Weilin Zhang (animator for Mob Psycho, Heavenly Delusion, Jujutsu Kaisen) expressing his frustrations with the state of anime on his blog
Source: [Weilin Zhang's blog](https://illofyou.com/Blog.html) from January 2026
Forewarning - The contents of this entry probably only make sense to animators and are extremely black-pilled, enough so that I feel compelled to clarify that I don't write this maliciously to discourage aspiring animators from pursuing animation. Dillegence in honesty is a necessary backbone to any message of encouragement, and it is for the explicit sake of speaking candidly about my own motivations and perspective that I write this here. If change is what we're after we mustn't be afraid to confront ugly truths. If anything I hope the expression of ugly but candid sentiments like these will better prepare the next generation of animators for the trials and tribulations that come with this wonderful craft:
Japanese Commercial Animation (Anime) is a net negative on society which is to say that I dont think any labor in this industry actually produces value to society. This has nothing to do with animation as a discipline and artform. It, however, has everything to do with it's practitioners. We have fundamentally dropped the ball and are victims of our own insufficiecies, all forms of blame hurled at CEOs, Producers, Investors, and Committee boards are nothing more than sore excuses from sore losers. It was our responsibility to do whatever was required to maintain quality.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason animation tends to attract petty, anti-intellectual types of characters which make for poor constituents of any type of strong community. We also for some reason like to stand on the shoulders of giants and rain droplets of smelly piss down upon them while we high-five each other and cross streams.(Is this metaphor still intact?).
For these reasons in part, I am perpetually stuck in a grey space of my own value systems which goes something like:
"I want to be a financially independent individual because I want to be a positive contribution to the community that I benefit from"
However, it seems that in order to BE financially independent with the profession I have dedicated myself to, it requires that I be a negative contribution on the community at large.
Let us quickly address the most straight forward solution. A simple career switch. This would be an obvious solution if it wasn't for the fact that I am the best animator of my generation and I'm unfortunately not dumb enough to be ignorant to the effect on the artform as a whole if I were to walk away from the inconveniently large amount of genius I was for some reason endowed with. I am comfortably aware that I represent Japanese animation to some extent now. I also love animation and it's hard for me to stand aside and watch my colleagues do everything in their ability to bastardize the potentials of this medium (I will not explain what I mean by this).
Anime as a product is a gambling advertisement. When it isn't it preys on its customer's other worst, most base instincts in order to survive on it's own two legs (and I know for a fact that I dont even need to go into what that is because you're already conjuring up at least a couple examples of what I could be refering to). This was not really the case just 10 years ago. Anyway, my feelings towards this stuff can be summarized as:
"Japanese commercial animation no longer fundamentally cares about preserving it's fundamentally life-affirming moral core which has massively negative implications on it's overall messaging, and by extension, it's role as fiction and entertainment in modern society."
As a product it is absolutely ambivalent about whether or not it makes you a worse person.
And this is true because anyone who's already been working in anime for sometime is reading this and thinks I am talking about nonsense. "What are you talking about bro, anime is just about having fun lols, and fun is good, umm I don't get my value system from anime lmao." Yes, well, to those of you that happily sign on to work on the next Uma Musume/Chainsawman film, for your sake I hope you really do mean that.
Anyway, you have to understand, when I mean net negative, I do mean the negative. Which means that it's not the fact that I am NOT contributing positively to any type of community by engaging in this work, it is that I sincerely feel that the projects that I am apart of genuinely make the world a WORSE place, which means that to do no work at all would actually be an improvement in my estimations.
This is the predicament most milennial and generation-z individuals who are trying to survive the work force find themselves in. The average person when confronted with such a rock-and-hard-place will just accept that their work is not where they are going to find fulfillment and instead use their income and leisure to find that instead. Unfortunately, working as a key animator isn't exactly the kind where I can clock out at 5 and have 2 weekends at the end of my week, for a plethora of reasons that I expect readers will already be able to sympathize to some extent. But all that to boot, recent tax laws and the declining Japanese Yen quite literally strips out half of my income as an international freelancer compared to pre-covid era. But I suppose to yearn towards a pre-covid era is completely pointless in which case I will redact the declining Yen but maintain the 20 percent international freelance tax as arguments. We are simply in a completely different world than the one 6 years ago.
For what it is worth, if there was even a shred of the aforemention moral core left I would be happy to dedicate my entire life to just this industry.
Really, again, my complaint is to do with the commercial industry and has nothing to do with animation. I still maintain that animation is a supreme artform and one of the pinnacles of human acheivement and project. Though I have all of these complaints with the specific industry that I work in (the japanese one), it is a fact that animation industries elsewhere are more abyssmal in all of these respects.
All these obstacles aside, if I really needed to make ends meet, I know deep down I could...at the cost of selling my soul via restraining contract to some studio and being complicit in this advertising machine. Unfortunately, I have grand dreams of leaving the world a better place than I found it, so I'm doing this god-damn comic as an extremely humble, extremely minute step-if-not-lil'-shimmy, and it is immediately coming at the expense of any prospect of forward movement in any other avenue of life. Just this little shuffle in some direction that isnt where I am right now is already costing my entire person.
For all intents and purposes, I am a bum lol. I am literally shirking my employment to draw a fucking comic book (it's not even a book it's all digital). And not only do you have to swallow that weirdly-shaped pill, you also have to somehow believe that this comic book about magic powers is genuinely sapping my humanity by the hour. It is the the north pole of my active mind, everything I do and think is within the context of this project. I say with an intonation of shame that trying to put this project onto the page somedays leaves me paralyzed in my own anxiety for hours on end. And it probably isn't even going to be that good because I know I've never drawn a comic before. Can you believe that at the end of this I'm going to then produce a 15 minute high-quality animation film? Well I do, because I am, and I will even if it's the last thing I ever do.
Anyway, the reflection to that value system I set earlier goes something like:
I don't want to be financially independent as an individual because doing so requires that I NOT be a positive contribution to society, and doing the best things that satisfy a positive contribution requires that I forego the time and energy to pursue financial independence which means that I am a negative contribution on my immediate community (I'm a bum).
Still wrapping up some jobs...I've started drawing chapter t-9, I hope to complete it before the end of February. As always, I have nothing but gratitude for your patience and time regarding this project of mine.
Forewarning - The contents of this entry probably only make sense to animators and are extremely black-pilled, enough so that I feel compelled to clarify that I don't write this maliciously to discourage aspiring animators from pursuing animation. Dillegence in honesty is a necessary backbone to any message of encouragement, and it is for the explicit sake of speaking candidly about my own motivations and perspective that I write this here. If change is what we're after we mustn't be afraid to confront ugly truths. If anything I hope the expression of ugly but candid sentiments like these will better prepare the next generation of animators for the trials and tribulations that come with this wonderful craft:
Japanese Commercial Animation (Anime) is a net negative on society which is to say that I dont think any labor in this industry actually produces value to society. This has nothing to do with animation as a discipline and artform. It, however, has everything to do with it's practitioners. We have fundamentally dropped the ball and are victims of our own insufficiecies, all forms of blame hurled at CEOs, Producers, Investors, and Committee boards are nothing more than sore excuses from sore losers. It was our responsibility to do whatever was required to maintain quality.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason animation tends to attract petty, anti-intellectual types of characters which make for poor constituents of any type of strong community. We also for some reason like to stand on the shoulders of giants and rain droplets of smelly piss down upon them while we high-five each other and cross streams.(Is this metaphor still intact?).
For these reasons in part, I am perpetually stuck in a grey space of my own value systems which goes something like:
"I want to be a financially independent individual because I want to be a positive contribution to the community that I benefit from"
However, it seems that in order to BE financially independent with the profession I have dedicated myself to, it requires that I be a negative contribution on the community at large.
Let us quickly address the most straight forward solution. A simple career switch. This would be an obvious solution if it wasn't for the fact that I am the best animator of my generation and I'm unfortunately not dumb enough to be ignorant to the effect on the artform as a whole if I were to walk away from the inconveniently large amount of genius I was for some reason endowed with. I am comfortably aware that I represent Japanese animation to some extent now. I also love animation and it's hard for me to stand aside and watch my colleagues do everything in their ability to bastardize the potentials of this medium (I will not explain what I mean by this).
Anime as a product is a gambling advertisement. When it isn't it preys on its customer's other worst, most base instincts in order to survive on it's own two legs (and I know for a fact that I dont even need to go into what that is because you're already conjuring up at least a couple examples of what I could be refering to). This was not really the case just 10 years ago. Anyway, my feelings towards this stuff can be summarized as:
"Japanese commercial animation no longer fundamentally cares about preserving it's fundamentally life-affirming moral core which has massively negative implications on it's overall messaging, and by extension, it's role as fiction and entertainment in modern society."
As a product it is absolutely ambivalent about whether or not it makes you a worse person.
And this is true because anyone who's already been working in anime for sometime is reading this and thinks I am talking about nonsense. "What are you talking about bro, anime is just about having fun lols, and fun is good, umm I don't get my value system from anime lmao." Yes, well, to those of you that happily sign on to work on the next Uma Musume/Chainsawman film, for your sake I hope you really do mean that.
Anyway, you have to understand, when I mean net negative, I do mean the negative. Which means that it's not the fact that I am NOT contributing positively to any type of community by engaging in this work, it is that I sincerely feel that the projects that I am apart of genuinely make the world a WORSE place, which means that to do no work at all would actually be an improvement in my estimations.
This is the predicament most milennial and generation-z individuals who are trying to survive the work force find themselves in. The average person when confronted with such a rock-and-hard-place will just accept that their work is not where they are going to find fulfillment and instead use their income and leisure to find that instead. Unfortunately, working as a key animator isn't exactly the kind where I can clock out at 5 and have 2 weekends at the end of my week, for a plethora of reasons that I expect readers will already be able to sympathize to some extent. But all that to boot, recent tax laws and the declining Japanese Yen quite literally strips out half of my income as an international freelancer compared to pre-covid era. But I suppose to yearn towards a pre-covid era is completely pointless in which case I will redact the declining Yen but maintain the 20 percent international freelance tax as arguments. We are simply in a completely different world than the one 6 years ago.
For what it is worth, if there was even a shred of the aforemention moral core left I would be happy to dedicate my entire life to just this industry.
Really, again, my complaint is to do with the commercial industry and has nothing to do with animation. I still maintain that animation is a supreme artform and one of the pinnacles of human acheivement and project. Though I have all of these complaints with the specific industry that I work in (the japanese one), it is a fact that animation industries elsewhere are more abyssmal in all of these respects.
All these obstacles aside, if I really needed to make ends meet, I know deep down I could...at the cost of selling my soul via restraining contract to some studio and being complicit in this advertising machine. Unfortunately, I have grand dreams of leaving the world a better place than I found it, so I'm doing this god-damn comic as an extremely humble, extremely minute step-if-not-lil'-shimmy, and it is immediately coming at the expense of any prospect of forward movement in any other avenue of life. Just this little shuffle in some direction that isnt where I am right now is already costing my entire person.
For all intents and purposes, I am a bum lol. I am literally shirking my employment to draw a fucking comic book (it's not even a book it's all digital). And not only do you have to swallow that weirdly-shaped pill, you also have to somehow believe that this comic book about magic powers is genuinely sapping my humanity by the hour. It is the the north pole of my active mind, everything I do and think is within the context of this project. I say with an intonation of shame that trying to put this project onto the page somedays leaves me paralyzed in my own anxiety for hours on end. And it probably isn't even going to be that good because I know I've never drawn a comic before. Can you believe that at the end of this I'm going to then produce a 15 minute high-quality animation film? Well I do, because I am, and I will even if it's the last thing I ever do.
Anyway, the reflection to that value system I set earlier goes something like:
I don't want to be financially independent as an individual because doing so requires that I NOT be a positive contribution to society, and doing the best things that satisfy a positive contribution requires that I forego the time and energy to pursue financial independence which means that I am a negative contribution on my immediate community (I'm a bum).
Still wrapping up some jobs...I've started drawing chapter t-9, I hope to complete it before the end of February. As always, I have nothing but gratitude for your patience and time regarding this project of mine.
Commentaires
nursing and teaching are jobs anyone should be proud of, but all my generation can think about is how thankless, overworked, and underpaid these professions are, for the same reasons that animators struggle. unions and government regulation are required if we don't all want to end up corporate slaves.
His entire post felt like a full on rant, if not a mental breakdown. It's extremely rambly and at points incoherent but also felt very honest.
It's a shame that an animator as talented as him, feels so negatively towards the future of anime.
Maybe for a mainland cn person, maybe, but for an American?
Is he not allowed to have any negative opinion on anything in Japan just because he’s Chinese American?
You sound like one of those racists people who yell “Well you are not a *real* American” to people like me just because I have a Chinese last name.
Despite the bad blood between the governments that has been going on for decades, China has one of the largest, if not *the* largest market for Japanese anime on the planet, Japan included.
Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle grossed $50M USD in China on its opening weekend, despite much cheaper ticket price than Japan and the U.S.
Are there a lot of brainwashed nationalists who hate Japan? Of course, but they aren’t long time Japanese anime industry veterans like the author is.
It's dumb to think they all dislike Japanese people and side with whatever the politics of their government
[Yasuo Muroi](https://x.com/animesijyuku/status/2012761953048137955?s=20)
[Henry Thurlow](https://x.com/henry_thurlow/status/2012727173355057642)
[Hiromatsu Shuu](https://x.com/Hiromatsu1988/status/2012802801567752586)
[Shunsuke Okubo](https://x.com/i/status/2012768366222545320)
[Q\_Kawa](https://x.com/Skydash827/status/2012634634371354720)
[Curie Lu](https://x.com/lu_curie/status/2012623105630339504)
That's not everything, but what i found by quick search
There's never been a better or worse time to be an artist
Thought this would be more about the actual problems with the industry. Not a rant about his egotistical moral standards.
Only thing I really disagree with is the suggestion that this wasn’t the case ten years ago. It absolutely was but perhaps in different directions
But that’s not how addiction works. It just builds.
The sad thing is that most of us will never understand what that is because most of us don’t have that sort of addictive personality but, for those that do, it is devastating.
So it would be bad enough to be promoting that via your anime that happens to be about gacha characters but you don’t need to understand the gacha to understand the anime (which is about horse racing so is always going to be, fundamentally, a celebration of gambling and animal abuse) except that that mindset is pernicious and toxic throughout society to the point where speculative crypto currencies and NFCs are allowed to exist purely to take people’s money and funnel it to other people with no pretence of some exchange of value having happened.
The world now runs on gambling and anime spends an awful lot of time trying to sane-wash that and that’s not a thing any of us should ever forget
Can't deny this one, sports gambling, online gambling, tcg packs, loot boxes, blind boxes, claw machines, japan seem especially concentrated in this gambling-in-all-but-name deal, seemingly decent business models and IPs still have to resort to gambling? It's deranged
>Anime as a product is a gambling advertisement
>"Japanese commercial animation no longer fundamentally cares about preserving it's fundamentally life-affirming moral core which has massively negative implications on it's overall messaging, and by extension, it's role as fiction and entertainment in modern society."
>Anyway, you have to understand, when I mean net negative, I do mean the negative. Which means that it's not the fact that I am NOT contributing positively to any type of community by engaging in this work, it is that I sincerely feel that the projects that I am apart of genuinely make the world a WORSE place, which means that to do no work at all would actually be an improvement in my estimations.
So unless you can find him explicitly complaining about fantasy with magic you just got a wrong interpretation.
Another quote:
>Anime as a product is a gambling advertisement. When it isn't it preys on its customer's other worst, most base instincts in order to survive on it's own two legs (and I know for a fact that I dont even need to go into what that is because you're already conjuring up at least a couple examples of what I could be refering to). This was not really the case just 10 years ago
He also mentions both Umamusume and Chainsawman movie. I understand Umamusume but how is Chainsawman related to gambling?
>I am literally shirking my employment to draw a fucking comic book (it's not even a book it's all digital). And not only do you have to swallow that weirdly-shaped pill, you also have to somehow believe that this comic book about magic powers is genuinely sapping my humanity by the hour.
He's not talking about problems with parts of the industry and some source material being problematic. He's literally having a crisis about art not fixing things like poverty so why does he do it. He is basically only seeing value in things that directly contribute to improving society. And he's lost sight of the value in entertainment.
I can see how someone who is passionate about the medium can be frustrated by the direction of the overall industry. Obviously there are a lot of high quality (in both production and writing) anime still being made. But its hard to swin through the river of crap to get to those islands.
That’s a sad outlook. I thought animators appreciated the medium more than the average viewer, considering how close they are to it, but it seems that isn’t the case. I wonder if he’s stuck in that overworked phase, where the love’s gone and he only sees the medium as a framework, everything reduced to just technicalities.
Huh? How did you come to the conclusion that he has anything against fictional stories in general when his passion project is literally a comic about magic powers?
>you also have to somehow believe that this comic book about magic powers is genuinely sapping my humanity by the hour. It is the the north pole of my active mind, everything I do and think is within the context of this project.
But alas, we are, in all honesty, a technical job that can’t function without big management.
Try making money as indie. It’s extremely tough.
For example, take a look at the work of Don Hertzfeldt, entirely self published
https://youtu.be/4PUIxEWmsvI?si=wJQMXQc8r3fpfwYY
He's actually blaming all the animators. He's not blaming the corporations at all. You know, the ones that actually try their best to kill animators?
That's why a lot of the animators that are talking about his post are actually not on his side. [Doesn't help that he doesn't even pay for his living expenses](https://x.com/lu_curie/status/2012623112173486337). So he doesn't actually really feel the grind his colleagues do.
Immediately stopped reading his rant as soon as I got to that part. Bro's so full of himself he's developed a bootlicker complex laced with god complex asshattery.
On one side you see all those articles about anime studios over the past few years promising animators “better working conditions/better pay/not using AI/yada yada” Which is clearly bullshit and just PR talk.
And on the other side,you see the animators themselves not just from japan, but also outsourced animators from the West/CN/KR willingly getting exploited and working for cheap out of passion as long as they get to work on a high-profile anime..
So what’s the actual solution here?
Not many other studios can do it, sadly. Not enough talent, influence or courage.
What I'm currently getting is his frustration towards the show's financiers which might have involvement in gambling industry or something adjacent. For example, while Apocalypse Hotel has life-affirming theme narrative-wise, it was still made by Cygames, a company that also ran gacha games and soon to be generative AI research lab. So I guess by his moral standpoint, even accepting Takeshita's invitation to work on The Summer Hikaru Died S2 would be akin to helping gambling company get some pocket money to make more content to further tricking young people to gamble on moe horse girls.
But he also mentioned "working on the new Chainsaw Man movie" as something morally wrong for animators to take, which to my knowledge has no investors with deep ties to gambling/gambling adjacent industries. So maybe he also dislike the type of anime being made today that he think is following certain trend that ultimately invites the worst type of audience? Did he hate the stories of anime nowadays, or the rising awareness of sakuga appreciation that give birth to pointless, sometimes even harmful, animators powerscaling discourse in social media?
I guess you can only get so much information from someone's incoherent rambling with so little context to what he's currently dealing with. Regardless of what he's getting mad at, he needs to take a long break and, like Curie Lu said, touch some grass outside of his apartment.
Well, he calls himself the best of his generation, so Idk if he cares about this.
just a bunch of: “this sucks! will i explain myself any further? no.”
You can look at the cynical side of business exploiting these things. But it's still wasted energy. Things have costs. People have personal agency to choose if they buy. It's up to them to avoid the truly exploitative stuff.
>Some things are made purely for shallow enjoyment/entertainment. Those are still important.
I mean if he's doing stuff like implementing gambling mechanics into children's mobile games then I would understand the sentiment.
I mean even before his controversial rant, Weilin Zhang was still recognised as among the best animators. For all we know, other animators could have the same ego but just aren’t stupid or crazy enough to rant about it publicly.
Victims sometimes believe the lies of those who oppress them.
wild.
Who in this industry is normal?
Just the greatest animator of his generation. Which he’s probably right about. The rest? No.
It's not like there is an international competition of the best animators worldwide, but he knows that Asians are way too polite and forced to be humble by their culture to call out his BS.
Being good doesn't excuse you from trash talking your colleagues, belittle them while posting non sensical schyzo posts like this
Whether it’s good or bad, that’s probably what has his mentality this way.
Corpratization to ensure slavery
Overall, ignoring his sweeping generalisations about the industry he’s in, he just seems to be upset about his perceived lack of creative freedom, and insufficient monetary compensation. These are justified complaints. Furthermore, he seems annoyed that anime is popular with the dregs of society. Whereas Beethoven is considered ‘high-culture’, anime is considered ‘low-culture’, and as a result he feels his “genius” is not being properly appreciated.
I do see the circumstances that he's in: I am forced to quit since the abysmal pay is definitely unsustainable in the long run, and the only ones who can sustain this lifestyle is those who have either a knack for networking(which not everybody has, contrary to popular belief), or those who already have something to live off on in the first place(aka the "trust fund babies") . But man, this ain't the way to go about it.
Either way he just seem frustrated and all I could think is pity
He declares himself the best animator of the generation in one of his first points. Unfortunately, I can't take much of what this guy says seriously when he's obviously ego tripping. I'm pretty sure he also said that bad anime isn't the producers or committees fault and entirely rests on the teams that make it totally disregarding the effects of poor time management and budgeting.
So his points include
> The work is too hard
>If the quality of work is bad it's because people didn't work hard enough
>I'd quit but it would be a crime against the art form to deprive it of myself
>Anime isn't art because it's too commercial
Anyway I stopped taking it seriously when he starts monologuing about how he is the best animator in the world and the whole industry would collapse without him. I didn't knew who he was 10min ago and it sounded way too entitled for a japanese to say that. So I checked and indeed he is from the US (someone with an ego this big can only comes from there). He may be good but bro isn't even living in the same continent that the people he criticize and those he says he is better than.
He himself wants to have a high playing job that positively contributes to society. However, due to his skill set the job he is most qualified for is something he deems negatively contributes to society.
Thats at least what I got from it.
I make literally 4x more than I did teaching and work 1/3 to 1/2 the hours doing something that produces basically 0 value to society.
But at least taking care of myself I'm able to provide for the people around me. I could house my friend who needed it for some time. I can commission works from my artist friends and have my house be fully decorated by art made by people I know and respect and admire. Im not so exhausted and irritated and extremely upset and face-to-face with the dismaying future of society and the world (although that's obviously still there); enough so that I'm able to give more of myself emotionally and physically to help people around me and volunteer. I'm able to donate to the school I taught at to help them get teachers better than I was.
I think in the end, you have to do what you can and focus on supporting community around you, which starts from supporting yourself. A lot of the jobs that are helpful to society can unfortunately be detrimental to the individual.
Maybe I can go back to teaching once I've healed more and am older/wiser/more patient, but I think it's not the end of the world to work a job that just pays the bills and gives you the freedom and wherewithal to support and encourage your community.
I also take with demonizing the way people spend their free time. Not everything *needs* to be a work of art either. Of course that's an issue when you spend all your time pursuing escapism rather than living life or doing the things you need to do but that can be said about literally ANY entertainment industry, and is by no fault of the people making the entertainment. People making individual choices to ignore their real lives in favor of a fantasy are the perpetrators of their own prison. We can't hold entertainment industries accountable for that choice to ignore reality.
Another thing I take issue with is the blame he places on the individual animators while acting like the mega-corporations have ZERO role to play in whatever perceived issues he has with the industry. Do the animators themselves have some role to play? I'm certain they do to some extent, but the majority blame lies on corporations, and it's utterly asinine to apply *zero* blame to those. It's downright delusional.
So yeah while I do agree that having some moral lesson is important. I don’t agree that the amount of anime with moral lessons has significantly decreased Morse that people don’t remember the “non moral” anime of the older generation.
And yeah not every anime needs to teach the viewer something important. Like you and others have said, the problem arises when people start using it to escape their entire life. And yes this issue isn’t just limited to or caused by the anime industry. Getting rid of anime or the entertainment industry in general isn’t going to solve the underlying issues that cause this extreme escapism in the first place.
There might be some truths to what he's saying, but he also chooses to throw his peers under the bus for daring to feed into industry by choosing anime animation as a career due to their passion and taking the blame away from the exploitative higher-ups, which is kinda insane coming from someone who does the same while living with his mom. And he also seems super frustrated that animation isn't recognized or at least striving to be a higher form of art, rather than recognizing it as the mixed bag medium for entertainment that it's always been (like any entertainment medium).
In the end, he's having some kind of mental episode and is lashing out. Hope he gets help.
Main points:
* Anime has morally decayed and no longer benefits the people. It's spiritually vacant. Anime is mostly just made as an advertisement to sell something else rather than as a medium to imbue lessons on people. It preys on humans' baser instinct (escapism) rather than elevating them as people (while I think some points are true to an extent, particularly anime being used as an advertisement, he's claiming all anime is bad)
* He blames the anime industry's problems (poor wages, terrible conditions, time crunches, etc.) on the animators **themselves** instead of the greedy executives and committees. Claiming that if animators were smarter or stronger, the anime industry would be better.
* He claims he's the best animator of his generation. He's so genius, in fact, that it's burden to him. He feels that if he quits, the animation industry would suffer (holy, hubris). And thus, it's his moral obligation to stay, even as he hates the anime industry. He feels he's the only person who sees the truth (black pilled) and while everyone else lives in happy ignorance, he nobly sacrifices himself for the artform.
* He feels he only has two choices. Stay in the industry and make money but sell his soul to make commercial trash. Or work on his project (which of course will be a gift to our spiritually vacant society) in order to contribute something good to the world but be a "bum" and financially dependent on others. They want to choose the second option but are burdened by the pressure of being a genius. It's their responsibility to make sure the animation industry doesn't decay any further.
* They also claim that anyone who animates is responsible for the moral decay of society and that doing nothing (ie not animating) would be better for humanity than animating (???) as they're all actively making the world worse. That animators that enjoy what they do live in blissful ignorance and are anti-intellectuals.
There is some modicum of truth in there, but he wraps it haughty language. It seems like he prefers his message to come across as pseudo-intellectual instead of actually having clarity and being understood. If I didn't know any better, it's like he's trying to reach the word count on an essay while simultaneously using a bunch of words he recently learned in a thesaurus. It's purposely obfuscated and then he blames the reader for not understanding. This post is purely a performative piece meant to show how smart he is and stroke his ego.
It seems like the guy is really losing his mind, which is honestly very common in this environment.
It's basically a tldr for:
anime bad, isekai bad, fanservice bad.
I am the pinnacle of Japanese animation even though I live on the other side of the world and I don't have a say anything anime does because I'm just a freelance outsider only aired to do the dirty work and can't make any decision on the final product.
...
I could go on but you get my point
He animated Naruto and Sasuke vs Momoshiki at 16 years old and been involved in huge episodes such as JJK season 2 ep 17, Takopi, Heavenly delusion, Mob psycho and Fate series.
[His resume](https://youtu.be/rES4y4Lknm8?si=RoyAM9VZ42BZgW8I)
Yes, he can refuse jobs; many animators do that, including making trailers for gacha anime, which pays more than many 12-episode anime series, but apparently he thinks the industry depends on him, so he shouldn't refuse jobs, since he has to carry the industry.
Overall, don't take what he said too seriously; he doesn't seem to be thinking straight right now. At least he's not talking about taking his own life like other entertainers.
All I understand is that he doesn't like UmaMusume or Chainsaw man, but the rest is pretty incoherent and doesn't "candidly" explain anything, especially what message or moral core he believes is being ruined...
Initially, I thought his anger was being directed at the higher ups within the industry and how they suck the life out of the people that work for them.....but then he began to talk about how his work is "negatively impacting society" and that's where confusion began.
My first thought was "is he trying to say that he has negatively influenced people with his work?" Basically the old "violent video games make violent people" argument.
Then as you go further it seems like he shifts gears again and is now attacking his colleagues/counterparts.
Ultimately, I can't understand the point he is trying to make, and I have no real idea who is anger is specifically pointed at. He seems to be all over the map with whatever point he is trying to make.
This is how most industries work; they often cater to the common denominator rather than a niche audience because well, you need a big enough demand for your supply. But just like in other industries, there's room to carve out a niche and make money and these simple, mass-produced anime are not anywhere near a net-negative like he says they are.
>all forms of blame hurled at CEOs, Producers, Investors, and Committee boards are nothing more than sore excuses from sore losers.
Along with the kind of language he uses, makes it pretty obvious why he's dancing around his opinions.
I don't know this guy or where he's from. But this is a very "I'm going to say I'm apolitical and never state my beliefs openly because I'm actually right wing" kind of post that we see all the time in the west.
he’ll speak ill about something he dislikes about the current state of the anime industry and, either, vaguely explains himself, or just jumbles a bunch of words together without getting at an actual point
i find it super confusing the read, but the people in his chat (that view him as the next coming of christ apparently) always just nod and applaud all of it.
> You always said you disliked the "might is right" way of thinking, but out of everyone I've met, it's probably you who has benefited from it the most.
>
> Back when I thought of running away to throw everything into work, you told me, "I wouldn't want someone like that to be the best in the industry, so I would work harder."
>
> Doesn't it feel like things have completely inverted?
>
> There are people out there who share the same dreams as you, but if this is how you proceed, you'll find yourself surrounded by no one but sycophants to help you achieve them. Even if you're the best in the world.
>
> To animate is not the only way to positively contribute to your community. Maybe anime lacks the moral core it once had, but what about yourself? Outside of your work, how do you treat the people close to you and your colleagues in the same field?
>
> Maybe if you left your hometown and your mother stopped paying your rent, your opinion on your peers in this industry would be different.
Animators, directors, etc., don't earn enough money to support themselves independently.
Not saying it was undeserved, because it wasn't. But reading this, it's so clear it was written by someone (who is 25-26 now) who has been coddled his entire life, and never had to struggle or fight for the opportunities the way almost all of his peers had to.
* Both Weilin and Curie are animators from the USA and are ethnically Chinese. A few years ago, they were guest speakers at an event hosted by an animation club from San Jose University (I would love to share the IG post but the account went private).
* They have worked together on some projects. A good example is the Heavenly Delusion OP in which Weilin directed. Both Weilin and Curie did some key animation AND in-between animation for the OP. Another example is Jujutsu Kaisen 2x17 which had an infamous production meltdown. One of the episode directors Hakuyu Go brought both Weilin and Curie to work on the episode in an emergency.
bodied
lol
Yes. Yes it is. I think.
"I'm carrying but my team is trash" - proceeds to run it down.
> "What are you talking about bro, anime is just about having fun lols, and fun is good, umm I don't get my value system from anime lmao." Yes, well, to those of you that happily sign on to work on the next Uma Musume/Chainsawman film, for your sake I hope you really do mean that.
Like… what does this even mean?
It means he's not right in the head at all.
Anime is just a medium. You can't control what shows get animated, which ones get popular, and who chooses to work on them. Being frustrated that an entertainment industry isn't always producing your ideal types of story and not accepting that sometimes mindless entertainment trash might be mixed in there is not just a foolish sentiment, it's straight up delusional.
It also reminds me of this man at the office who was 73 but didn't want to retire because 'they need me'. And yeah sure the dude knew a lot and when he actually retired there were some moments when his knowledge would have come in handy. However you aren’t the sun and the world will continue without you. Some will miss you, but people will fill the gaps and adapt. You aren’t that important to your profession. It’s quite a liberating thought imo.
After reading this wall of self-indulgent wankery all I can think is
Spiderman pointing meme
My only response is: If he wants his complaints to be taken seriously, then actually give concrete reasons, or else this is just the rambling of someone who's experiencing burnout. Which, join the club.
It isn't like we don't see passion projects being turned into anime occasionally. Like we just had ''A Wild Last Boss Appeared'' last season which was a passion project. Likewise Vinland Saga is another one of those.
Bro what?
>I also love animation and it's hard for me to stand aside and watch my colleagues do everything in their ability to bastardize the potentials of this medium (I will not explain what I mean by this)
No seriously, what?
>If it wasn't for the fact that I am the best animator of my generation
...
Ofc anyone with a sane mind wouldn't use explicit stuff as a good example because it's not just anime that did. Anime never loss any moral code. It's just the society started prioritizing greed aka those companies. I met a lot of passionate people even older than he is. And lemme say this fk this privileged guy siding with corporations.
Very bold statement lol.
1. There is no doubt he is among the top tier of animators of his generation so I understand him having some pride in that. But nobody likes a braggart and calling yourself the very best while talking about the burden of genius is not gonna win many people over. He should take some lessons from Disney's Milt Kahl on that if he wants to be a positive part of the animator community.
2. He seems to have a very rose-tinted view of past anime, that they were more morally sound. But it has always been a commercial medium driven by the trends of the time. Whether it's trying to sell toys or Gunpla or card games or manga. True the trends change and we see less anime originals than we did in past decades, but creative people still try to make profound work despite all that. Stuff like Sonny Boy, Look Back, Orb, etc.
Yeah no, go fuck yourself, you bootlicker, the blame is ALWAYS with the money people.
In jobs, in politics, in EVERYTHING, shit always goes horrible because of those on top.
That is not an opinion, is a fact.