Chainsaw Man director Ryu Nakayama is looking for animators to work on the highly anticipated anime series, and studio MAPPA is offering better than average pay and benefits to get them.
As reported by Crunchyroll, Nakayama put out the call for animators on the director's Pixiv account. Nakayama is looking for artists who live in Japan and are able to work in MAPPA's new Ogikubo studio. Any artists recruited will have to go through a two-month trial period before signing-on for two years as a trainee, after which they may be given a full-time position based on their performance. While the new recruits will technically be trainees, MAPPA is offering their new hires a monthly salary, a rarity among entry level animation positions, as well as other benefits such as paid time off, family allowances, and a yearly bonus. MAPPA will reportedly pay these new hires a salary of 230,543 yen (about $2,100 USD) a month, which is higher than industry average for new animators, and is even higher than what's offered by studios such as Kyoto Animation or Studio Ghibli.
This announcement comes several months after MAPPA was accused by multiple animators of over-working and under-paying their artists. Earlier this year, veteran animator Ippei Ichii criticized both Netflix and MAPPA, who worked together on the production of shows such as Yasuke, of paying their animators well under the industry standard rate. Prior to that, another animator who worked on Attack on Titan at the studio criticized the company's "factory-like" working conditions, and stated that they were required to work "until the sun came up." The animator also criticized MAPPA for taking on too many projects at once. MAPPA is well known as the animation studio behind popular anime such as Jujutsu Kaisen and Yuri On Ice. MAPPA refuted these claims in a statement, saying it offers fair rates relative to the budget of each project, and that it has never forced anybody to work on one of its shows.
Despite MAPPA's denials, the company has since been very public about its efforts to improve working conditions at the studio. The company recently opened its new Ogikubo location, which features more modern, spacious work areas and facilities for employees to relax in. The Ogikubo studio will specifically be focused solely on the creation of the Chainsaw Man anime, and the company has stated that it hopes to attract new and recently-graduated animators to the project.
The Chainsaw Man anime still doesn't have a final release date. The series' creator, Tatsuki Fujimoto, recently released the critically acclaimed one-shot manga, Look Back. The Chainsaw Man manga is currently on a break following the conclusion of the story's first arc, or part, in Dec. 2020. While the first part of the manga was published in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump print magazine, the second part of the story will be posted exclusively on the publisher's online manga service, Shonen Jump+. A release date for Part 2 of the manga has not been announced at this time.
Source: Pixiv, via Crunchyroll
