Not everything is bleak. The ending sequence for Frieren season 2 was entirely hand drawn with colored pencils[0] and the new Ghost in the Shell (coming out next month) is also hand drawn[1].
Ending sequencesa re kind of artistic showpieces, but when you get down to it it's 1-2 minutes of special animation for PR purposes. Most of Frieren is about whimsical character moments over very generic backgrounds (also true of the manga); people love it for the bittersweet characters and trope-skewing gags. I love the show but it's not the best example of technique or visual innovation.
Mappa is imho the current heavyweight studio, doing everything from spectacular action setpieces with bold visual experimentation in mainstream stories like Jujutsu Kaitsen to the extremely labor-intensive stylization of Dorohedoro.
Even if we're still far from the golden age, Dandadan (Science SARU; though I've heard the sheer effort bankrupted them) and the recent Witch Hat Atelier (Bug Films) are quite nice to behold.
Some modern romcoms like Kaguya-sama (A-1 Pictures) and The Dangers in My Heart (Shin-Ei) were nicely done too.
Things are obviously not going in the right direction, but the current accelerated fall in quality the consumer sees is more influenced by general unwillingness to spend and/or take risks from bean counting production committees.
The phrase 'production committee' appears only once in OP, with no discussion of the implications or how they work or how they change things compared to TV network monoposonies. Disappointingly superficial. It just repeats a lot of random salary or wage or working hour statistics and anecdotes without ever - puzzling for a piece in the Economist! - asking how this market operates, why it keeps going like this, and why rational self-interested actors avoid raising animator salaries or investing more in them or even increasing headcount, under circumstances like the current boom, which Econ 101 would predict results in a corresponding boom in animator populations and salaries...
Outsourcing is only good to a point, because how can you keep a local supply of key animators, story board artists, character/BG designers if you don't have a pool of local talent working up the ranks to pull from? It saves money to outsource and pay low wages to freelance workers, but that also means the native talent doing in-betweens and fixing the outsourced work that comes back can burn out or quit because of not being able to afford to eat and house themselves. Even outsourcing is kind of a problem because ultimately it means that for all the money being made in animation very little of it is going to the animators. Nobody is creating the best art when they're treated like a robot on an assembly line and worried about paying their bills.
Japan has to decide if they want to invest in their animation industry or if they'd rather let it die out by killing off the local talent while training animators in other countries to one day replace them.
I wonder why the use of AI to do in-between frames is not more embraced by artists and professionals. It sounds like a perfect use case for the technology: pure scutwork that would have been farmed out to sweatshops in a cheap-labor country anyway.
> I wonder why the use of AI to do in-between frames is not more embraced by artists and professionals.
It's been being used for years. It saves time, but ultimately the results aren't good enough to replace humans. I don't expect that it ever will be. AI is incapable of creativity and sometimes it'll be faster and easier for an artist to just draw what they envision than it is to tell a computer what they want, have the artless software do it badly, and then have the artist tweak and fix the result until it matches what they wanted in the first place.
Neat, I didn't know for Ghost in the Shell, I'll be watching it in few weeks then! Thanks for sharing.
PS: so weird to watch the trailer while working in XR. I never imagined as a kid I'd be programming in a headset but now it's banal. I even buy 2nd hand HMDs for 100 bucks. Weird times.
Noob Question: There is a famous parlor trick with generative networks(I think it was GANs but it might be some kind of diffusion based network.), you start with a canvas and draw a stick figure of what you want and the generative network draws the rest of it.
Do AI platform companies actually pre-train networks to do the same for hand drawn artists?
Related question: If they do train them to do that, are there any that train people for the "reverse": learn how to draw with paper and pencil by showing techniques only i.e only the "what" but not the "how" ?
AI image generators readily take partial images and run in a super-resolution mode(they are always in that mode). They can take a stick figure or a screenshot or anything you want. They prefer to have text description of the image, but that can be generated too if needed.
It seems Western AI platform companies generally don't prefer an architecture with multimodal non-literal inputs to closely follow intents of users, over ones based on pure literal descriptions. It was some Chinese guys that first did works in that direction. There appear to be psychological resistance to the idea of non-literal forms of thoughts among Western entities, as if there's some literal-text superiority theory deep down in people's minds. Others like researchers from Chinese labs probably don't have that.
Artists' responses to generative fill-ins are lukewarm at best, if the obvious responses were put aside. AIs tend to treat artists' intentions as deviation from the mean and tend to steer image into less interesting, more noisy directions. That negates potential productivity gains.
I don't think there's any AI trained to generate ideal strokes from prompts so to teach someone, or datasets that could be used for it, esp. with current climate regarding AI image generation - the bridge between AI and artists of many kinds are burning white hot, nothing is going through there.
It's actually a stance against the use of AI in the industry: "We want to express that this is a hand-drawn show made by humans to highlight the humanity in the story"
Mappa is imho the current heavyweight studio, doing everything from spectacular action setpieces with bold visual experimentation in mainstream stories like Jujutsu Kaitsen to the extremely labor-intensive stylization of Dorohedoro.