Geographical distribution of film and animation

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Film

About 6,600 movies are made per year worldwide (data from 2011, includes only movies made for theatrical release, not TV or direct to video movies), of these, India is the largest filmmaker producing about 1,250 movies per year.

1 India ----------------- 1,255
2 United States --------- 819
3 China------------------- 584
4 Japan ------------------ 441
5 United Kingdom ------ 299
6 France ----------------- 272
7 South Korea ---------- 216
8 Germany -------------- 212
9 Spain ------------------ 199
10 Italy -------------------- 155

World film production is highly decentralized, even the top producer only makes 1/5 of all movies and many countries produce more than 100 movies per year.

Hollywood is only responsible for a small fraction of American film production, as movies made by the big studios only represent 150-160 movies a year, out of the 800 movies the US produces per year.

And big budget Hollywood movies are even rarer, movies with budgets bigger than 10 million dollars numbered only 50 in 2011. Larger than 100 million, only about 15 are made per year, larger than 150 million, only half a dozen, in fact wikipedia only lists 83 movies costing over than 150 million dollars made over the past 18 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...xpensive_films). Blockbuster films are a tiny fraction of the world's film industry, even if you measure it by studio expenditures: the production cost of hollywood movies that cost over 100 million dollars per year is around 2-2.5 billion dollars, out of the ca. 15-20 billion dollars spend on film production around the world.

Animation

While film is highly dispersed around the world, animation is highly concentrated on Japan. The reasons for this are mainly historical. Western culture is a photographic culture, painting declined after the invention of the camera and similarly animation never developed into a medium in the west, mostly restricted to comedy sketches and children's entertainment. While in Japan, the first large non-western country to industrialize, animation developed to full bloom. I expect the same to happen in China and perhaps India over the next decades as these countries finish their processes of industrialization. Korea is too a small a market to develop a large animation industry, since animation requires a lot of money to produce (compared to film which is cheaper).

I lack precise statistics about the total volume of animation produced in the world but using data from databases such as MyAnimeList and data from wikipedia I can make a rough estimate. Japan produces around new 160 animated TV series a year, plus there are dozens of long running TV series and Japan produces around 120 movies and OVAs per year, given average TV episode length of 25 minutes, about 200 new seasons of animation, each about 20 episodes, yield 100,000 minutes of animation, plus movies and OVAs it goes to about 120,000 minutes.

US production of animation consists of about 10-15 movies per year (that's 800 to 1200 minutes of animation, considering 80 minutes is the typical size) plus 20-35 new TV series per year (from wikipedia, each lasting on average for 2 seasons or 40 episodes of 20 minutes each, some last 20 seasons (The Simpsons) but many only last one), so taking 27 TV series on average, each about 800 minutes long, yields 23,000 minutes of animation, including the films.

The Chinese animation industry is about as large as the American, according to wikipedia it's about 20,000 minutes per year. Considering world GDP minus Japan's is 95 trillion dollars, US and China are 17 trillion dollar economies, we can crudely estimate the non-Japanese world's animation output at about 100,000 minutes assuming the size of the animation industry is proportional to GDP similarly to China and the US, which implies that Europe's animation output probably is around the same range as China's and the US's but I am not sure considering the very small number of European animated series I know. So I would be safer and guess world animation output outside of Japan at about 80,000 minutes.

So global animation output is 200,000 minutes, 60% in Japan (according to wikipedia, 60% of the world's animated series are made in Japan, so my estimate appears to have certain accuracy), of the 40% rest, about 11% in the US, 10% in China, less than 10% in Europe.



Hmm... interesting statistics.

I found a document that may be interesting to you: http://www.nordicity.com/media/2014129zmrnwhjuw.pdf

Canada produced $220 million dollars in animation in 2012/2013. I'm not sure how many movies/shows that means, but I think somewhere it lists the amount of hours of footage made.



Canada's animation industry is very large, it's volume of animation produced is not much smaller than the US's (like 1/3 or more). It's around 10-15 TV series a year.

For comparison the Anime industry is about 2.5 to 3 billion dollars, so 220 million dollars would be around 1/12 to 1/15 of the anime industry size, if the average production costs are the same it means Canadian animation is about 8,000 to 10,000 minutes. Notice the article said that of the 220 million dollars Canadian animation, 175 million are children's animation, leaving only 45 million dollars for adult animation, or 1,600 to 2,000 minutes. US adult animation is probably the same proportion or about 4,000 minutes a year, equivalent to 10-15 seasons per year of adult animated shows such as Family Guy and South Park. I read in an anime forum that in Japan only 12% of the anime produced is children's animation (not very rigorous source), so that leaves about 2.2 to 2.6 billion dollars for adult animation, or 100,000 minutes of adult animation.



From anime encyclopedia, minutes of animation produced in Japan:

2005 --- 115,550
2006 --- 135,530

Notice that I estimated output at about 120,000 minutes (for 2013). My guestimator was apparently really close to the data.



Interesting data from here:

http://aja.gr.jp/english/japan-anime-data

So in 2015 there were 341 animated TV series made in Japan of which 233 were new series and 77 animated movies. So only out of the ca. 350-400 movies Japan makes per year about 20% are animated.

Although they don't have data on the number of direct to video movies made (which are usually the majority of anime movies according to Miyazaki). Overall it looks like Japan's animation output is now about 10 times the US's and has been increasing fast over the past 20 years.

I also read Chinese animation production is actually higher due to government subsidies but they don't care about the quality (as it's basically those Communist 5 year plans with "maximize number of minutes", so the quality is regarded as very low). China produces about 250,000 minutes of animation per year now, twice as much as Japan's output. Interestingly, most of it never gets out of China (although there are a few Chinese series on MAL's database like Fox Spirit Matchmaker).