I think happens with a lot of Disney shows as well; Titmouse created Motorcity, but it's considered a Disney show. There's the company that owns the show, the people who have the ideas, and the studios which do the animation work right?
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Here's one I'd like to know about - on Care Bears: Welcome to Care-a-Lot, there are executive producers listed in the opening credits and then one or two others listed in the closing credits? Why? Is one set more or less important than the other? Less involved?
I think you're pointing out the difference between producers and studios. Without a producer, a studio's work has no direction, and will find it incredibly difficult to put their work out there, so the two go hand in hand. I would prefer that all phases of production be handled under one roof, but the world is far from ideal, and in this day and age the technique involved is too much for one person to learn.
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What exactly is the difference between a director and a producer?
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I don't know the exact difference, but I do know that in animation, the role of the director is rather different from that of live-action television. And you also have different types of directors - for example, there's the director, and then there's the animation director.
edited 12th Nov '12 7:04:18 AM by JMQwilleran
In live-action stuff, the producer(s) basically deal with the money side of things - getting funding, negotiating with distributors, and so on - while the director is broadly in charge of the creative side of things. This is a simplification, since in larger-scale productions there are assitant directors (and the editor etc) and other producers fulfilling other roles, but that's the gist of it.
I assume it's the same in animation, except an animation director is going to have a different job than a live-action director, because of the nature of the medium.
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Hi tropers, I want to talk about western animation credits for a bit, and I'll use My Little Pony Friendship is Magic as an example.
On top there's Hasbro Studios. They pay all the bills, but do none of the work (relatively speaking). They don't write, design, direct, or animate anything, they just look at the work done by other people and give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down, and bow to their corporate overlords.
Then there's Studio B, or DHX Media. They take the money from Hasbro Studios and use it to hire artists who design locations, characters, and sets, hire writers who write episodes, hire storyboard artists and layout artists who translate the script into visual shots, hire directors to direct the artists and technicians, and hire animators to work on all those frames that go into making the animation actually appear to move.
Studio B has one animation crew in-house, and two animation crews that work for Top Draw Animation, and they split the workload between them.
You might say, then, that Top Draw Animation handles most of the production of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. And you'd be wrong. Most of the credit squarely belongs to the writers, artists, and directors who are responsible for the creative input into the show; they make the show what it is. The animators take this nearly-finalized input and add the frames that are required to make the animation move believably.
I use this example because it is well-documented and it should be obvious that Top Draw Animation don't "produce" My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, they handle the outsourced animation, and no one in their right mind would credit them with being the driving force behind the show. Other animated show articles on TV Tropes have a tendency to exaggerate the contribution of outsourced animation studios. It's important to distinguish who does what. You wouldn't credit Hasbro Studios with MLP Fi M or Nickelodeon with Rugrats, they just foot the bill; since they own the shows, you can call those Hasbro shows or Nickelodeon shows, but that's about as far as it goes. From the other end, you wouldn't credit Top Draw Animation with MLP Fi M or Anivision with Rugrats, they "just" do the final animation stages. The actual artistic and creative drive behind MLP Fi M and Rugrats are Studio B and Klasky-Csupo, who do the character design, set design, scripts, storyboards, and direction.
So next time you see an article that credits Anivision with the huge popularity of Nicktoons in the early 1990s, kindly point out to them that Anivision were an outsourced studio and not a producer.