ButaPro

Q: These days Web-based animation/anime studios pop up like mushrooms after the rain! What makes ButaPro different from the rest?

A: Compared to many other companies in our space, our approach focuses more on artist empowerment, technical experimentation, quality-over-quantity and IP creation at its core. And world domination, of course. We’re not just satisfied with being part of the anime ecosystem, we want to actively improve upon it the best way while providing our clients and collaborators with high quality products able to make their brands shine brighter than ever before.

Q: What does Buta Productions even mean in the first place?

A: Buta means pig in Japanese. Within the broader Sakuga Community, where people critically discuss the technicalities of japanese animation, the word buta is often used as a synonym for “otaku” or “fan”. ButaPro can be read as “giga fan turned pro” or even “animation made by fans for fans”. The rich presence of people from the amateur circle “Studio TonTon (which also means pig in Japanese) influenced this choice as well.

Q: I’ve heard that anime pays terribly, how can this business even be ethical?

A: While we still struggle to compensate what we think our amazing artists should deserve for their immense talent and dedication due to the nature of the animation market, we always aim to pay our internal animators at least 4-5 times more than the basic unit prices of average TV anime. While the ethical concern raises above everything else we also benefit from this by being able to acquire way more competent and powerful talent than your average studio: unskilled animators are slow and their work require plenty of fixes from other workers, great animators are fast and their work often times doesn’t need fixes of any kind. These kind of choices have of course a positive financial impact for the studio itself in the long run.

Q: Why did you decided to open a Patreon page despite being a commercial animation studio?

A: Despite its growing popularity, anime is still a very commercial medium that struggles with the discussion many important life topics and themes. With the generous help of our Patreon supporters we can create more unique and original pieces that would otherwise struggle to find funding elsewhere.

Q: I would really love to commission you a music video/lore video/promotional video for my IP but it seems so expensive…

A: Fear not! While we cannot guarantee our availability due to scheduling and financial reason to every individual creator and company on the planet we always make time to meet you online to chat about your needs and how expensive they might be. We can do miracles in the field of efficient spending. Just send us a mail at business@butapro.com !

Q: What’s ButaPro’s stance on the so called generative AI in the animation production process?

A: While certain complex machine-learning tools can be useful in 3D animation/video games-making without being detrimental to artists and artistry and shouldn’t be demonized as a whole, we find generative tools such as image generation or generative-filling for background coloring not only useless for our creative objectives but also unethical as the training data for the datasets used by such software is pretty much always stolen and scraped from the actual copyright owners, who never gave their global consent. We have a strong stance against them, we will always instruct artists and outsourcing companies to avoid these tools and if we change our mind the future we will be transparent and notify our community about what caused this change of heart.