animation question on anime

How many months does it take to do an anime tv show, OVA, and a movie? In America it takes about 9 months. Just curious.

That varies depending on the budget and quality. South Park is done in mere hours, some movies take several years.

Well, not quite. This info may be a couple years old, but from thought to finish, South Park is/was done in only 3 weeks usually (which is damn fast for a NA production), although it can be tweaked quickly in extraordinary situations, like the Elian Gonzalez incident.

Laters. =)

Stan

I think it takes six months for an episode of The Simpsons to be produced. Depending on how many episodes are produced in the show, there's always a way to produce a TV show by using a team of different animators to produce episodes seperately. These days many American cartoons are also getting shipped off to studios overseas (Korea, China, etc.) for the heavy backbone work of animating, ink & painting and what-not. These days computers are also being used to speed up the time of executing the finished animation.

Shows like South Park are completed in a very short period of time. Usually a few weeks to a few hours from several accounts. Many times they're able to get away with the extra time they have to throw in a gag based on current event that had occured before the episodes are first aired on Comedy Central. This was evident a few years back when the feds took Elian Gonzales from his Miami relatives. Trey Parker was rather clever enough to quickly throw in a joke with parodying the familiar photo of one of the swat team guys as he pointed his gun into the closet that Elian was being held captive by one of the family members. And this was days before the episode would air on Comedy Central later in the week (I can't remember the episode offhand).

From the Master of Car-too-nal Knowledge... Christopher M. Sobieniak

Well, a Simpsons episode a few weeks ago had Homer showing pictures of him holding baby Bart over a hotel balcony rail. Considering what that was obviously parodying, I'd say they've cut production time considerably . . .

'Quintuplets 2000.' In fact, the *entire episode* revolved around that . . .

As for the picture, replace Elian with Kenny, then do . . . *ahem* . . . the other appropriate change . . .

- Vaughner

'I'll have you know, in addition to knowing the secrets of the universe, I'm quite potty trained!' - Ko-enma, Yu Yu Hakusho

That's one of the things about the production of that series. The sudent extra bits like the Elian Gonzales incident that were used have been much easy to add into the show because of the shorter time period. This would be nearly impossible to do with one like the Simpsons, especially when the episodes have 'came back in color' (a typical term I hear many times) and it would be harder for them to add something extra in post-production.

From the Master of Car-too-nal Knowledge... Christopher M. Sobieniak

It's always hard to add something extra in post-production when one is sending most of the gruntwork overseas. You can't just send a storyboard and key animation to Korea and, unsupervised**, expect a finished product in a few days (**usually, the returned footage still needs to be tweaked to the satisfaction of the creators before ready for release). So everything is all mapped out already before being sent overseas.

That's not a problem for Trey and Matt since they do their own work.

Laters. =)

Stan