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.

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

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.

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" ?

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.

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).