It’s been more than twenty years since Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy used the newly made Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment (MASSIVE) software to create and animated armies of orcs and elves. MASSIVE famously took much of the misery out of big battle scenes, generating thousands of sprites that would battle among themselves. Well, they were supposed to. Early prototypes had trouble getting the sprites to fight each other – they had to literally make them more stupid and foolhardy before they’d get into it.

Regardless, MASSIVE had plenty of other obvious uses, and as processing power ramped up, would be purloined by Mamoru Hosoda to generate schools of self-aware fish in Mirai. Soon after, Yuhei Sakuragi would use similar “deep learning” algorithms to get the crowd scenes in his Relative Worlds to effectively animate themselves.

Such applications were just the tip of the iceberg. As demonstrated recently by Dwango’s Yuichi Yagi, now we have A.I. software packages that can be trusted to generate the in-between animation that goes between key frames, putting a big chunk of the animation business out of work. A.I. software like DALL·E 2 can now take a photograph and turn it into a 3D environment, or take a portrait and make it come to life. It can even guess what might be off-screen or out of frame, like predictive text, but for images. When faced with such leaps in abilities, it’s not hard to see that the next generation of animation labourers could be reduced to “human fallback” – the supervisor minions who pop their heads in every now and then to click an approval or reject a bodged model, based on a Stable Diffusion scraping of Every Anime Ever Made.

But how long will we have to wait before A.I. worms its way into other areas? Surely there’s already enough content to process, and expectations low enough in certain genres, for an A.I script writer to plot out an entire anime show? Feed a hundred light novels into a hopper, and see if the Plototron 3000 comes up with a world-beating idea for… I don’t know, a teenager in another world with a sentient smartphone.

I’m not one of the doomsayers, yet. Yuhei Sakuragi estimated that human fallback was required on almost half the working hours of his deep-learning scenes. “The conclusion was that you should probably aim for 50 or 60 per cent of completion, then shape it with human hands afterwards,” he said. Computer animation itself was once decried as a poison that would destroy anime… instead it made it anew, and gave us unexpected talents like Makoto Shinkai.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #227, 2023. A month after this article first appeared Rootport’s Cyberpunk Peach John was hailed as the “first manga drawn by an A.I.”

“Basically, if you’re just drawing stuff, there’s no particular inconvenience. I could have a meeting on the phone and send stuff off by courier. There was no producer to worry about because all we had to do was draw. It was fine. But once you start working as a character designer, suddenly you find that you can’t just ask: ‘What about this?” So after I’d finished GaoGaiGar, Betterman and Brigadoon, I thought it was time to go to the source and actually move to Tokyo. So that’s what I did.”

Over at All the Anime, I write an obituary for Code Geass designer Takahiro Kimura.

“Kyoto has been successfully digitised; 2027 has been ingested to such a degree that it can be run in Naomi’s own future as a simulation indistinguishable from the real world itself. In effect, his whole world has been carefully saved and archived, which is good news for his future self, because Ruri Ichigyo, the girl he fancies, is fated to be put in a life-threatening coma in just a few weeks.”

Over at All the Anime, I write up Tomohiko Ito’s Hello World.

“In a medium notorious for shots and beauty-passes that go on for way too long in order to amortise the costs of set construction, Hori’s camerawork is brisk and choppy, never outstaying his welcome in any particular scene, deftly creating the illusion that he is snatching his footage on the fly, not painstakingly building it one frame at a time, paltry seconds of motion taking hours to create.”

Over at All the Anime, I watch Takahide Hori’s stop-motion future feature Junk Head.

“Denison devotes entire sections to Ghibli’s short films and advertising contracts, many of which will be completely new to some self-proclaimed fans, despite a cumulative running-time equivalent to that of a whole other movie. These include, for example, Hayao Miyazaki’s nostalgic advert for House Foods, made in 2003 and unseen abroad.”

Over at All the Anime, I review Rayna Denison’s new book, Studio Ghibli: An Industrial History.

“It’s not quite some teenager’s fan fiction thrown up online and then stuck between covers as IP bait to lure in an anime company, but that’s largely because I can see that an editor has been near this: the first chapter is the work of a much better author than the second, as if the experience of writing the book has already taught Nahuse some tricks of the trade, and he snuck back to write a better opening. Either that, or he had his whole life to write chapter one, but chapter two came swiftly afterwards, against a deadline.”

Over at All the Anime, I review the first volume of Nahuse’s Rebuild World.

As if the acting world needed any more drama, Hellena Taylor, the voice of Bayonetta in the games and anime spin-off, was made to re-audition for her own part in Bayonetta 3, and then given such a low-ball offer that she walked.

Taylor is by no means the first actor to find out she is replaceable. When he was shunted aside for Kiefer Sutherland in the Metal Gear Solid franchise, David Hayter was similarly annoyed. He, too, was asked to read for the part that had previously thought of as his, on the grounds that maybe he had “aged out” of the role. Such a concept would be particularly insulting to Taylor, since, without getting into specifics about a lady’s age, she is still seven years younger than Atsuko Tanaka, the Japanese voice of Bayonetta (and Ghost in the Shell’s Motoko Kusanagi), who is still in the role.

In an online video post, Taylor noted that the Bayonetta franchise had made $450 million, “not including merchandise.” She enumerated her various places of training and education, a total of seven and a half years at drama schools, and observed that the final offer for her to provide all the lines, shouts, and barks for the next game in the series, was a buy-out of $4,000 – no royalties, just guild minimum for a single eight-hour day.

What’s in play here is the timeless argument over whether voice actors are above- or below-the-line talent. Some of you, and some producers, might be thinking that all you’re buying is some guy to come in off the street and yell a bit. On my first dubbing job, after some idiot (me) sent home one of the actresses early, we had to rope in a runner, literally drag her away from making coffee, to shout “THE TOTEMS HAVE COMBINED!” It wasn’t Shakespeare.

But for the last generation, voice acting has become part of a media mix. Certainly in anime, and also in games, it provides a chunk of the content that magazines write about. It provides bodies to be onstage at conventions; human beings, as stand-ins for cartoon characters, who can sign your video boxes and hold forth with anecdotes. The industry has spent 20 years trilling about this actor or that actor bringing their talent to a role – their voice and wisdom and (sometimes) physicality in motion capture. And if $4,000 still sounds like a lot of money to you, remember that might be the only work someone sees in six months.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #225, 2022.

“Shiranui is trying, really, really hard to be a good person… so hard, in fact, that he risks dragging other people into his own self-generated drama.”

Over at All the Anime, I review the manga Natsume & Natsume by Shunsuke Sorato.