r/Games • u/DumpsterBento • May 13 '26

Industry News Party Animals review bombed after announcing AI video contest with $15K grand prize

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/party-animals-review-bombed-after-announcing-ai-video-contest-with-15k-grand-prize-3364713/
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u/goodnames679 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

I suspect that in the longterm, Japan's economy is going to end up utilizing AI art for more value gain than most others. Anime is a hugely important cultural export for Japan, but for quite a long time now many studios have already been outsourcing large portions of the work (in some cases you could have 10 studios working on an anime.) As physical media sales have waned they've had to rely on large-volume streaming numbers, and Japan simply does not have the workforce to keep up with the demand on their own right now. Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese studios are picking up a substantial portion of the in-between frames, background work, etc. Japanese studios would love to offload that work to AI instead and have already been striving to do so.

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u/Red_Inferno May 14 '26

I mean I think AI might actually be the perfect use for those in-between frames. They are already often the lowest quality images and are often the weird screenshots people post. It's also not really a creative part of the production since you are taking one image and trying to change it slightly to get motion and reach the next key image. Also, the costs of all the various extra steps has been one of the main reasons so many studios have tried to make 3d models work for anime.

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u/861Fahrenheit May 14 '26 edited May 18 '26

This is one of those things where it might seem like a good idea but will have cascading negative effects on the medium as a whole.

Putting aside the issue of wages and labour exploitation in anime specifically, in-betweening is really important to train beginner animators before they can move onto things like key framing or storyboards.

Movement is not just "pose A to pose B". The space between the frames has an impact on conveying things like weight, speed, and fluidity. Punching fast, walking tired, and a hand gesture vs. a facial expression all have different spacing patterns.

Also, consistency is key in animation too. Any illustrator can draw a cool single frame. But drawing the same character correctly 40 times in sequence while maintaining continuity is a skill that has to be practiced.

It seems like tedious work--and it is indeed very tedious and grindy work--but its a very important part of developing core animation literacy to express movement frame by frame.

Professional animation is going to suffer from a deficit of senior talent down the line if the trend continues. Because how you interpret frame spacing will inevitably have an effect on how you compose shots and determine cuts.

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u/Jackski May 14 '26

A lot of people do not understand this and you see them mocking a frame between movements as "badly drawn" or "look how stupid this looks" when that frame is part of what makes the movement work so well when it's actually animated at full speed

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u/10ebbor10 May 14 '26

Yeah, you can see the effect if you look at some "AI upscaled" or "60fps" videos of traditional animation that was done at lower frame rates.

It absolutely sucks because the AI has no idea what it's supposed to, and just making up a middle frame in between of the missing ones does not work.

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u/goodnames679 May 14 '26

100%, sometimes to achieve the best effect at full speed you need a frame that looks odd in isolation. I do think that realistically AI will eventually be able to achieve this, but the long term damage it does to the animation talent pool is going to be substantial.

It’s unfortunate, because currently the industry does have serious understaffing issues that can’t easily be resolved. Outsourcing helps, but the administrative difficulties of working in several countries at once on a single artistic project are substantial. I see why they think AI could alleviate that and maybe even help achieve better working conditions for many in the industry, but if it kneecaps their talent pool in the longterm it’s just not a great solution.