How is anime made?
Anime making in Japan is a very fragmented process. This diagram shows the budget for a late night anime. Many anime fall into the late night category, airing well past midnight on many channels. These shows are mainly produced to expose the television audience to new franchises in order to sell other sorts of merchandise relating to those franchises.
Most of the funding comes from sponsors and is paid to large broadcasting companies to buy time slots to show the anime. The animation is produced by animation production companies, but they are often paid less than what is required to actually produce an anime series. From a starting budget of 50 million yen ($500,000), 40 million ($400,000) of it can go just towards acquiring a TV time slot alone, and only 8 million ($80,000) or so is given to the animation production company. Yet, it usually costs 10-13 million yen ($100,000-130,000) to produce just a single anime episode. Anime usually runs in 11-13 week long cours, or seasons. These companies produce anime at a huge loss, and have to make it up through DVD sales, soundtrack sales, and the licensing of their franchise for merchandise and toy companies. One anime series, Escaflowne, reportedly budgeted 30 million yen ($300,000) per episode.
The anime production company involves many jobs, including but not limited to keyframe artists, in-between artists, coloring artists, background artists, editors, sound effects artists, and voice actors. Each of these roles have been experiencing lower and lower wages and growing use of outsourcing. Over two-thirds of these jobs make less than 3 million yen ($30,000) per year, while one-fourth make less than 1 million yen ($10,000) per year.
In some cases, the copyrights are owned by the TV broadcasting companies, who contract the anime production companies to produce an anime largely to what the broadcasting companies specify. However, the anime production company has no copyrights to sell to make up for the cost of production, except for DVD's of the anime they produced. This makes it really hard for anime production companies to stay in business when they can't sell their DVD's.