Ornette wrote:Random question: where did you get those figures from?
I've never been good at finding fiscal reports of foreign television animation, but I knew some guys who worked as freelance animators that worked on major television commercials back in the mid-late 90s. They explained to be how to break down an animated scene so you can track every item to approximate a rough financial estimate.
I used their freelance pricing as a guild to find a rough estimate of an animated films budget. Albeit, it won't be a very accurate one, as with Japan's different and changing economy and different views on business procedures; and we are discussing studio work, not freelance work. But it's enough to get an approximation.
The general freelance fee for animation back in the mid 90s was $60 dollars per second of screen time. There were live-action elements that were already shot that the animated character had to interact with, so the cost of creating backgrounds was eliminated. There was also only one animated character within the commercial, requiring only one animator. Multiple characters obviously would have required multiple animators.
For fluid, 12 FPS (frames-per-second) animation, that was about $5 a frame. The commercial was 30 seconds long, and the animation took most of the screen time. So the final cost was about $1,800 for 30 seconds worth of animation.
A lots of the animation inside the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series was limited animation. The FPS was, on average, significantly lower than a higher budget show. Basic "lip-flap" common in Japanese animation normally consists of only three or four frames in somewhat of a loop animation. This helps cut costs across the board, but there's still the extra costs of multiple animators for multiple characters.
Battle scenes don't get the cheap budget luxury of "lip-flap" production values, and in an attempt to wow as many viewers as possible, The battle scenes of episodes 1 & 2 were fully animated, 12 FPS animation drawn on larger cels than most Japanese television animation preceding it, also involving more actual battle choreography than most of it's predecessors, rather than relying on close-ups of shouting pilots.
Then there's the effects artists, which are generally paid differently than character animator. They're the guys who animate water splashes, explosions, and at times tricky items like rope, lights, and cloth not adjacent to the characters. Most of the time this is replaced in smaller budgets by the cheaper "speed-line" animation used in a lot of limited animation. Stuff that DragonBall Z is known for using.
Although for lighting, the computer started to play a more prominent, yet subtle role on NGE. It was mainly used to create that glowing effect of the light shining behind moving objects. Stuff that, prior to that, had to be manipulated frame-by-frame by the effects artists using an air brush technique.
The number of backgrounds also come into play, as each individual background obviously costs money to produce.
All of this is physically layered on the cels and photographed. What little computer assistance that was used in lighting had to be scanned into the computer from the film negative.
While watching the first two episodes, one can see how GAINAX ended up creating the animated footage that would later take up about half of the later episodes. In many an episode do they re-use the NERV techies' lip-flap while sitting in front of the exact same backgrounds painted for episode 1. Other example about in other environments in which there was re0use of already produced backgrounds and animation.
As the show progressed, one can also pin-point there areas where outsourcing occurred. Normally the "in between" cels for the key frames would be outsourced to a Korean company. But, as many have pointed out in the above posts, the designs seem to flex around often in the middle episodes. This indicates that either outsourced the key frames that the in between were often based off of, or that they just laid off their model checker (the guy who cleans up the key frames and make sure that the designs are congruent with the original models drawn by Sadamoto).
The computer lighting assistance is also nowhere to be found in a lot of the middle episodes, indicating that was also cut out of the budget. On top of all that, very few of the Eva battles every really reach the fluid 12 FPS mark. Some of them reach close, (Asuka's first battle, for example) but even then a lot of moments within the battle rely on still frames that only cont the studio about five American dollars, the cels to draw and paint, and the background paintings. Very little of the Eva battle involving Toji even reached the 12 FPS mark. At times even the "speed-line" animation reared it's head to avoid creating the huge backgrounds needed for that amount of movement. At times a lot of animation budget was saved by just using more close-ups of the pilots than earlier budgets allowed by simply being able to afford more animation. Sure, it was used to it's emotional and artistic perfection. It still didn't cost as much.
Even the layering of the re-used effects pieces looked outsourced, or just rushed by the studio itself (which is worse), as there were times that continuity was completely screwed over by accidentally layering explosions over certain elements that it was supposed to be behind, and not being able to afford the costly film needed to re layer and re photograph it. (We'll blame it on the intern.)
And finally, most studios split their budgets in such a way as to give most of it to the first and final episodes. So the final episodes were expected to have a budget and production value equal to the first two episodes. But, even that was budget cut (albeit, it was somewhat unexpected for GAINAX), as most of episodes 25 & 26 only consist of still frames, some air-brushed backgrounds, and even photographs that could have easily have been developed at a drugstore.
It may not me completely accurate to say that half of the budget went to the first two episodes. But seeing as how the last two episodes were supposed to have originally had a budget similar to the first two episodes (just look at the animatic for episode 25), the production's budget certainly felt like an engine without a caboose.
