Is it just me or is it harder to "make it" for cartoonists and animators these days?

Oof, that hits me hard. I used to watch Pocoyo аs a child, so hearing that the company behind it has gone this direction makes me feel almost like I've had the rug pulled out from under me!

Yeah, there was a lot of hard work put into it back then, but at the same time, that hard work did pay off. By showing people what he could do with his art, he showed people the value of artistry and creativity, something that the current Disney company seem to be actively sabotaging by rehashing old ideas and making "live action" remakes. 

Digital animation, especially with anime, is still hand drawn, it's just done using touch screens and is traced over drawn pencil scans.

It's interesting that you say it was really easy back in the day, I had always thought it was a hard industry. I haven't watched any documentaries like you so I take your word for it. I was basing my belief on a film I watched about Walt Disney. He failed over and over before he eventually made it. I guess he was trying to run his own business rather than just work for somebody.

I think AI definitely has something to answer for. But I also think what people want is changing too. Comic books are not such a big thing anymore. People that like things like superheroes watch the films etc. Comic book collecting is a rarity now. The images expected in something like that have changed as well. People don't seem satisfied with someone's drawings anymore. It needs to be more flashy and impressive. That's how I see it anyway. For TV animation, technology has just moved on far past needing someone to draw all the image. It was a very time consuming way to make film. A handful of films may still use that and stop motion. But most now will use digital animating skills. This massively reduces the time needed to employ someone to draw.

The exception to all this seems to be manga and anime. These are still currently extremely popular and do have a signature drawn style. I don't know whether the films still use drawn animation or if their digital animation is in the style of a drawing. But the books would still need artists.

Yeah creative industries are hit hard at the moment, ai is one of the reasons, but there was a down turn anyway as companies were all investor led now, who want the guaranteed quick buck over new and interesting (I mean look at ocarina being released yet again on switch 2 rather than even any other Zelda title).

I read a really depressing article by the studio that makes the kids show Pokoyo. They were crowing how they had developed their own ai program that was fed with thousands of shots made my animators and could generate storyboards and base animation that only needed one animator to clean up. They were saying how great it was that they had 'cut productuon costs'. But in real human terms, that meant employing only 1 animator to the previous 3. So you work really hard to make something creative and then get rewarded by being replaced by a computer so the company could make more money. 

The job market in the games industry is really depressing currently, especially with all these uni courses churning out kids to an industry that's really hard to get a job unless you take an unpaid internship. 

I imagine it's a similar situation for cartoonists, with ai, studios need less workers to generate ideas and churn. A lot of people go indie just to make something new as old studios only want the same thing they did last year. 

It is hard, but I think there's always hope where there is human creativity to do something new and exciting.

Until there is some sort of agreement to stop trying to get ai to do fun creative things, all creative industries are going to keep shrinking and stagnate. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be anytime soon.

Do you think that there is a lot of money made from comics still? Outside of conventions of collectors events I rarely see much of the printed versions any more and I know there are many places to get the comics free online from all the big names so I wonder if they are still the money maker they used to be.

it is also far too easy to feed old comics into an AI engine and tell it to create the pictures for a new story and to get surprisingly adequate results. I wonder if the studios are realising this and working on narrowing their talent pool to more AI feeders / updaters and having a small pool of the old talents only.

Even designing a new character is so easy with some AI now that it can be hard to justify paying someone to actually draw it when you can have it generated and tweaked, ready to create a story in 10 minutes.

It is depressing and I see this repeated across so much of the creative industry now.

Are there any other creative outlets that you could look into that cannot be replaced by AI? Sculpture perhaps?