When Passion Pays $2 an Hour: A Mappa Animator’s Reality

There is a pretty stark disconnect going around about how animators get paid at MAPPA. On one side, an artist says she made pocket change for a Jujutsu Kaisen shot. On the other, old job listings and pay rankings make MAPPA look like one of the better-paying studios for newbies. Both can be true, which is... not great!

What an animator says she was paid for Jujutsu Kaisen

Animator Li Cree, in a YouTube interview hosted by Yiman, said she was paid 17 dollars for a six-second scene she worked on for Jujutsu Kaisen. She also said that specific bit of animation took her around 10 hours, which shakes out to roughly 2 dollars an hour. Yes, that math is as depressing as it sounds, and it looks even worse next to typical Western animation rates.

What MAPPA says it pays new animators (on paper)

There is another side to this. An older job posting shared via Crunchyroll listed a base salary for trainee animators at 230,543 yen per month, which was roughly 2,007 USD at the time. The posting also described a two-year contract for new hires, with the possibility of moving into a full-time role with benefits if performance was solid. The hours and pressure might still be intense, but strictly on paper, that starter salary sounds a lot less dire than that 17-dollar check.

And according to reporting rounded up by Anime Senpai, MAPPA actually ranks near the top for entry-level pay at major studios:

• Toei Animation
• MAPPA
• Kyoto Animation
• Studio Ghibli falls below those names, which is surprising given Ghibli's global reputation

So which picture is real?

This is where things get messy. Pay can vary wildly depending on how someone is brought in, what they work on, and how the project is structured. The job posting numbers make the studio look decent for trainees, but a lot of animator reviews still describe punishing schedules and lousy pay outcomes once you get into the actual day-to-day. The allegations around compensation and workload at MAPPA are not going away anytime soon.

The fan reaction

Fans of Jujutsu Kaisen are not exactly shrugging this off. One comment that got traction summed up the mood:

"This is absolutely awful, and shame on MAPPA for making its employees feel this way. Idc if the rest of the season has to be delayed, but the folks working on it should be able to release material they're proud of."

Why this matters

If workers are overextended and underpaid, burnout hits the work, and the work hits the audience. Even the biggest studios are not dodging the pay gap and workload imbalance, which says a lot about where the industry is right now. The short version: a glossy pay sheet can coexist with miserable individual outcomes, and until that changes, we are going to keep hearing stories like this.