Since long ago, several animators in Japan have commented on the hard experience of working in an animation studio, such as SHAFT, in which the time limits and the arduous workload that they carry make many come to break and even focus their whole life on work without rest. On this occasion the animator Hiroto Nagata spoke on social networks about the harsh reality of working for a large animation company like SHAFT and even how it has come to affect his life.
Hiroto Nagata talks about the harsh reality behind SHAFT studio
Hiroto Nagata, SHAFT animator known for working on works such as The Quintessential Quintuplets, Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story, Fate/Extra: Last Encore and Owarimonogatari, among others, posted on the social network Twitter/X his hard experience about his work at SHAFT studio which has even led to affect his life and cause him certain emotional problems due to the huge workload he is tasked with:
The work was so difficult that I could no longer sit at my desk. I feel palpitations and shortness of breath just sitting at my desk. I can no longer draw anything…, even then I post the following: I dreamt that someone at work strangled me and, when I woke up, for some reason it still hurt. Since that day, I have a constant choking sensation, as if my throat was being pushed down. I got worried and went to the hospital to have my throat checked, but nothing was wrong. What is this?
But even a very disturbing situation was how the production manager of a SHAFT series was treating it as something easy to replace: The production manager told me that if I don’t do well this time, I will be erased from the anime industry, so I work while crying, telling myself that if I don’t work hard enough, I will be erased from here. I wanted to reply that we wouldn’t be in this situation if we hadn’t been crammed with projects, but there’s no point in fighting with the producer at this point.
It is certainly a concern how studios, and even one like SHAFT, treat their animators in this way because of the huge backlog of work and projects they have. And the fact is that animators even normalize this kind of treatment to some extent, as it was with Hiroto Nagata, who we can speculate that he has been receiving this same treatment from them for years, however, so far it seems to have affected him too much.
Even the fact that he is going through this should not be minimized, as there are many animators like him who are probably going through the same thing. And that they continue to work despite the circumstance in order to get ahead in an industry as tough as it is in Japan and with the working mentality of the Japanese, it is quite an alarming situation. Let’s hope that in the future they will be able to raise more awareness about mental health, especially for animators, and that Hiroto Nagata can find support somewhere for the situation he is currently going through.
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