#NewDeal4Animation: An Explainer on the Fight Behind Fan-Favorite Cartoons
Animated series are more popular than they’ve ever been. Once seen as a form of entertainment primarily for children, animation has since become a core staple of the TV and streaming content industry. While the proliferation of animated content over recent years has in no small part been due to the rise of streaming services that are capable of providing more niche content to wider audiences, many artists in the animation community have raised concerns about budget loopholes and tight deadlines imposed by content providers.
Snowballing into a larger social media movement for raising awareness of the animation community’s concerns, #NewDeal4Animation is illuminating some of the complex inner-workings that have affected and continue to affect fan-favorite animated shows.
RELATED: The Cuphead Show Season 1 Review
Like all television and streaming shows, animated series are segmented into seasons of episodes for production orders and eventual distribution on platforms or channels. Customarily, animation workers receive pay boosts for series that are renewed for multiple seasons; this serves as a way to keep quality talents on projects and serve as leveraging power for the creators behind projects that fans have an appetite for. However, the way production contracts are negotiated for streaming services can sometimes engender a large number of episodes that are produced at once and artificially broken up into different “seasons” by the service. This has become a common trend for many streaming series, if unpopular with animation workers themselves.
According to one member of the Animation Guild who was contacted for an explanation for fans: “Companies producing content under New Media terms are allowed to pay lower wages and
Read more on gamerant.com
