Last October, KAORI Nusantara had the opportunity to have a conversation with Federico Antonio Russo (FAR), an Italian producer who has worked on series like Wonder Egg Priority, My Dress-Up Darling, and Bocchi the Rock! as a translator and as a producer. Recently, FAR and his fellow producer, Blou, founded their animation studio: Buta Productions.

In this interview, we talked about his experiences in the anime industry that led to him founding his own animation studio, the intricacies of managing an animation studio, his experiences with anime producer Shouta Umehara during his time working in the anime industry, his thoughts about the anime industry in general (the good and the bad), as well as his thoughts about the prospects of Indonesian animators to work in Buta Productions. Check it out!

First of all, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your studio to our readers?

My name is Federico Antonio Russo; people know me as FAR on the internet. I’m the president of Buta Production, a studio that I established with Blou. Right now, we’re mostly doing contract work from various places, including the Japanese anime Industry. As a studio, we try to do anime a bit differently. What I mean by that is that we care about individuals who are working on the anime and creating a suitable pipeline for us.

Could you give us more details on how you decided to establish an animation studio after years of freelancing in the anime industry? Did any personal experience influence your decision?

I started as a translator who helped foreign animators who worked in the anime industry, before moving to the production position. At first, I started to work for anime studios like SynergySP. At that time, people who worked at the animation desk, Sai, contacted us and asked us to find people who could work for A Couple of Cuckoos. Around that time, Kentaro Waki also had a similar request for the Girls Frontline opening. After that, we get works for titles like My Dress-Up Darling, Bocchi the Rock!, Akebi’s Sailor Uniform, and even for the opening video of a video game.

Because we were working as a freelancer without any hierarchy or legal entity, we repeatedly ended up in unpleasant situations. For example, we’re getting paid less than the industry standard during A Couple of Cuckoos production because of quality concerns. The funny thing is a year later, Sai moved to Studio Bind and contacted animators who had worked for us even though he said the result was below industry standard. 

Something similar happened when we worked for Studio WIT. At that time, Studio WIT told us they wanted to work with us, but as volunteers. I rejected that. I told them I had other things to do and I didn’t want to work on this for free. Especially because this activity is very time-consuming. 

So at some point, we understand that we need to fix this. Our position is a murky area, legally speaking. So we ended up creating our studio. It turned out to be the right decision because the anime studio started going in a different direction. When we first started, the pay was very bad, and it was very difficult to contact foreign animators. Later, the anime industry boomed and it became easier to find animators. If we stay as freelancers, we can end up in a situation where we can suggest an animator to the studio, but then the studio itself will directly hire that animator. It means we end up being useless. 

So before the creation of your studio, you’re the one who contacts the animator before the studio hires them, while now you are the one who hires the animator. Is that correct?

Yeah, now they simply go to us and ask whether our studio can do it or not. In the past, it’s more like “Tell me who’s the animator that can do this particular part”. So in a sense, we were more like scouts. Right now, we’re the ones who hire the animator and the studios who hire us don’t really care who has done the part.

Before creating Buta Production, you guys also created Studio Tonton. In his Tweet, Blou has mentioned that Buta Production is the “professional” branch of Studio Tonton. Could you elaborate more about this?  

Well, Studio Tonton is more like a fan group; kind of a doujin circle of animation, I’d say. It was started by people from the Sakuga community in 2020, around the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, they thought “Hey since we have more free time now, why don’t we create some animation by ourselves?”. Blou then started working on a fan project about Naruto, a Naruto fan opening. There was supposed to be a Naruto fan-made ending too, but it never got released because the director ran away. (laugh). 

They also did other things, like in-between and digital painting in some anime and also did some promotional videos for webcomics. Right now, the studio does mostly fan projects like hololive fan projects. But they are not a professional entity, just a fan group. On the other hand, many people from this group ended up working in the Buta Production. That includes GitsAsh. Some people from this group end up working professionally for other studios too. Some of them are still in contact with us.

So, that’s why we called Buta Production the professional branch of Studio Tonton. There’s no legal connection between the two entities, but some people who work for Buta Production are originally from Studio Tonton. The people who end up working for us also have the same idea about what we want to do when it comes to animation. 

Is Studio Tonton still active and creating something?

They’re still active, but they’re not Blou’s priority anymore. This was more of Blou’s project rather than FAR’s project anyway. Something he does for fun in his free time. Originally, Blou was very happy with the studio Tonton, he likes doing original projects in his free time. But over time, people started to recognize us. Some of the Studio Tonton staff are offered to do professional work in other studios. Fan projects are also more difficult to coordinate and cost us a lot of time. So we just treat it as a side project.

As for Studio Tonton’s project, this year, they’re going to release an adaptation of a comic called Sable House. They’re also doing a hololive fan music video project, but the project has been in development for so long that people are burned out from it at this point. It has been conceptualized for so long that as a result, the people involved have mostly moved on from the fandom and don’t have that same level of passion anymore. But it is still going to eventually be released, so for now Studio Tonton is still around. We’re also still going to be around later on, but we’re mostly going to do smaller things.

Thank you for the clarification. The next question: what is the challenge of creating and managing a studio like Buta Production?

The biggest challenge to me is definitely making sure that we have enough cash flow to have things running smoothly and pay everyone on time. Right now, we don’t have any investors. We only get money from the projects that we do and Patreon. Then we also need to do accounting properly to make sure everything is proper and running. We have to divide our resources, making sure that we have enough to pay our staff properly while also covering utility bills like electricity, internet, and taxes.

Speaking of anime projects, is there anything you dislike about anime production? What do you think needs to be changed or to be gotten rid of to make it better?

I think the biggest issue that anime has right now is how chaotic your average production is. The fact is that chaos really makes handling multiple things at once very difficult. I’ll give some examples here so it can be better understood: There are some studios like MAPPA who are absolutely not willing to negotiate for delays. So, you might end up in a situation where if the animator, director, or any other entity you’re working with is messing up their schedule, then the entire production will collapse. I also worked in other industries like video games. In those industries, people still can ask for more time and think about the possible solution to mitigate a problem. Of course, people are going to apologise occasionally, but if the production process can’t continue, there will be a delay. So that everyone can handle their tasks properly.

In anime production, studios rarely want to delay their project, which means everything has to be done on time and there’s too much chaos. If something happens in another studio, even if I am not directly involved in that production, I am also going to be affected. For example, there are times when we have to do a certain number of genga, but because another studio collapses, if I have some freelancers who worked on my production who also went there, they’re going to be in a bad spot, and I probably have to delay something on our side to accommodate for that.

There were also some conditions where a third party who was commissioned to make a promotional video for a certain anime decided which cuts were going to go in that promotional video, so they contacted the studio to tell them that these cuts needed to be finished as fast as possible; even if in the schedule the episode is going to air in one year, further adding to the chaos. Sometimes bigger studios can pull their resources to mitigate this problem, but for smaller studios like us, It’s very hard. For some studios, this situation is not good financially because it creates more expense and they need to get loans from banks. Fortunately, we’re not in that position right now as we always run on a profit. 

When it comes to the financial aspect, sometimes I think the income we receive from the anime industry is not good enough to justify this level of complexity. Fortunately, it’s getting better and better every year. In Tokyo a few months ago, the average salary of an animator was lower than the minimum wage requirement there. Now, it is slowly catching up. It’s getting more and more profitable. Not to mention, wealthier studios also can pay more.

Another problem in this industry is communication. No, it’s not because of language. Rather, it’s really difficult to judge the hierarchy in a production, who has the authority to make a certain decision, and it could lead to miscommunication. Sometimes people who contacted you say it’s okay, but then their superior, animation director, or even the producer from the production committee say it’s not okay. These things can cause a lot of stress.

That’s a lot of problems. But on the other hand, is there anything you like about anime production?

I like that they give way more responsibility and freedom to specific actors. If you are working in a Western production, for example, you will have a storyboard that feels more like a layout. Then as an animator, you are mostly focusing on the motion and making sure the characters feel clean. In anime productions, you can do a lot more than that. You are given a rough storyboard, then you can make the drawings go in the direction you want them to be; you can work on the lens, compositing effects, specific timings of the camera’s motions, and all kinds of stuff. These things aren’t really present in the Western industry, and that’s what I like about anime productions compared to other production pipelines. It’s a lot more fun for me as a producer because rather than judging an artist from just their technical skill, I can also focus on what that artist can bring into the production on a more personal level. That makes everything more interesting.

So in the anime industry, are they allowing you to express yourself more compared to Western animation?

Yes, there’s freedom of expression, but I think it’s beyond it all. The anime industry is a model that gives everyone a certain amount of responsibility. For example in the West, the look and feel of the animation is determined by people who work on the storyboard and the pre-production design. The rest have to follow what they are trying to do. In the anime pipeline, you still need to follow directions but you also can add up something on top of the director’s. 

To make it easier to understand: In the West, it is like a game of subtraction, while in anime, it’s a game of addition. In the Western model, some people are very important and everyone else has to subtract their own personality to fit into that pipeline. In the anime industry, the director has their own vision but by collaborating with others, they can enrich that vision. 

Of course, not every Western studio is like that, I personally respect Cartoon Saloon a lot for how they avoid this dichotomy oftentimes, but it’s more common for everyone there to just follow the pre-production plan. Some people plan the show, and then others just have to follow the plan and never think much as long as it’s still in line with the planned vision. That’s not what I think is ideal.

Is there any plan for Buta Production to create their own anime? What do they feel about Indonesian talents? Find out the answer in the next page.

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