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 generating backgrounds from referenced photos. At the time, the slide only talks about future prospects, and makes no mention of the technology being incorporated in the studio’s current works like One Piece or the upcoming Digimon BeatBreak and Gosu.

AI has been controversial to use and discuss across the larger entertainment industry. While it’s often been argued to be a means of efficiency and helpful to reducing menial work, workers across different creative fields like (voice acting and art) feel their livelihoods have been threatened by studios’ adoption of the technology and its integration into projects without artists’ consent. Others consider it a form of theft or digital necromancy that could add extra steps to the production process or lead to unintended errors upon release. Toei’s a big company, and how it uses the technology will impact everyone, from other studios to the fans who watch their works.

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