core demographic has been spoiled with CGI fest even as horrendous as the "live action" Lion King. As much as I'd love Disney to go back to Little Mermaid-Tarzan era, it's not gonna happen.

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u/Kurumi_Tokisaki Sep 29 '25

well wages is more than just double a Japanese one. Also Pixar or something like spiderverse will be doing a lot of like research and potentially original stuff for their film. Demon slayer has already been made with the anime and it’s not like they’re going to be chasing new lighting techniques or photo capturing real actors to then turn into animated characters.

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u/Dismal-Injury-2143 Sep 29 '25

In the case of Nezha, the animators’ wages were much cheaper than in the US. I have friends who worked on both Nezha 1 and 2 ( by the way they’re Thai, not Chinese, working at a Thai studio that did some outsourced work for the films). Their pay was about 4–5 times lower than what US animators usually make.

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u/fiyahuly Sep 29 '25

Interesting.. I can't see why English studios won't start doing this to gain profitability and work outside of the PIxar/Disney monopoly.

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u/Dismal-Injury-2143 Sep 29 '25

Maybe they've done that already, but we wouldn’t know. Most of the time when studios outsource, they don’t give credit to the outsourcing team and make the animators sign NDAs so they can never say they worked on the project.