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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 nex

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]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4Bx2qtkRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4Bx2qtkRM [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc

AdmiralAsshat 4mo ago
Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation.
- a-french-anon 4mo ago
  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.
  - gwern 4mo ago
    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...
    - TimorousBestie 4mo ago
      Looks like an opportunity for you to generate new content for the blog!
      - gwern 4mo ago
        Regrettably, I am not an expert or insider, and cannot generate that particular content. All I can point to is the void at the heart of articles like this, where supply and demand and greed somehow cease to exist.
- re-thc 4mo ago
  > Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation. Not true. Madhouse isn't what it once was. Frieren had lots of freelancers. Also, Kunihiko Hamada (whom worked on Frieren, is 1 of the lead animators, designers) left, citing disappointment.
itissid 4mo ago
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" ?
- asa123 4mo ago
  re: parlor trick Are you referring to: https://github.com/lllyasviel/controlnet https://github.com/lllyasviel/controlnet ?
  - programjames 4mo ago
    They're likely talking about style transfer from a decade ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004
    - fc417fc802 4mo ago
      Nope there are models that do exactly as described, completing or elaborating on line sketches. Google had (has?) at least a couple public demos. https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03477 https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03477
  - TimorousBestie 4mo ago
    Heh, that user’s handle is a reference to the visual novel Fate/Stay Night (which has been adapted into several animes). A cute coincidence.
- numpad0 4mo ago
  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.
utopiah 4mo ago
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.
- bee_rider 4mo ago
  This isn’t banal for me! What’s a good headset for programming these days?
  - waldohatesyou 4mo ago
    +1 to this, I’ve never heard of someone actually doing that. I was hopeful the Vision Pro would become that device but Apple seems to have decided they don’t care about the future.
    - ghaff 4mo ago
      It seems that Apple doesn't care about a device for an audience of nerds/gamers that pretty much no one else is is interested in--given the current technology.
    - utopiah 4mo ago
      There are dozens of us! I clarified a bit in a longer post. I do actually like the Vision Pro... but even though I own one I barely use it. It's a good device but it's just too many hoops for what I do. I find a much affordable Quest, even older generations, with adb and a proper WebXR support (including with AR support, which Apple refuses to implement) fits better my need. I have 0 problem popping a Quest 2 in my backpack without even thinking about it, only protection being a literally piece of cardboard on the lenses. I can work with it anywhere and give demos to total stranger with no worries about them dropping it or heck even running away with it. FWIW I'm also not in the Apple ecosystem so all the wall garden hoops just tire me. I want the device I own to let me do my work. I find that, probably counter-intuitively, super high resolution and refresh rate matter... but only up to a point. As I mentioned in the longer post if you are "just" looking for a monitor with another form factor, sure, maybe it's OK-ish, but to me it's very uninteresting and not worth all the challenges, including social, of having an HMD strapped to your face. Only when it's properly immersive does it shine, and then resolution and refresh rate don't have to be that high to be usable.
Aunche 4mo ago
How much of this is actually drawn in Japan though? A lot of the drawing ends up being outsourced to places with cheaper labor like the Philippines.
- hiccuphippo 4mo ago
  At least the Frieren one was drawn by a single Japanese artist https://x.com/aoumemimei/status/2012695958824407124 https://x.com/aoumemimei/status/2012695958824407124
  - thefifthsetpin 4mo ago
    I didn't realize that they redrew the parts that don't change between frames.
    - c0_0p_ 4mo ago
      They don't usually. In this case they do because they need it to look jittery.
- re-thc 4mo ago
  > How much of this is actually drawn in Japan though? Often the key frames or "important" parts are done in-house with the "mechanical" or boring parts being outsourced.
  - bitwize 4mo ago
    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.
    - autoexec 4mo ago
      > 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.
toyg 4mo ago
It feels like GITS made a stylistic choice because they were criticized for going too much the other way in recent productions (lots of crap 3d/CG).
- hiccuphippo 4mo ago
  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" https://www.cbr.com/ghost-in-the-shell-remake-zero-ai-use/ https://www.cbr.com/ghost-in-the-shell-remake-zero-ai-use/
- bsder 4mo ago
  Indeed. It also looks like it hews VERY closely to Shirow's original manga art style. I think ... a lot of people are going to be disappointed in that. I like it, but some of the characters designs are ... ugly. I believe intentionally so to draw contrast. But there's just no getting around the fact that some of the characters are ugly.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 4mo ago
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.
- nekooooo 4mo ago
  not science saru?
  - anigbrowl 4mo ago
    I like Science Saru too, Mappa happen to be my personal favorites. YMMV.
altano 4mo ago
Ending sequence? Arco was an entirely hand-drawn movie w/ a 93% Rotten Tomato score released this year. Couldn't even break even. I liked it a lot. Seems bleak to me.
- Throwthrowbob 4mo ago
  [dead]
vl 4mo ago
So for new Ghost in the Shell is it a good idea to watch previous ones before watching the new one? If so, it what order? Is movie worth watching at all?
- krapp 4mo ago
  If you have to watch only one GITS series, watch Stand Alone Complex. If you mean the American movie, no. It's trash. The 1995 anime, definitely watch.
- tracerbulletx 4mo ago
  You should definitely watch SAC and both GitS anime movies, but you don't need to watch them before the new anime.
- hiccuphippo 4mo ago
  The new anime is a more faithful retelling of the manga from the start so you can watch it by itself.
- yvdriess 4mo ago
  I can also recommend the manga, the first vol. It's packed with interesting ideas and author footnotes that the 1995 hints at but has no time to elaborate on. E.g. In the movie the protagonist glances an office worker that looks like her. The manga has her explain that she looks like a cheap generic model to hide the fact she is full of expensive specialized government tech. I always think of that scene when I put an expensive work laptop in a ratty backpack.
c0_0p_ 4mo ago
Frieren is fantastic and beautifully done, with only a few scenes that look cheap. But I actually strongly dislike the credit sequence you're talking about, and I'm pretty sure it's rotoscoped.

AdmiralAsshat 4mo ago

Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation.

a-french-anon 4mo ago
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.
- gwern 4mo ago
  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...
  - TimorousBestie 4mo ago
    Looks like an opportunity for you to generate new content for the blog!
    - gwern 4mo ago
      Regrettably, I am not an expert or insider, and cannot generate that particular content. All I can point to is the void at the heart of articles like this, where supply and demand and greed somehow cease to exist.
re-thc 4mo ago
> Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation. Not true. Madhouse isn't what it once was. Frieren had lots of freelancers. Also, Kunihiko Hamada (whom worked on Frieren, is 1 of the lead animators, designers) left, citing disappointment.

itissid 4mo ago

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" ?

asa123 4mo ago
re: parlor trick Are you referring to: https://github.com/lllyasviel/controlnet https://github.com/lllyasviel/controlnet ?
- programjames 4mo ago
  They're likely talking about style transfer from a decade ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004
  - fc417fc802 4mo ago
    Nope there are models that do exactly as described, completing or elaborating on line sketches. Google had (has?) at least a couple public demos. https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03477 https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03477
- TimorousBestie 4mo ago
  Heh, that user’s handle is a reference to the visual novel Fate/Stay Night (which has been adapted into several animes). A cute coincidence.
numpad0 4mo ago
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.

utopiah 4mo ago

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.

bee_rider 4mo ago
This isn’t banal for me! What’s a good headset for programming these days?
- waldohatesyou 4mo ago
  +1 to this, I’ve never heard of someone actually doing that. I was hopeful the Vision Pro would become that device but Apple seems to have decided they don’t care about the future.
  - ghaff 4mo ago
    It seems that Apple doesn't care about a device for an audience of nerds/gamers that pretty much no one else is is interested in--given the current technology.
  - utopiah 4mo ago
    There are dozens of us! I clarified a bit in a longer post. I do actually like the Vision Pro... but even though I own one I barely use it. It's a good device but it's just too many hoops for what I do. I find a much affordable Quest, even older generations, with adb and a proper WebXR support (including with AR support, which Apple refuses to implement) fits better my need. I have 0 problem popping a Quest 2 in my backpack without even thinking about it, only protection being a literally piece of cardboard on the lenses. I can work with it anywhere and give demos to total stranger with no worries about them dropping it or heck even running away with it. FWIW I'm also not in the Apple ecosystem so all the wall garden hoops just tire me. I want the device I own to let me do my work. I find that, probably counter-intuitively, super high resolution and refresh rate matter... but only up to a point. As I mentioned in the longer post if you are "just" looking for a monitor with another form factor, sure, maybe it's OK-ish, but to me it's very uninteresting and not worth all the challenges, including social, of having an HMD strapped to your face. Only when it's properly immersive does it shine, and then resolution and refresh rate don't have to be that high to be usable.

Aunche 4mo ago

How much of this is actually drawn in Japan though? A lot of the drawing ends up being outsourced to places with cheaper labor like the Philippines.

hiccuphippo 4mo ago
At least the Frieren one was drawn by a single Japanese artist https://x.com/aoumemimei/status/2012695958824407124 https://x.com/aoumemimei/status/2012695958824407124
- thefifthsetpin 4mo ago
  I didn't realize that they redrew the parts that don't change between frames.
  - c0_0p_ 4mo ago
    They don't usually. In this case they do because they need it to look jittery.
re-thc 4mo ago
> How much of this is actually drawn in Japan though? Often the key frames or "important" parts are done in-house with the "mechanical" or boring parts being outsourced.
- bitwize 4mo ago
  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.
  - autoexec 4mo ago
    > 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.

toyg 4mo ago

It feels like GITS made a stylistic choice because they were criticized for going too much the other way in recent productions (lots of crap 3d/CG).

hiccuphippo 4mo ago
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" https://www.cbr.com/ghost-in-the-shell-remake-zero-ai-use/ https://www.cbr.com/ghost-in-the-shell-remake-zero-ai-use/
bsder 4mo ago
Indeed. It also looks like it hews VERY closely to Shirow's original manga art style. I think ... a lot of people are going to be disappointed in that. I like it, but some of the characters designs are ... ugly. I believe intentionally so to draw contrast. But there's just no getting around the fact that some of the characters are ugly.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 4mo ago

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.

nekooooo 4mo ago
not science saru?
- anigbrowl 4mo ago
  I like Science Saru too, Mappa happen to be my personal favorites. YMMV.

altano 4mo ago

Ending sequence? Arco was an entirely hand-drawn movie w/ a 93% Rotten Tomato score released this year. Couldn't even break even. I liked it a lot. Seems bleak to me.

Throwthrowbob 4mo ago
[dead]

vl 4mo ago

So for new Ghost in the Shell is it a good idea to watch previous ones before watching the new one? If so, it what order? Is movie worth watching at all?

krapp 4mo ago
If you have to watch only one GITS series, watch Stand Alone Complex. If you mean the American movie, no. It's trash. The 1995 anime, definitely watch.
tracerbulletx 4mo ago
You should definitely watch SAC and both GitS anime movies, but you don't need to watch them before the new anime.
hiccuphippo 4mo ago
The new anime is a more faithful retelling of the manga from the start so you can watch it by itself.
yvdriess 4mo ago
I can also recommend the manga, the first vol. It's packed with interesting ideas and author footnotes that the 1995 hints at but has no time to elaborate on. E.g. In the movie the protagonist glances an office worker that looks like her. The manga has her explain that she looks like a cheap generic model to hide the fact she is full of expensive specialized government tech. I always think of that scene when I put an expensive work laptop in a ratty backpack.

c0_0p_ 4mo ago

Frieren is fantastic and beautifully done, with only a few scenes that look cheap. But I actually strongly dislike the credit sequence you're talking about, and I'm pretty sure it's rotoscoped.