Tuesday, September 14, 2010

TeeVee Boomlet

The continued uptick in animated television product might be related to things like this:

... Cartoon Network -- The Monday night juggernaut of animated comedies (7-10 p.m.) continue to generate huge ratings and delivery gains for Cartoon Network compared to the same time period last year. ...

When TVbtn says huge ratings gains, it isn't kidding. Just about every age demographic, male and female, expanded 40% to 90%. For instance, the ever-popular Scooby Doo had jumps of 49% for boys and 323% for girls.

Adventure Time's eyeball totals expanded from 77% to 92%, depending on the demographic.

So it's not surprising that there's more small-screen toonage rolling through studio pipelines. While this has caused overall employment to trend up, the rising tide hasn't lifted all boats. The steady expansion of digital storyboarding, par example has meant more board artists can build animatics at their desks. And as animatics have proliferated and grown more elaborate, studios have cut back on timing directors. (There's also the long-time practice of shipping work offshore, which hasn't gone away.)

But the good news is that cable and network animation has been enjoying increasingly robust Nielsen numbers, which appears to be translating into more people drawing paychecks from cartoon studios.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Most likely, the uptick has everything to do with the brilliance of people who can draw, and nothing to do with writers, who are all hacks and are conspiring to ruin animation at their exclusive, elitist writer meetings.

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