In 2016, Studio Ghibli co-founder and director Hayao Miyazaki, responsible for beloved anime classics like Princess Mononoke and Kiki’s Delivery Service, made headlines around the world for his reaction to an AI animation program. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all,” Miyazaki told the software engineers who came to show their creation to him. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” A half-decade later, artificial intelligence and the potential role it could play in anime productions is once again in the spotlight.
This week, Netflix shared Dog and Boy, an animated short the streaming giant described as an “experimental effort” to address the anime industry’s ongoing labor shortage. “We used image generation technology for the background images of all three-minute video cuts,” said Netflix Japan of the project on Twitter, according to a machine translation. The short is touching but was immediately controversial. As Motherboard points out, many Twitter users accused Netflix of using AI to avoid paying human artists.
Others took issue with how Netflix and Wit Studio, the company that produced the short, credited those who worked on Dog and Boy. As you can see at the end of the video, human animators were not only involved in the creation of the short’s backgrounds, but they also revised the AI’s work. However, the background designer is listed as “AI (+Human).” The credits go on to list Rinna Inc, an AI artwork company, and a handful of AI researchers.
Many artists worry about the potential for AI to devalue their work, but that concern is particularly acute among anime creators. The labor shortages Netflix points to are the result of unsustainable labor practices that see the majority of Japan’s animation studios depend on essentially unpaid freelancers to complete much of the work that makes anime possible.
According to data from the Japanese Animation Creators Association published in 2018, in-between animators, the workers who draw the frames that make a scene look fluid, earn about ¥200 (or less than $2) per drawing. With many frames taking more than an hour to produce, the average in-between animator can expect to make about ¥1.1 million (or $10,000) per year. For context, in 2019, Japan’s poverty line was at ¥2.2 million.
There was a time in the last century when we, quite foolishly, believed incineration to be a superior means of waste disposal than landfills. And, for decades, many of America's most disadvantaged have been paying for those decisions with with their lifespans. South Baltimore's Curtis Bay neighborhood, for example, is home to two medical waste incinerators and an open-air coal mine. It's ranked in the 95th percentile for hazardous waste and boasts among the highest rates of asthma and lung disease in the entire country.
The city's largest trash incinerator is the Wheelabrator–BRESCO, which burns through 2,250 tons of garbage a day. It has been in operation since the 1970s, belching out everything from mercury and lead to hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and chromium into the six surrounding working-class neighborhoods and the people who live there. In 2011, students from Benjamin Franklin High School began to push back against the construction of a new incinerator, setting off a decade-long struggle that pitted high school and college students against the power of City Hall.
In Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore, Dr. Nicole Fabricant, Professor of Anthropology at Towson University in Maryland, chronicles the students' participatory action research between 2011 and 2021, organizing and mobilizing their communities to fight back against a century of environmental injustice, racism and violence in one of the nation's most polluted cities. In the excerpt below, Fabricant discusses the use of art — specifically that of crankies — in movement building.
Making Connections: Fairfield Houses and Environmental Displacement
As the students developed independent investigations, they discovered what had happened in the campaigns against toxins that preceded their own struggle against the incinerator. They learned that the Fairfield neighborhood, before being relocated to its current site, had been situated near to where Energy Answers was planning to build their trash-to-energy incinerator. At the time of the students’ investigations, this area was an abandoned industrial site surrounded by heavy diesel truck traffic, polluting chemical and fertilizer industries, and abandoned brownfield sites.
Students read that the City had built basic infrastructure in Wagner’s Point, the all-white (though poor and white ethnic, to be clear) community on the peninsula in the 1950s, nearly thirty years before doing so in Fairfield, which was located alongside Wagner’s Point but all (or almost all) Black. As Destiny reiterated to me in the Fall of 2019:
Wagner’s Point was predominantly white and Fairfield predominantly Black, but both communities were company towns, living in poverty, working in dangerous hazardous conditions, and forced to live in a toxic environment.... On the surface, this history can be read as a story of two communities, different in culture and race, facing the issue together. But this ignores the issue of racism that divided the two communities. For instance, Fairfield did not get access to plumbing... until well into the 1970s. This is an example of structural racism. It is also a story not told by our history books.
The students talked in small groups about systemic and structural racism and unfair housing policies. They investigated the evacuation of Fairfield Housing. They learned that former residents were forcibly relocated to public housing and were offered $22,500 for renters and up too $5,250 per household. They also received moving costs of up to $1,500 per household. When 14 households remained in Fairfield a decade later, then-Mayor Kurt Schmoke stated that he would prefer to move all residents out of Fairfield, but the city did not have any money for relocation. This history provoked Free Your Voice youth to think beyond their community to how structural racism shaped citywide decisions and policies.
Despite attempts to integrate school systems in the 1950s and the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s intended, specifically, to mitigate racism in housing policies, the provision of public education and the regulation of housing practices remained uneven in the 1970s (and into the present). Students learned that in 1979 a CSX railroad car carrying nine thousand gallons of highly concentrated sulfuric acid overturned and the Fairfield Homes public housing complex was temporarily evacuated. That same year, they read, an explosion at the British Petroleum oil tank, located on Fairfield Peninsula, set off a seven-alarm fire. All of this led the students to deeper inquiry.
Figuring out the ways in which structural racism shaped contemporary ideas about people, bodies, and space is something that Destiny often referred to when speaking publicly. Destiny explained that studying “history allowed us to see our community in a way that gave us the ability to build power or collective strength. So, how do you confront this history, this marketplace?” Building power within the school was about “re-education,” she said, but it was also about rebuilding social relationships across the community and helping residents to understand the structural conditions and histories sustaining inequities that others (especially white others) tried to explain away using racist stereotypes and tropes (e.g., Black youth as “thugs”; “they’re poor because they’re lazy”). These tropes subtly and not so subtly suggested racial and cultural inferiority.
As a group, the students worked to establish a presence in the community and to create spontaneous spaces for dialogue and discussion. They attended a Fairfield reunion in Curtis Bay Park during the summer of 2013, where approximately 150 former Fairfield Homes residents gathered to celebrate their history, reminisce, and have a cookout together. Gathered on the grass next to the Curtis Bay Recreation Center, former residents reminisced about what life was like in the projects. At one point, an elder participant shared with Destiny, “Fairfield was the Cadillac of housing projects.... We were all a family, we took care of one another.” The Free Your Voice students engaged with living history as they listened and learned.
For many of the students, the combined processes of reading texts and listening to elder residents’ stories moved them from numbness to awareness. Being able to discuss what they learned in sophisticated conversations with their peers and the experts they sought out helped to build their confidence as activists and adult interlocutors.
Arts and Performance in Movement Building: The Crankie
While analysis and study were key to building change campaigns, the students also recognized that building a sociopolitical movement of economically disadvantaged people required more than mobilizing bodies. To be effective, they were going to have to move hearts and minds.
In 2014, Free Your Voice students decided to strengthen the emotional and relationship building aspects of their campaign by adopting art forms, including performance and storytelling, into their communication efforts. Destiny began a speech she delivered at The Worker Justice Center human rights dinner in 2015 by quoting W.E.B. Dubois: “‘Art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its handkerchiefs, that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too’” (Watford 2015). Art — in the form of a vintage performance genre known as “the crankie” and rap songs — became a tool the students utilized to tell their stories to much broader publics and to boost emotional connections with their allies. Performances particularly allowed youth to be creative and inventive. Their productions were often malleable. Sometimes, Free Your Voice youth would rewrite a script based on audience feedback. As a result, their performances were often improvisational, and they invited residents to be a part of the storytelling. This allowed the student-performers to develop strong narrative structures and especially realistic characters.
Not only did students do art, but they also invited artists, including performers, to join the Dream Team to broaden both the appeal and impact of the Stop the Incinerator campaign. One artist at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Janette Simpson, spoke to me at length about the genesis of her commitment to Free Your Voice’s organizing, and how that commitment deepened and extended her work with other campaigns originating with The Worker Justice Center. Free Your Voice students approached Simpson, with their teacher Daniel Murphy acting as their mediator, about incorporating her work in theater into their campaign.12 They sent her a recent report on the environmental history of the peninsula and asked that she read it. That report became the hook that convinced Simpson to collaborate:
I had been thinking about how art and artists can serve social movements, and how artists also have agency in the making of their artwork. Or maybe thinking about autonomy. Free Your Voice youth suggested I read the Diamond report, which was written by a team of researchers from the University of Maryland Law School. I remember being like, Wow! What a story! All these visuals came to my mind... like the guano factories, the ships, these agricultural communities, this Black community versus the white community... the relationship to the water and the relationship to the city. So I decided I would try to illustrate a version of that report in a way. Like, what did people look like in 1800s, and what were they wearing? ... Then I realized that this is not my history, who am I to tell someone else’s story? I need to think more symbolically, and then it came to me to write this illustrative history as a fable or an allegory.
Which is what she did, alongside Terrel Jones (whose childhood lived experiences I detailed in chapter 2). Terrel and Simpson created a crankie, an old storytelling art form popular in the nineteenth century that includes a long, illustrated scroll wound onto two spools. The spools are loaded into a box that has a viewing screen and the scroll is then hand-cranked, hence the name “crankie.” While the story is told, a tune is played or a song is sung. Terrel and Simpson created a show for the anti-incinerator campaign that was performed throughout the city for audiences of all ages and walks of life. The Holey Land, as their show was titled, was an allegory about the powerful connection between people and the place they call home. In this tale, the Peninsula People and the magic in their land are threatened when a stranger with a tall hat and a shovel shows up with big ideas for “improving” their community. As storybook images scroll past the viewing screen, the vibrant and colorful pictures of a peninsula rich in natural resources, including orange and pink fish, slowly get usurped by those of the man with the shovel building his factories, and the Peninsula People are left to ponder the fate of their land. The story ends with a surprising twist, and a hopeful message about a community’s ability to determine their own future.
Netflix's penchant for live-action manga remakes isn't going away any time soon. The streaming service has revealed that it's partnering with Legendary Entertainment on a live action My Hero Academia movie. Anime and manga adaptation veteran Shinsuke Sato (Alice in Borderland, Bleach) will both direct and executive produce, while Obi-Wan Kenobi's Joby Harold is writing the screenplay.
The manga and the anime it fostered both revolve around Deku, a boy who aches to join the UA High School and become a superhero despite missing the natural powers that most humans have by that point. Both the manga and the still-running anime offshoot have been successful, with the manga racking up over 65 million sales so far.
There's no mention of casting or a release window for the Netflix project. Toho, which handles the anime, will distribute the movie to Japanese theatres. As IndieWireexplains, this comes four years after Legendary said a movie was in the works.
As with earlier adaptations, Netflix has multiple incentives to create a My Hero Academia title. It's tapping into a large fanbase, sometimes for anime productions it already offers. This also gives it a way to reel in customers who would otherwise stick to anime-centric rivals like Crunchyroll, which recently lowered prices in some countries.
Whether or not it'll be worth watching is another matter. Netflix doesn't have the best track record for live action takes on manga and anime. The Cowboy Bebop series misunderstood its source material and generally struggled despite a top-tier cast and intriguing premise. There's also the question of the format. A movie doesn't allow as much room for story development as an episodic show, so My Hero Academia may have to rush through the narrative.
Flickr is adding a new virtual photography category to help users find and categorize images they capture in their favorite video games. Previously, the platform only offered three content categories: photos, illustration and art, and screenshots. The company notes the third and final one didn’t quite meet the needs of one of its fastest-growing communities, which is why it’s making the change.
“By putting your work into one of these categories, you can use filters to limit your search results by interest,” Flickr explains in a blog post spotted by PetaPixel. “For instance, virtual photographers will be able to filter by ‘virtual photography’ while conducting site-wide searches if they only want to see that kind of work, while avoiding real-world photography or other art and illustration.”
The addition is an acknowledgment of just how popular virtual photography has become. We’re at the point where most games either ship with a photo mode at launch or the feature is added after release. Many developers have also started to frequently share the best captures from their communities. For instance, Hideo Kojima retweets Death Stranding photo mode images almost every week, as do studios like CD Projekt Red and Guerrilla Games.
What happens when animation geeks get the greenlight to produce whatever they want? You get Netflix's Love, Death and Robots, an anthology series that's meant to remind viewers that cartoons aren't just for kids. You'd think that would be a foregone conclusion in 2022, decades after anime has become mainstream, Adult Swim's irreverent comedies took over dorm rooms, and just about network/streaming platform has their own "edgy" animated series (Arcane and Big Mouth on Netflix, Invincible on Amazon Prime).
Still, it's all too common to see the medium being diminished. At the Oscars this year, the best animated feature award was introduced as something entirely meant for kids, prompting the filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), to demand that Hollywood elevate the genre instead. Even Pixar's library of smart and compelling films still aren't seen as "adult" stories.
Love, Death and Robots, which just released its third season on Netflix, feels like a crash course in the unlimited storytelling potential of animation. It bounces from a cute entry about robots exploring the remnants of human civilization (the series' first sequel, 3 Robots: Exit Strategies, written by sci-fi author John Scalzi), to a near-silent, visually lush game of cat and mouse between a deaf soldier and a mythical siren (Jibaro), to a harrowing tale of whalers being boarded by a giant man-eating crab (Bad Traveling, the first animated project directed by series co-creator David Fincher).
Jennifer Yuh Nelson, supervising director for Love, Death and Robots, tells Engadget that the animation industry has certainly made progress when it comes to telling more mature stories. "Everyone that works in animation has been talking about trying to get more adult things done because it's [about] the freedom of exploring the whole spectrum of storytelling," she said. "You're not trying to do things for a certain age group."
Netflix
But, she says, animators were also told the audience for mature projects wasn't necessarily there. "I think it takes a show like [this] to prove that it can [work], and that makes the whole business and the whole company town basically look around and say, 'Oh, this is a viable thing that people actually want to see.’"
Series co-creator Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) also points to the power of video games, which has been telling mature narratives with interactive animation for decades. That's another industry that was initially seen as toys for kids, but has matured significantly with rich storytelling from indie projects, like Kentucky Route Zero, to big-budget blockbusters like The Last of Us. Games and animation are practically evolving together, with audiences demanding more complex ideas and creators who were raised on earlier generations of those mediums. You don't get to the excellent Disney+ remake of DuckTales, or Sony's recent God of War, without a fondness for the simple joys of the originals.
"Animation has grown so much and reflects a taste of the people making it and the people that are watching it," Nelson says. "It's a generational shift. People demand a certain level of complexity in their story, and so it's not princess movies anymore."
With every season of Love, Death and Robots, Nelson says that she and Miller are focused on finding stories that evoke a sense of "nerd joy." There's no overarching theme, instead they look out for projects with scope, emotion and a potential to be visually interesting. And while none of the shorts have been turned into standalone series or films yet, Nelson notes that's a possibility, especially since some authors have explored other ideas within those worlds. (I'd certainly love to see those three quirky robots poking fun at humanity for an entire season.)
The series also serves as a showcase for a variety of animation techniques. Some shorts show off meticulously crafted CG, while others like Bad Traveling use motion capturing to preserve the intricacies of an actor's movement or face. Jerome Chen, the director of military horror short In Vaulted Halls Entombed, relied on Unreal, which makes his piece seem like a cut-scene from a game I desperately want to play. And there's still plenty of love for more traditional 2D techniques, like the wonderfully bloody Kill Team Kill (directed by Nelson, a far cry from her playful Kung Fu Panda sequels).
Netflix
"The tech doesn't replace the art, but the experimentation allows these studios to find ways of doing things better," Nelson said. "[The show gives] freedom for all these different studios to try their own language."
Miller has a slightly different view, saying on some level it's like "tech is the art and they somehow mixed together." While he agrees with Nelson, who was quick to point out "artists can make art with a stick," Miller said you'll still need a certain level of sophisticated technology to create photorealistic stories.
The great thing about an anthology series like Love Death and Robots? Both of those philosophies can co-exist while equally demonstrating the power of animation.
For the first time in its storied history, New York City’s annual Obie Awards will consider virtual, digital and audio productions, the event’s organizer, the American Theater Wing, announced on Friday. The move comes in response to the challenges Off- and Off-Off-Broadway artists and groups have had to face through the coronavirus pandemic. Due to some of the strictest lockdown restrictions in the country, many New York theater companies turned to online streaming to survive.
“We wanted to make sure that the work that did happen was eligible,” Heather Hitchens, the CEO and president of the American Theater Wing, told The New York Times. “The Obies respond to the season, and to the evolving nature and rhythms of theater.”
The American Theater Wing hasn’t decided on an exact date for this year’s show, but Hitchens told The Times she expects it will take place sometime in November and involve an in-person presentation. In addition to expanding the mandate of the Obies to honor online productions, judges will consider projects staged between July 1st, 2020 and August 31st, 2022. That's because the most recent Obie Awards took place in 2020. The American Theater Wing is also responsible for the Tony Awards, and 2022 will mark the first year that the organization will have staged the Obies on its own.
It’s hard to say what the future will bring, particularly in the middle of a constantly changing pandemic, but the American Theater Wing’s decision to consider online productions could open the door for the Obies to consider shows staged outside of New York City.
Adobe Fresco has given artists and designers the ability to draw and paint with lifelike digital materials for two years now. Last fall, the company expanded the app to iPhone, but this year the updates are much more robust. With the additions announced today at its annual Adobe Max design conference, the company gives its free-to-use drawing and painting app handy tools that expand how and what artists are able to create.
First, Adobe is adding motion to Fresco. This gives artists and designers the option to add timelines and motion frames to individual layers. The company explains that this allows you to assign specific movement to each element. Adobe says you can also draw paths for objects to follow and the goal is to keep things simple so the concept of motion is approachable for all skill levels.
Next, the company is adding reference layers to Fresco. This should help speed up the process when you need to add color to line art. Once you set the reference layer, you can begin working on a separate layer for fills. Fresco will still recognize the lines on the original layer without applying edits to it. This will work if your reference layer is vector or pixels and keeps your original drawing intact.
Adobe/Kyle Webster
Vector brushes are already available in Fresco, but Adobe is expanding that library to include a new set with "jitter." Basically, these brushes will help you quickly give drawings texture. Lines are still sharp, but there's variation in the stroke for a more naturally drawn look. As always, vector brushes are infinitely scalable and can be combined with pixel brushes in the same Fresco file.
Lastly, Adobe is helping you keep your perspective correct with new guides. Perspective grids will help you keep illustrations looking realistic when it's time to add depth. You can set vanishing points anywhere, even off the the artboard, and lines will snap to the grids as you work. Adobe says this should allow artists and designers to focus more on art and less on the heavy lifting.
Adobe Fresco is free for anyone to use on iPhone, iPad and Windows without a Creative Cloud subscription. There are more tools available if you do pay for Adobe's apps, like access to an expanded library of brushes.
Google's Pocket Gallery came along in 2018, allowing users with AR-enabled smartphones to see artworks by the likes of Vermeer and Klimt, even pieces normally not accessible to the public. Now, Google is opening up the exhibitions to everyone on the web, letting you explore them on desktop or mobile devices with or without AR capabilities, it announced in a Keyword post.
Up until today, Pocket Gallery was essentially an (overly complicated) AR experience inside Google's Arts & Culture app, placing an art gallery on your desktop or another flat surface and allowing you to explore different art pieces. Now, you just need to load up the Arts & Culture website, find the Pocket Gallery section, choose a relevant exhibition in your browser and use your mouse or finger to scroll around, zoom in, etc.
Otherwise, it works much the same, allowing you to view, pan and zoom right in, down to brushstrokes and flecks of paint on certain pieces. It also provides a written description along with audio narratives for key pieces (complete with a museum-like echo), describing an artwork's history, meaning and more. It's a welcome and much overdue change, opening up the educational possibilities of Pocket Gallery to far more people.
Google Arts & Culture has other virtual experiences, including 360-degree videos and more. Along with the update, Google also unveiled a new exhibition in the collection done in collaboration with Réunion des musées nationaux - Grand Palais in France. It features 40 marine masterpieces from the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre and elsewhere.
A three-part documentary series on DC Comics is coming to HBO Max, according to Deadline. Warner Bros. Unscripted Television is producing the documentary, which will detail the influence and legacy of DC from the time it was established and the time Superman was born in the 1930s. The division is working with Leslie Iwerks (as co-director and executive producer) and Greg Berlanti (as executive producer) for the project.
Iwerks is known for several other high-profile documentaries, including The Pixar Story that showed audiences what happens behind the scenes at the animation studio and The Imagineering Story, which gives viewers a look at how Disney develops rides and attractions for its parks. She will co-direct the documentary with Mark Catalena, who served as editor for The Imagineering Story. Meanwhile, Berlanti is a prolific writer, director and producer who'd previously worked on Doom Patrol, Supergirl, DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Superman and Lois, The Flash and Black Lightning.
Jim Lee, DC's Publisher and Chief Creative Officer, said in a statement:
"DC has a rich legacy of over 80 years of iconic storytelling: from the introduction of the genre defining Super Hero Superman in 1938 to the amazing movies, TV shows, cartoons, games and comics which have been synonymous with superheroism for generations thereafter. We are so excited to dive into this history and bring fans along this amazing journey."
The docu series doesn't have a release date yet, but it will expand HBO Max's DC offerings further when it arrives. WarnerMedia started migrating all DC Universe content to HBO Max last year, making the former streaming platform a comics-only subscription service.
After jumping into comics earlier this year, Substack is entering in a bigger way by signing several major creators to its platform, the New York Times has reported. The new slate of writers includes Saladin Ahmed, Jonathan Hickman, Molly Ostertag, Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV, with other writers and artists to be announced at a later date.
As with other Substack writers, comics creators will send their work out in a newsletter format and charge subscribers directly for their work. During the first year, they'll be paid by Substack which will take most of the subscription revenue, and after that, the platform will take a 10 percent cut. Creators will retain ownership of all their materials.
Tynion IV, who recently won the Eisner award for his work on DC's Batman and other titles, said he'll work on Substack exclusively. "This wasn’t an easy decision," he told the NY Times. "In order to invest my time in new material, I needed to choose. I could not do both."
DC had presented me with a three-year renewal of my exclusive contract, with the intent of me working on Batman for the bulk of that time. I was grateful of the offer, but I couldn’t help but look at the success of my original, creator owned titles and wonder if it was the right choice.
Substack first got into comics back in June when it signed Marvel's Amazing Spider-Man writer Nick Spencer. Spencer reportedly spearheaded the idea and was the liaison between Substack and newly signed creators. On top of comic book stories, they'll publish, essays, how-to guides and other content on the platform.
Until recently, Substack has mostly focused on newsletters covering politics, technology and more. Comics, meanwhile, have been around forever on the web, but have largely been funded by ads and merchandise sales. By joining with Substack, creators will be able to engage directly with readers in a model that more closely resembles comic book sales.
In his Substack launch post, Tynion said that he effectively turned down a three-year renewal of his DC Batman contract when Substack signed him "to create a new slate of original comic book properties directly on their platform, that my co-creators and I would own completely," he wrote. "I’m going to dedicate my whole brain to building a bunch of really cool stuff on my own terms, without having to get permission from any publisher to make it."
