why CGI animation cost less to make than hand drawn animation but big CGI animated movies budget is always many times higher ?

Question

In japanese anime nowadays there are alot of smart use of CGI to cut down on production cost. However most big CGI animated movies always cost 7-8 times higher than traditional hand drawn animated movies. Weathering with you and your name budget was about 9-11 million, while boss baby, frozen, kungfu panda was upward of 125-150 million.

In: Technology

Answer 1

Because they are doing things you could only dream of with hand-drawn animation.

Hand drawing was a big limiting factor in animation. You could spend money and effort to make it a little better, but you always had to resort to tricks to limit the number of moving things on the screen and recycle as much footage as you could. You were always limited to the artist’s imagination when it came to how things moved, how light illuminated a scene and how it was reflected. And if you were putting the final movie together and something didn’t look right, your options to fix it were more limited. These constraints created an upper bound on how good animation could get, spending twice as much money only moved the needle a little.

With CGI, the sky is the limit. You can get hand-drawn animation quality for less, but you can’t spend more money to make something a **lot** better. Not only is there a higher ceiling on quality, CGI is still an evolving technology, you can still find new ways to make it better. In a movie market where a good movie can gross over a billion dollars, spending an extra 10, 20, or even 50 million makes sense if it beats out the competition.

Finally, the financials haven’t changed as much as you might think. In 1989, *The Little Mermaid* cost $40 million to make, about $80 million adjusting for inflation. That’s more than the first *Toy Story*, which came out six years later, and on par with movies like *Ice Age*, *Madagascar*, and *Despicable Me*. One of the last big production hand-drawn features, *The Hunchback of Notre Dame*, cost $100,000,000 to make. The cost of modern CGI animated productions is largely a reflection of studios spending more on movies in general.