We have heard many news about the working environment of Anime industry and how employees are not getting paid appropriate amount. A similar tweet came from the English voice actor of Kawaki (Boruto) on Twitter explaining how Crunchyroll & Funimation are paying their voice actors only $35 per hour minimum.
Just a while ago Crunchyroll and Funimation merged together to make world’s largest anime library. The anime content of Funimation moved to Crunchyroll and they became one. However, just after this announcement, a tweet came from voice actor of Kawaki (Boruto).
The Voice artist came forward on twitter, and revealed that Funimation only pay anime dub voice actors $35 per hour. The amount of efforts Voice Actors put in their acting is massive and this amount just doesn’t seem right.
The tweet you see above is by Michael Schwalbe, the English dub voice actor of Kawaki (Boruto: Naruto Next Generations).
Anime is the most vocally-strenuous and damaging genre of voice acting, yet it’s by far the lowest paid. In the tweet he said that Funimation has had a history of exploiting voice actors and paying bare minimum wages.
“$35 per studio hour is nothing. most work maybe 2-4 hours of sessions a week if they’re LUCKY and often have to do 50-75 unpaid auditions per new session.” Said Michael Schwalbe.
Many anime voice actors, some of who don’t have the best reputations, were forced into accepting this type of pay due to Funimation‘s tiered pricing.
Moreover, Funimation and Crunchyroll are now one and we don’t know if this would make any difference for VA’s. They deserve better wages and hopefully the voices of Voice Actors reach them for good.
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I feel bad for the voice actors, but the anime translators have it even worse. Much worse. The pay offered post-merger is nearly 40% less than pre-merger. Considering how long it takes to translate each episode, the pay is approaching grocery checker level. When did knowing two languages and having good creative writing skills along with subtitling skills become a near-minimum wage job? Actually, I know. It happened when the LSPs started buying up smaller translation companies. They now hold a quasi-monopoly on the translation market. And this merger is just another nail in the coffin.