Animation Studio Toei Wants to Use AI for Future Productions

If you watch anime, particularly of the shonen variety, you likely know Toei Animation. The studio is best known for adapting popular manga like Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon, and it’s got plenty of work coming out. When those series and films release, some may have been made with artificial intelligence. In Toei’s recently published financial briefing for 2024-2025’s fiscal year, one slide reveals the studio’s invested an undisclosed sum of money into Preferred Networks, a Japanese company with “cutting-edge AI technologies.” The two hope to “co-develop new business opportunities and improve the efficiency and quality of our production, capitalizing on synergies between AI and animation production technologies.” Toei is specifically eyeing AI usage for storyboards in productions, along with coloring (and color specification), backgrounds, and in-betweens. Use cases cited include having the technology automatically correcting in-between or specifying and picking the correct colors, and ... Read full article.