Looking into the Animation Industry – Part 2: Demand of the British Animation Industry

As I was applying for more and more studios, I’ve started to build the kind of picture that the UK animation industry has – what types of animation it favours and what ones are falling to the background. At face value, the UK industry is more commonly known for children’s animation, adaptations and stopmotion as noted by UK Screen Alliance.

During the second term, one of our tutors gave us a list of studios to check out and apply to. These ranged from some of the largest UK animation names like The Line to smaller less known ones like Local Hero animation. Looking into each animation studio further, I made note of ones which were stopmotion-based, VFX, 3D, 2D-cut-out and 2D frame-by-frame (since we seem to be moving towards a trend of making animation as fast as possible through cut-out, which is breaking down characters into individual parts and moving them without redrawing). Since my interest lies in 2D, I’ll largely focus on the studios in 2D, with a passing mention for the other processes and the studios that focus on them.

A large amount of the studios on the list use 2D cut-out as their main form of animation. This included Blue Zoo, Mummu, Animade, Shoot You Rumpus, The Like Minded, Shotopop, Seed, Art&Graft and Sun & Moon Studios. 2D frame-by-frame is a little less common here in the UK, but still used by studios like The Line, Picnic Animation, both Shotopop and Rumpus as a secondary form, The Like Minded use it in tandem with cut-out, as well as Passion Pictures. Studios using or specialising in 3D include Ritzy animation, The Like Minded, Robin animations. VFX can be found with The Mill, Framestore and Jellyfish Pictures amongst others. And stopmotion is used by studios like the world-renowned Aardman, Loose Moose and more.

A lot of the studios seem to mix in with multiple processes rather than one, such as Shoot You which does 2D cut-out, hand drawn and 3D, adapting to the changing demands of animation. It seems like a worthy investment to study cut-out animation, given the demand for this type of animation in 2022 and to expand my skillset further to have more studios to apply for. Programs like Toon Boom that specialise in this process are used by studios like Sun and Moon, Blue Zoo and Golden Wolf. I’ve been pretty stubborn about frame-by-frame for a while now, but I’m starting to learn the need to adapt and grow with new processes, so this is something I want to pick up alongside TVPaint over the summer.