The internet’s latest animation discourse, pitting Invincible against Jujutsu Kaisen, is a perfect example of how outrage without facts is the thing that sells the most on social media.
Numbers, when stripped of context, can fuel wildly misleading comparisons. Our politicians are doing it, and it is not a stretch to imagine that a blue-tick Twitter account would do the same to farm engagement. A viral post suggesting that Invincible looks worse despite costing $2.5 million per episode, while Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3 supposedly costs just $150,000 per episode, has been making the rounds on social media.
Fans are confused on why ‘INVINCIBLE’ has worse animation than ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ with 10x the animation budget.
— That COMICBOOK Guy (@Culture3ase) March 29, 2026
$150K animation vs. $2.5 Million animation pic.twitter.com/9PjKH4HGA5
Naturally, the initial graphic has since been reposted countless times across social media, because nobody bothers to fact-check anything these days. Not only that, but people have been praising the Japanese anime industry for keeping the budgets in check because capitalism has apparently deluded the masses into thinking that paying your animators the bare minimum is wrong.
First of all, that $150K figure is outdated to the point of absurdity. Anime may have operated at those budgets over a decade ago, but modern, high-profile shonen productions—especially something as demanding as Jujutsu Kaisen—typically average a price tag of $500K per episode, often higher when production values are pushed. Even then, those “lower” costs are sustained by systemic issues: aggressive outsourcing to Southeast Asia and South Korea, and, more troublingly, the chronic underpayment of animators.
According to a recent report by the Nippon Anime Film Culture Association (NAFCA), animators in Japan earn shockingly low wages, around $7 an hour on average. The data also showed a median of 225 working hours per month. At an eight-hour workday, that amounts to roughly 28 days of work. At the extreme end, some reported 336 hours, equivalent to 42 days in a single month. Compared to Japan’s overall average of 162.3 monthly working hours, as cited by NAFCA, these figures highlight the particularly harsh conditions within the anime industry.
Meanwhile, in North America, entry-level animators typically earn between $30 and $35 per hour, while senior animators earn between $60 and $70 before taxes. They also receive benefits such as healthcare, vacation time, and sick leave, while working roughly 140 to 150 hours per month.
The cost gap makes much more sense when you realize that anime’s visual dynamism doesn’t come from magical efficiency; it often comes at the expense of poor working conditions and exploitation of these artists, who are the backbone of this industry.
Then there’s the structural difference in how these shows are made. Invincible isn’t a 22-minute weekly anime; it regularly delivers episodes approaching an hour in length. A single season of Invincible can effectively equal nearly 20 standard anime episodes in runtime alone.
Add to that a star-studded (and expensive) voice cast and creator Robert Kirkman’s push for a near-annual release schedule, and it is quite apparent why the show can’t match the hyper-polished, extremely detailed and dynamic “sakuga bursts” of Jujutsu Kaisen, which often takes years between seasons.
None of this is meant to deny that anime often outperforms Western TV animation in sheer fluidity, direction and extravaganza. But calling Invincible “badly animated” is simply reductive. The series literally made a spoof in Season 2 about how it allocates its resources strategically, prioritizing major story beats and action-heavy set pieces—many of which, particularly in the final two episodes of Season 3, are genuinely remarkable and deliver on the hype and the spectacle that the source material demands.
In the end, these are two entirely different animation ecosystems, but quite often, something being “cheaper” is probably a result of a system that isn’t paying its artists nearly enough.
Source: NAFCA.