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.
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You can’t say that CGI costs more or less than hand drawn animation because it doesn’t. CGI has a wider range of potential costs than hand drawn animation, which is why its used in both expensive movies and cheap anime.
With hand drawn animation the cost of fluid animation is mostly determined by how fast you want it done. If you want it done really fast you hire more animators, if you don’t care, you hire less. But its difficult to drop the overall quality of the animation (and therefore, also drop the cost) without producing something that’s jarring to watch. Likewise, its hard to increase the quality because there are practical limits as to how well humans can draw – particularly in a production environment.
With CGI its much easier to alter the quality, and cost, of the CGI. And if you’re looking for cheap CGI – as in the case of anime – the more CGI you order the cheaper it gets. The reason for this is that the main cost involved in cheap CGI is making the digital models, once you have those done its relatively inexpensive to shoot scenes with them.
But CGI doesn’t have to be cheap. If you want to make a CGI model that has a higher definition than the human eye is capable of perceiving, that’s not a problem. All it takes to do that is to throw an obscene amount of money at the project. When you see Disney or Dreamworks movies that use a lot of CGI, chances are they spent more time (and money) developing the main character’s model than most anime spend on an entire season’s worth of CGI.
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