By- Prachi Agarwal
Abstract
Animated films and videos are often affiliated with a single known cartoon production house like Disney, Pixar or a famous Japanese anime house. However, there are many layers which go unrecognized and not adequately credited. Most modern animated content is a cross-border work, done by thousands of workers whose names hardly reach the screen. This article aims to trace how animation shifted from a studio-based craft concentrated in the United States and Japan to become a global industry. This article examines the rise of production hubs in the Philippines, South Korea, India, China and Vietnam and argues that animation is not only an art form but also a product of a global production network that follows globalization, labor distribution and cultural exchange.
Introduction
The cartoons that we watch and end up crediting only one studio or country are usually an output of a scattered geographical supply chain. While a cartoon character is designed in California, it can be animated in Seoul, colored in Manila and become a final product somewhere else. Industrialisation and the logic of capitalism have gradually reshaped animation, turning it from a pure art form into something closer to a globalised manufacturing industry. I argue that looking into ‘behind the scenes’ work and extending the credit beyond the logo will help in understanding what it really takes to make animation possible.
The Studio Era
Animation started as a form of labour intensive art-craft, but quickly aligned with the industrial agencies. It did not become less dependent on labour. Instead, the work was broken into small, repeated tasks and organised like an assembly line. By the late 1930s, a feature film meant employing a number of artists to hand-draw and paint the frames. Walt Disney even toured Ford’s River Rouge plant in 1948. In effect, Disney ran his studio like a factory, breaking the work into stages and passing it down an assembly line. In this same period, the term automation was coined, and the Disney animators’ strike echoed the labour battles on Ford’s assembly lines. This division of labour placed a few directors at the top and a large, mostly invisible workforce beneath them. A hierarchy where credit and control flowed upward, even though the real work happened below. This factory model was also expensive, because the work depended so heavily on people. In hand-drawn 2D animation, labour makes up almost 70 to 80 percent of the total production cost, and even in computer-assisted 3D it is still around 60 percent. When such a large amount goes to the labour force, the need to find cheaper alternatives becomes strong. This is exactly what pushed studios to start looking abroad.
The Rise of Outsourcing
Upon demands for inexpensive cartoons from American television, animation companies started offshoring labour intensive, repetitive tasks to other countries. South Korea was at the heart of such developments. Korean animation companies were producing Japanese, as well as eventually American and European animations through subcontracting, to the extent that by the late 1990s, Korea had become the third-largest animation producer in the world. Such practices also came into being with American animation companies, such as Hanna Barbera, one of the most significant producers of TV cartoons, which outsourced its animation division to Asia during the 1980s. The phenomenon of outsourcing was not just about cutting costs, but rather represented a fundamental change. The creative “head” stays in Los Angeles or Tokyo, the working “hands” being shifted to cheaper economies.
The New Geography of Animation
Currently, the production geography of animation is widespread throughout Asia. South Korea continues to be an upscale centre, but the Philippines has been home to animation production offshored by the US for many years. Meanwhile, India has constructed a large service industry based on studios that specialize in competing on price and volume. As salaries in traditional centres were growing, new labour pools in India, the Philippines, and Vietnam developed to cope with the increased demand. However, China followed an alternative path, leveraging active government policies to foster its own industry and purposefully transitioning from volume to quality through successive policy phases since the 1990s. The result was evident in the form of the Chinese movie ‘Ne Zha 2’ released in 2025, which turned out to be the highest grossing animated film in the world, earning more than a billion dollars mostly in China alone.
The Invisible Hands
The global division of labour poses a serious challenge to who is being recognized for their labour and who is getting paid properly. The outsourcing of animators sees the creation of “in between” frames and colouring in scenes that complete an animation, but these individuals are largely unseen by consumers of their work and underpaid. The wide difference in wages between rich and poor countries is exactly why offshoring was seen as appealing. The trend is not limited to outsourced labourers. Even within the world-renowned Japanese anime production, there has been documented exploitation within such a sector where individuals work overtime, and an unsafe work culture is normalized. MAAPA, the production behind big hits like Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man is one the well known examples. The animators of the company were pushed through their limits to meet hard deadlines. However, the core problem of such globalized division lies in ownership, as those commissions and brands that work are taking the intellectual property and prestige for themselves, whereas those actually drawing the cartoons receive none of the recognition in return. Globalisation has expanded opportunity and built entire national industries, but it has also entrenched a hierarchy in which authorship and reward concentrate at the top.
Digital Pipelines and the Streaming Surge
Digital production has allowed us to turn animations into files that can be exchanged easily in real time. People across boundaries can easily work on the same project at the same time. On the other hand, the supply has also become equally convenient with streaming platforms. By 2024, over-the-top services such as Netflix and Disney+ will account for more than half of the global animation market, with Asia-Pacific the fastest-growing region. The commercial scale is striking: the animation outsourcing market alone was valued at roughly 205 billion US dollars in 2025 and is projected to keep growing at around 10 percent a year. Studios are increasingly treating foreign partners as specialised collaborators rather than just cheap labour in order to meet demanding release schedules. The advantage is a body of animated work that is richer, more varied, and more widely accessible; the disadvantage is increased pressure, strict deadlines, and a growing reliance on a small number of powerful platforms that set terms and budgets.
AI and the Future of Animated Labour
AI has the potential to reshape the supply chain once again. Concept art and lip-sync are already tasks that generative tools can help with. According to a widely cited industry analysis, a fifth of film, television, and animation jobs could be consolidated, eliminated, or replaced by AI. The technology is debated, while the union that represents animation workers admits that AI is already having an impact on hiring practices and the range of jobs. Many artists believe it is based on the unlicensed scraping of their own work, calling it labour theft as much as data theft. While others contend that AI will primarily automate lower-level tasks and serve as a tool to support rather than replace human creativity. In any case, AI is likely to follow the oldest pattern in animation, which is to focus first on repetitive, low-wage, frequently outsourced labour, exactly the kind of labour that globalisation has already pushed to the periphery.
Conclusion
Looking at animation from this perspective shows that cartoons are more than just entertainment. They are products of a global network of workers, businesses, and technologies. Behind every animated film or television show are artists, designers, and technicians from different parts of the world who contribute to bringing characters and stories to life.
For this reason, I believe audiences should pay more attention to the people behind the scenes. When the credits roll, it is worth remembering the many animators whose work often goes unnoticed. Acknowledging their contributions does not take away from the magic of animation. Instead, it helps us appreciate the collaborative effort involved and encourages a more balanced discussion about how recognition and financial rewards are shared within the industry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prachi Agarwal is a fourth-year student at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, pursuing an integrated B.Com LL.B. (Hons.) degree. She is drawn towards research that deals with law, culture, religion and they shape society and everyday life. Outside her studies, she is passionate about music.
Image source: https://pin.it/7IGC0BT1t