(L+CR) Www.Working!!

[DragoonKain3]

Oh you didn't know? Taneda got sick, and is an undefined hiatus even up to this date.

http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-new...ical-treatment

Believe me, I have a habit of learning VA names who are habitually cast as childhood friends, and Taneda is one of them. I'm so sad that she got so sick she went on hiatus, because even though it isn't life-threatening last I heard, it might still be a big impact on her career since she is missing a lot of her work. I'm afraid she will be another Goto Yuko (typically typcasted as osananajimi heroine in eroges way back when, but probably best known as Mikuru Asahina of Haruhi fame), another actress who had to take medical leave in 2012, cancelling a lot of her scheduled roles and pretty much never got a lot of roles after the fact.

[Mazryonh]

Yes, I knew that Risa Taneda got sick. But it doesn't explain how the studio got someone who is both more famous and likely much more expensive to fill in for her role in this version of Working!.

I'm also familiar with Yuko Goto. I'm glad she's still with us right now, unlike Miyu Matsuki whose sick leave, well, never ended.

[DragoonKain3]

Oh you meant as an actual replacement? I personally don't know the actual reason why Mizuki in particular, but it couldn't have been much more expensive than Taneda. Taneda is already considered among top tier VAs, judging by how many lead roles she has since her double lead role in 2013, and so Mizuki would only be more expensive because of her veteran status.

I mean, they're already paying Tomatsu as the lead female role, Mizuki on a side character should be within their budget if Taneda was the one to be replaced. All speculation of course, but just my 2 cents.

[Mazryonh]

Originally Posted by DragoonKain3

Oh you meant as an actual replacement? I personally don't know the actual reason why Mizuki in particular, but it couldn't have been much more expensive than Taneda. Taneda is already considered among top tier VAs, judging by how many lead roles she has since her double lead role in 2013, and so Mizuki would only be more expensive because of her veteran status.

By "double lead role in 2013," do you mean these two roles?

These characters voiced by Risa Taneda were so similar in certain ways, I'm thinking that one of them must have been inspired by the other.

Originally Posted by DragoonKain3

I mean, they're already paying Tomatsu as the lead female role, Mizuki on a side character should be within their budget if Taneda was the one to be replaced. All speculation of course, but just my 2 cents.

Yes, Haruka Tomatsu is singer of substantial fame herself, given her work on her singing group named "Sphere." What do you mean we're never getting another season of Tomatsu's breakout show, Kannagi? But I'm still of the opinion that Nana Mizuki is at a much higher level of fame, not to mention pay grade, than Risa Taneda, which is why I don't think that Taneda is "top tier" like you say she is. I doubt that Taneda regularly performs at sold-out concert venues, or gets the kind of reaction shown below whenever she arrives at airports outside of Japan like Nana Mizuki does.

Not only does Mizuki normally get this kind of reaction, but she has to be among King Records' (her record company) top names. If she could be making much more money giving concerts or recording new albums, then why would she say yes to substituting for Risa Taneda in WWW.Working! unless a lot of money was involved? Did she sing lots of character songs for WWW.Working! that are being sold on expensive CD singles to make up the expense of hiring her?

The history of how anime productions cut corners when their budget falls short and they can't get approved for more funding is vast. Just look at this blast from the past:



The anime adaptation of Yoake Mae Yori Ruri iro Na was forced to depict a cabbage like a green marble for its TV broadcast for budgetary reasons. Unless WWW.Working! had a lot more leeway in its budget to hire a big name like Nana Mizuki (and on short notice, at that!), the choice of hiring a more expensive seiyuu than Risa Taneda to substitute for her still makes very little sense to me.

[karice67]

I don't follow seiyuu and the industry close enough to be able to give an answer for this particular case, but the blogger who wrote this post about "Seiyuu castings, earnings and everything in between" might.

Also, generally speaking, 'bad animation' has little to do with budget. Time and talent matters far, far more.

[Mazryonh]

Originally Posted by karice67

I don't follow seiyuu and the industry close enough to be able to give an answer for this particular case, but the blogger who wrote this post about "Seiyuu castings, earnings and everything in between" might.

The parts in the article that says "seiyuus earn peanuts" and "only about 10%" of seiyuus can make a living from voice work makes me think that Nana Mizuki must fit in that 10%, so it's likely she still had to be paid more than Risa Taneda would have.

Originally Posted by karice67

Also, generally speaking, 'bad animation' has little to do with budget. Time and talent matters far, far more.

Time and talent has to come from somewhere. You can't get something for nothing in this industry. And sometimes the non-monetary cost comes from unpaid overtime, enough to lead to "death by overwork" such as at A-1 Pictures back in 2010. The fact that the cabbage I showed had to be turned into a green marble may have been due to overwork.

[karice67]

Originally Posted by Mazryonh

The parts in the article that says "seiyuus earn peanuts" and "only about 10%" of seiyuus can make a living from voice work makes me think that Nana Mizuki must fit in that 10%, so it's likely she still had to be paid more than Risa Taneda would have.

First, for the last few years at least, I'd say that Mizuki Nana's career is primarily about her being a singer/idol rather than a seiyuu, so she has other income streams that quite a few seiyuu don't have. (The more recent idol seiyuu may be similar or a bit different, but I personally don't know enough about them.)

(Second) IIRC from a number of posts that blogger has written, there are different brackets of seiyuu pay. But this is based more on how long they've been in the industry, rather than how famous they are per se, and Mizuki is likely to be in a higher pay bracket than Taneda just for that reason.

HOWEVER, there are other considerations that go into choosing seiyuu for a role. And different considerations again that go into choosing a replacement. The most important I can think of for the latter are that the replacement:

1) needs to have a similar voice
2) needs to be able to step right in to fill the shoes of the person being replaced
3) needs to be available

Since the show's director and sound director will not have time to run another audition, they will have to choose from seiyuu they know, meaning someone who auditioned during the actual audition process, or someone the sound director was already familiar with.

TLDR, I don't know the answer for this particular case, but there are other considerations besides budget that are likely to be more important. For example, you don't want to waste the director or sound director's time by hiring a less proficient seiyuu who may have to do lots or retakes etc etc.

But that's just me going by my basic understanding of what factors are important in seiyuu casting. If you really want to know, you should ask that blogger.

Originally Posted by Mazryonh

Time and talent has to come from somewhere. You can't get something for nothing in this industry. And sometimes the non-monetary cost comes from unpaid overtime, enough to lead to "death by overwork" such as at A-1 Pictures back in 2010. The fact that the cabbage I showed had to be turned into a green marble may have been due to overwork.

There are a couple of facts about animation production that might be helpful here. Freelance animators--and if I'm not mistaken, all animators working on A-1 Pictures shows are freelance--are paid according to the number of cuts they are able to animate, no matter how quickly or slowly they animate them. Production costs do go up if studios have to hire extra freelancers because they are running behind. However, the other possibility is that, with all productions being stressed as deadlines get compressed etc, they can't actually find extra animators to work on their project. E.g. SHIROBAKO episode 11.

TLDR: Money can become important...but that's typically due to problems with production scheduling. I recommend reading Sakugablog if you want to learn more about this.

[larethian]

Mizuki Nana has like 2 live concerts every year, and they have humongous turnouts. Her releases also hit top chart positions when they come out. I'm pretty sure she has a decent amount of royalties coming in from different sources.

Other fun facts:
https://youtu.be/QuuaYVhHyw4?t=847
As already mentioned by the blog: https://youtu.be/TWz0GDiWATE?t=1729

[Mazryonh]

Originally Posted by larethian

Mizuki Nana has like 2 live concerts every year, and they have humongous turnouts. Her releases also hit top chart positions when they come out. I'm pretty sure she has a decent amount of royalties coming in from different sources.

Other fun facts:
https://youtu.be/QuuaYVhHyw4?t=847
As already mentioned by the blog: https://youtu.be/TWz0GDiWATE?t=1729

So what's stopping Nana Mizuki from just quitting anime work and going on world tours and/or holding three concerts a year in Japan instead of just two to make a lot more money then? If her salary was her main concern, most anime productions wouldn't have the budget to hire her at all if they couldn't compete with the dollar value offered by her working on new albums or concerts, instead of working on anime voice work.

To reflect on an older work of Nana Mizuki, I'm amazed that the Aquaplus company found the time and money to hire her to voice act and sing for their White Album 1 anime series. Paying her royalties for her singing work and her regular voice work salary, including the singing and voice work from Aya Hirano and veteran Rumi Shishido, must have been astronomically expensive. I should also mention that WA1 was a two-cour series that likely wasn't well-received due to how all-over-the-place the writing was, and the fact that its plot had very little to do with the PS3 game that the anime series was promoting. I can't imagine that BDs for the WA1 anime sold very well.

And those two videos don't have English subtitles. Could you explain what's going on in them? I think I see Koichi Yamadera in the second one.

Originally Posted by karice67

First, for the last few years at least, I'd say that Mizuki Nana's career is primarily about her being a singer/idol rather than a seiyuu, so she has other income streams that quite a few seiyuu don't have. (The more recent idol seiyuu may be similar or a bit different, but I personally don't know enough about them.)

I don't mind anime seiyuus being promoted and working simultaneously as idols and/or singers, but assuming they don't crash and burn like Aya Hirano did, sometimes you end up with more trouble than it's worth. For instance, Rie Tanaka had to close down her fanclub and pretend her old idol photos didn't exist once she got married to Koichi Yamadera, which to me makes no sense since getting married didn't stop singers like Madonna from going about their usual work, however many clothes they wore while performing, and by the same token I don't understand why Rie Tanaka couldn't continue her modelling work after getting married (is it because of some obscure Japanese law?). Still, it happens every so often that seiyuus like Minori Chihara contribute both voice acting and singing for the same series like Date a Live or Kyoukai no Kanata, and that must be quite expensive to pay for.

Originally Posted by karice67

(Second) IIRC from a number of posts that blogger has written, there are different brackets of seiyuu pay. But this is based more on how long they've been in the industry, rather than how famous they are per se, and Mizuki is likely to be in a higher pay bracket than Taneda just for that reason.

HOWEVER, there are other considerations that go into choosing seiyuu for a role. And different considerations again that go into choosing a replacement. The most important I can think of for the latter are that the replacement:

1) needs to have a similar voice
2) needs to be able to step right in to fill the shoes of the person being replaced
3) needs to be available

Since the show's director and sound director will not have time to run another audition, they will have to choose from seiyuu they know, meaning someone who auditioned during the actual audition process, or someone the sound director was already familiar with.

I didn't think that Nana Mizuki and Risa Taneda had similar voices. And given what other posters have said about Mizuki throwing two concerts a year and regularly releasing new albums, she must be very busy most of the time. What about just contacting the "second place" seiyuu in the audition process, assuming Risa Taneda wasn't just requested outright by the ones in charge? That would very likely have been the cheaper option instead of shelling out for Mizuki.

One of the odder "actor substitution" stories I've heard was how, after Miyu Matsuki's death, the production company for Prisma Illya hired Yumi Kakazu who had in fact voiced a very similar character to the one that Miyu Matsuki did for Prisma Illya in order to fill-in for Matsuki. The catch here is that Kakazu voiced that similar character over ten years before Matsuki's death! How did Kakazu end up being the first choice for the producers to call in, since there was no guarantee that Kakazu could still voice that kind of role? Should they have held another audition instead?

Originally Posted by karice67

There are a couple of facts about animation production that might be helpful here. Freelance animators--and if I'm not mistaken, all animators working on A-1 Pictures shows are freelance--are paid according to the number of cuts they are able to animate, no matter how quickly or slowly they animate them. Production costs do go up if studios have to hire extra freelancers because they are running behind. However, the other possibility is that, with all productions being stressed as deadlines get compressed etc, they can't actually find extra animators to work on their project. E.g. SHIROBAKO episode 11.

TLDR: Money can become important...but that's typically due to problems with production scheduling. I recommend reading Sakugablog if you want to learn more about this.

Now you've got me wondering if the A-1 Pictures workers were freelancers so that the company could avoid doing things like paying them benefits or health insurance or even overtime (since the article I linked claimed that A-1 somehow didn't record the outrageous amounts of overtime the suicidal animator worked on). But even with the process you mention, there's still so many "off-model" moments in so many anime series I think at least some of the causes have to be money-related.

Other articles talking about how the animation industry treats its lower-level workers include one talking about how shockingly low the pay level is, and how badly overworked they are.

[j1m1]

Thanks to karice67 for linking to my blog post. Anyway I will post here using this account cos my old account has been deactivated for inactivity

Re: Mizuki replacing Taneda in the role, how it came about still remains a mystery to me. It took me by surprise as well, and I did do some digging back when it was announced to see if I could uncover any possible reason for the casting so here are some of my thoughts on the situation.

1. Taneda's hiatus was announced fairly late on - around Aug 31/Sep 1 iirc. The anime started airing on Oct 1, so we can't really tell if Taneda had participated in any part of recording at all (she was still working during the week prior to her hiatus). Dialogue for episodes can be recorded anywhere from months to a couple of weeks in advance, so let's assume the anime staff finds out in late August that Taneda intends to step down the role, and the first recording is only days/1-2 weeks away. This leaves them with very little time to find a replacement.

Originally Posted by karice67

1) needs to have a similar voice
2) needs to be able to step right in to fill the shoes of the person being replaced
3) needs to be available

Pretty much 2 & 3 are the most important criteria.

Originally Posted by Mazryonh

I didn't think that Nana Mizuki and Risa Taneda had similar voices. And given what other posters have said about Mizuki throwing two concerts a year and regularly releasing new albums, she must be very busy most of the time. What about just contacting the "second place" seiyuu in the audition process, assuming Risa Taneda wasn't just requested outright by the ones in charge? That would very likely have been the cheaper option instead of shelling out for Mizuki.

I don't think similarity in voices would be very important in this particular case. For the staff, the important thing is to get someone in immediately. At that point of time, where recordings for the autumn series would be starting, most seiyuu's schedules would already be determined. Whoever, if anyone, previously auditioned for the role might not necessarily be available to take up the job at such short notice.

2. As the role is a major one, whoever was to replace Taneda would likely require approval not just from the director/sound director, but also from the production committee members. I looked at the committee (Aniplex, Lawson & ytv) and did not see any obvious possible links that might explain the choice of Mizuki for the role. Of the staff, sound director Aketagawa Jin does have connections to Mizuki having cast her a couple of times in the past, and he does hold quite a bit of power over casting choices ie he likes to cast his favourites (Taneda being one of them). It is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that he may have tapped Mizuki for the role.

TL;DR my best guess is that Aketagawa didn't have many options available to him. He needs someone to fill the role quickly, preferably somebody 'famous' enough to satisfy the producers. It's likely he'll just have placed calls to his usual favoured agency managers to see who's available and then take on the biggest name he can find. Bonus being that it's someone like Mizuki Nana.

(as a side note, Aniplex/A-1 are both Sony companies and they had a big say in the WWW.WORKING castings - Tomatsu Haruka, Amamiya Sora & Asakura Momo are all managed by Sony subsidiaries so I don't believe pay was an issue with those 3)

Of course, that is just my 2 cents. As to why Mizuki still continues to provide voice work for anime instead of singing all year around, it is sometimes due to production committee choices, most recently for something like Konobi which her label King Records produced and had one of her songs used as the opening theme. Other shows might want to cast her for star power, to sell event tickets etc etc. She may also be obligated to her management agency Sigma 7 to do at least some form of voice work per year instead of just earning money for King Records. Many possible reasons. The cost to hire her may be slightly higher, but if the returns make up for it...

Anyway, hope all that stuff was helpful

[Cosmic Eagle]

Originally Posted by Mazryonh

So what's stopping Nana Mizuki from just quitting anime work and going on world tours and/or holding three concerts a year in Japan instead of just two to make a lot more money then? If her salary was her main concern, most anime productions wouldn't have the budget to hire her at all if they couldn't compete with the dollar value offered by her working on new albums or concerts, instead of working on anime voice work.

You know....maybe....just consider, that she could well actually...enjoy seiyuu work as well?

I mean, income is not the sole determinant why someone choses a certain job you know. And it's also not like you can just decide to up and go on a world tour on a whim. There's schedule for other concerts and such as well.


Seiyuu/singer is not exactly a rare thing these days. Hell, even Hayashibara Megumi if you want to look back 10+ years to now is a singer at her very core

[Mazryonh]

Originally Posted by Cosmic Eagle

You know....maybe....just consider, that she could well actually...enjoy seiyuu work as well?

I mean, income is not the sole determinant why someone choses a certain job you know. And it's also not like you can just decide to up and go on a world tour on a whim. There's schedule for other concerts and such as well.

I heard that Nana Mizuki was extremely happy to be cast as Cure Blossom for Heartcatch! Precure. That's the only job I've heard that she took because she was a fan though. And the more popular you are, the more lucrative offers usually come in. And the alternative isn't pretty. One seiyuu, Yurika Ochiai, even blogged about how she became almost destitute when seiyuu work for her dried up.

I also think that Nana Mizuki is big enough to have some influence regarding how often she can hold concerts.

Originally Posted by Cosmic Eagle

Seiyuu/singer is not exactly a rare thing these days. Hell, even Hayashibara Megumi if you want to look back 10+ years to now is a singer at her very core

But hiring famous ones to sing and voice is still a big expense, which is what I was asking about.

Originally Posted by j1m1

Anyway, hope all that stuff was helpful

Yes, your info was very helpful. The question of just how much higher Mizuki's salary was than Taneda's remains open though, especially since approving a higher budget in an anime production once it's been set should likely be rather difficult.