Schism

I was talking to a friend about the state of the industry and I realized that the gap between TV and features is growing wider on several fronts.

Not too long ago, both features and TV were done using the same technology: drawings on paper. Features have moved heavily in the direction of cgi and TV has moved heavily in the direction of Flash or Toonboom. The reasons for this are economic.

While budgets have generally gone up for animated features, budgets have gone down for TV. Theatrical box office has continued to rise (though most, if not all of it, has been due to ticket price increases rather than increased attendance) but ad revenues for TV have dropped due to the proliferation of channels. The TV audience is constantly being eroded by more choice on TV as well as choices elsewhere (the internet, video games, etc.)

Both features and TV have their problems in terms of content, but the one thing that's undeniable about features is that they operate at a higher level of craft. There is time to revise and to polish. In TV, a minority of shots get revised.

This has repercussions for the animation workforce. In the past, while features were always seen as the top of the industry, there was a certain amount of mobility between TV and features. Today, I'm guessing that there's a lot less. Besides the fact that the software is entirely different, those working in TV have less opportunity than they did in the past to do work that aspires to feature quality (even if TV budgets and schedules guarantee that the work will fall short).

While I believe that any working artist should be as versatile as possible in order to stay employed, I wonder if for the time being we've reached a point where anyone aspiring to work in features has got to stay completely focused on that goal. In the past, opportunities would arise (especially in studios doing their first features) for people to move in from TV. I'm not so sure those opportunities will be as plentiful in the immediate future. Long term, though, all bets are off as the field keeps evolving in ways that nobody can predict.