Employment In France’s Animation Industry Hit A Record High In 2019, But Wages Stagnant

Each year, professionals from France’s animation industry gather in Angoulême for the Rencontres Animation Formation. The convention marks the launch of an annual report compiled by Audiens for Animfrance, which represents the country’s animation producers.

This year’s report was presented at the convention on Wednesday. As ever, it provides a wealth of data on employment in France’s animation industry (one of Europe’s biggest). The research covers the year 2019, and as such does not reflect the impact of the coronavirus.

We’ve combed through the report — here are our five key points that show the country’s animation industry is stable but not experiencing major growth as it did a decade ago:

• Employment is at a record high. The report counted around 7,500 declared workers in 2019 — a few hundred more than in 2018. More than 86% of them are on fixed-term contracts.
• Women are better represented than ever. In 2019, more than 2,700 women were working in the industry, making up a record 38% of the workforce. The major job categories with the highest proportion of women were distribution (76%) and production (65%). The categories that employed the least females were “development and cultivation of pipelines and networks” (9%) and vfx (25%).
• Wages are not keeping up with inflation. In 2019, the average gross pay to full-time workers was €64,600 (USD$78,350) for executives and €24,600 (USD$29,836) for other roles. Compare these numbers with 2012, when the figures were €62,500 and €24,200 respectively. They have fluctuated little in the intervening years.
• The total number of animation companies isn’t increasing. For the past five years, between 130 and 140 businesses have responded to Audiens’s survey each year. In 2019, there were 133. But the preceding decade saw rapid growth: in 2004, the number was 67 — only half what it is today.
• The industry is becoming less centralized. Paris still dominates, accounting for half of all studios, 59% of the workforce, and 67% of the industry payroll in 2019. However, those percentages are all down from what they were ten years previously. The fastest-growing regions are Charente, home to animation hub Angoulême, and Hérault.

The full report can be read as a PDF (in French) here, with a summary (also in French) available here.

Image at top: the 2019 French feature “The Swallows of Kabul.”