One of the most common questions we get at Powerhouse is “How much does animation cost?” Animation is an extremely pliable medium. Art style, script, level of action, and many other factors can affect a budget. Level of detail can be scaled to fit almost any budget, large or small. However, that doesn’t mean that a $2,000 budget is going to get you animation at the level of a Disney feature.
Advances in technology such as the transition from paper and celluloid to digital have changed costs significantly. When things are adjusted for inflation, however, the numbers are relatively unchanged throughout history for good quality animation production.
The Animation Graph (or Animgraph, as we call it) is a budget timeline that showcases the animation budgets of various projects for roughly the past century, with numbers adjusted for inflation. You can adjust this to look at costs per minute, per second, and per frame.
If you have any information we can add to the graph, please help us out and send us information. We would love to keep this updated and include other projects. Just fill out the form below:
Click the image above to be whisked away to the magical world of budget analysis!
