The strange disappearance of Japan’s animators | The Economist

The strange disappearance of Japan’s animators<br>Anime has never been more popular. So why does the industry have a labour crisis?

June 19th 2026

By Han Zhang

Endo Mizuki always enjoyed seeing his drawings come to life. As a child growing up in a working-class family in suburban Kanagawa, a prefecture outside Tokyo, he made flip books for fun, drawing cartoon dinosaurs, “Toy Story” characters and stick figures chasing each other. By the time he reached secondary school, he dreamed of becoming an animator. But he knew that breaking into the industry was extremely difficult, and he needed a back-up plan. So when he was 16 years old, he enrolled in a vocational high school to study computer programming. There he largely kept his artistic aspirations to himself. “Even if I told my classmates about it, I didn’t think I could get them to understand it,” he recalled when we met in Tokyo in autumn 2024.

Endo nevertheless continued honing his skills. After graduating in 2021 he picked up shifts as a cashier at a grocery store, which left him time to daydream and draw. At home he watched tutorials on YouTube and studied the styles of artists he admired, including Saito Atsushi, who designed characters for his favourite anime series, “Love Live! Superstar!!”, about a girlband.

A cheerful young man with floppy bottle-blond hair, Endo showed me some of his work from those days. In one drawing a teenage girl in school uniform with green hair leans backwards to look at the sky; in another, a sweaty young woman with purple eyes opens a freezer door to cool herself down. “I drew as I liked and once I was satisfied with one picture, I moved on to the next,” he told me. The joy he felt made any doubts about his uncertain career prospects melt away.

It would seem that there has never been a better moment for young artists like Endo to fulfil their dreams. Yet the industry is in crisis

The industry Endo aspired to enter is in the middle of a boom. In the past decade the anime market has almost tripled in size to reach about $19bn, according to a report published in 2024 by the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA), an industry group. A Teikoku Databank survey, also released in 2024, found that the anime-production sector itself has been growing, too, seeing a 23% increase in sales from the previous year to hit more than $2bn. This bodes well for Japan, which is grappling with economic stagnation and population decline. As Weekly Toyo Keizai, an economics magazine, proclaimed in 2023, “A rare growth industry has burst onto the scene.”

Anime’s success has been fuelled by interest from overseas. Between 2012 and 2022 the revenue from outside Japan grew sixfold; since 2020 the number of subscribers to Crunchyroll, a streaming service dedicated to anime programmes, has jumped from 3m to 21m. In the past few years, several anime films have topped the American box office. As a result of this popularity, anime-production studios are in high demand to work on titles for television networks and other companies. “The competition to reserve good studios is getting fierce right now,” an employee at a big distributor told me. The most reputable studios “are typically reserved for three to five years in the future. The industry has reached a bottleneck moment.”

It would seem that there has never been a better moment for young artists like Endo to fulfil their dreams. Yet the industry is in crisis. Labour and creative predicaments have compounded, threatening the continued growth of the genre. The most immediate challenge is a shortage of animators. The talent pool has been hollowing out since the 1970s, when studios began to use contract workers to enhance efficiency and cut costs. Subsequent generations of anime artists have rarely received on-the-job training, and, feeling discouraged, many have left the industry altogether. The growing popularity of anime is making this trend more pronounced. At the beginning of the 21st century just over 100 anime series aired a year; in recent years the count is more than 300. “You’d think the number of animators would grow accordingly, but it didn’t increase that much,” said Fukumiya Ayano, of Nippon Anime and Film Culture Association (NAFCA), an advocacy group. In 2010 it was estimated that there were about 4,500 animators in Japan; today the number is between 5,000 and 6,000.

Fan art Endo Mizuki sits at his desk in the offices of Bandai Namco Filmworks in Tokyo. His sketchbook is filled with observational sketches, which he will use to inform the frames he draws on his tablet. Merchandise from “Love Live! Superstar!!”, Endo’s favourite anime series, sits on his desk The animator shortage comes on the heels of shifts in the process of making anime. For instance, more artists now work on a single title than in the past, and each on a smaller number of tasks—contributing to a highly segmented workflow. Many animators and anime...