Is the era of personal full-length animation really coming?
In the past, an ordinary anime fan with no animation background who wanted to independently serialize a Japanese-style anime series with a consistent art style and complete worldview would mostly be taken as a joke. But this year, such “wild anime series” can be seen everywhere. Even some UP creators used AI to hand-make sequels of popular Japanese anime ahead of the official release, and the hyper-realistic visuals directly shocked the Japanese industry, who exclaimed that “the era of personal full-length animation has arrived”.
Take Bilibili, which has a high concentration of ACG audiences in China, as an example. Open the “UP Creator Animation Theater” section, and you will be greeted by a richness completely different from that of the licensed anime zone. The art styles range from Japanese cel-shading, American 3D cartoons, clay plush animation to a mix of CG and special effects, and the themes include isekai reincarnation, magical girls, campus group portraits, interstellar adventures, anthropomorphic animals, all of which are familiar cultural symbols from Japanese animations over the past decades.
For more than two decades in the past, Chinese ACG audiences were at the receiving end of the Japanese animation industry. From following new anime releases and making subtitles to drawing fanbooks and editing MAD videos, they always revolved around existing IPs. Now AI has lowered the creation threshold, and Chinese ACG communities are no longer just audiences chasing Japanese anime, but can personally produce the anime series they want to watch. When ordinary people can also “create anime” on their own, will the traditional rules of animation production be rewritten?
China’s ACG communities start to create their own dreams
These “wild anime series” are not simple AI secondary creations or imitations, but integrate issues and emotional expressions that Chinese young people care about.
The most intuitive works are those in Japanese 2D animation style. *Villain Girl Dispatch Center*, which has accumulated over 10 million total views, features Japanese cel-shading texture, JK beautiful girls and cute character designs. The story not only has the contrastive cuteness of good and evil from *The Demon Girl Next Door*, but also the group portrait of girls’ complaints in the style of *Bocchi the Rock!*, while its underlying tone is a contemporary workplace comedy: in a city where “heroes defeating villains” has become an entertainment show, the girls are actually workers hired by a dispatch company to “play villains”.
*Villain Girl Dispatch Center*
The more viral work is *Determined to Become an Evil Beast*, whose view count has exceeded 26 million. This “instant-noodle anime” with each episode only 2 to 3 minutes long tells the story of a modern person who accidentally travels to a Chinese-style fantasy world, fighting against sects, monsters and various unexpected situations all the way. In the absurd and uninhibited plot, the creator skillfully integrates complaints about involution, social decency and workplace exploitation. The whole work is completely made by one individual: an amateur UP creator who originally had only 6,800 followers built an AI workflow on his own, and gained 200,000 new followers in half a month.
In addition, *Ribe the Alien Thief* in American animation style is called “China’s version of *Rick and Morty*” by many fans. With the unit drama framework of “cosmic wandering team + one planet per episode”, the veteran vagabond Ximu and the idealistic rookie Ribe take jobs in the gray drifting city “Lanke”. Every time they go to a new planet, they encounter realistic issues most familiar to young Chinese people: *Landing Planet*, which has a single episode view count as high as 9.38 million, deconstructs the obsession with taking civil service exams and postgraduate entrance exams, *The Genius Female Assassin Is Forced to Go on Blind Dates* satirizes arranged marriage pressure, and *Hardship Planet* ironically reflects the culture of advocating unnecessary suffering.
AI technology has greatly lowered the threshold of animation production that was once out of reach for individuals. Even independent creators with only a good idea can produce a serialized anime series on their own. This bottom-up model perfectly fits Bilibili’s community ecology centered on PUGC. The platform has a huge pool of UP creators, who know best what memes the audience wants to see and what emotions they are willing to pay for, so the content they produce is closer to user needs than traditional animations.
Fan animations spark controversy, the era of personal full-length animation is really coming
The energy released by these wild creators with the help of AI has begun to bring considerable impact to the traditional animation industry. Recently, around the anime *Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World* adapted from a popular Japanese light novel, AI fan works by two UP creators have caused quite a stir in the Chinese and Japanese ACG circles.
In mid-September, UP creator “Ka Dian” hand-made a nearly 3-minute fan short film *Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World Academy · Prologue*, which gained nearly 2.6 million views on Bilibili, and was reposted to X, with views once reaching 7.5 million. Many netizens exclaimed that the AI-generated visuals are no different from the original work, and some even mistook it for an official extra episode. By October, several more UP creators used AI to animate the unadapted Chapter 7 “Imperial Arc” from the published original *Re:Zero* novels. Due to the extremely high completion degree, many netizens initially thought it was a “leak of Season 5 resources”; after learning that it was a secondary creation, many netizens sighed: “This means we don’t have to wait for the official release to see the sequel.”
*Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World Academy · Prologue* reposted on the X platform
Even the Japanese industry could not stay calm. Ikeda Yoshimasa, a well-known figure in the Japanese card game industry, posted a long article on X criticizing sharply: “This is not a simple secondary creation, it is the seizure of animation rights, and it is preemptive animation.” In his opinion, the moment of revealing the mystery and the final destination of the characters, these first-experience rights that should be personally delivered to readers by the original author, will be completely destroyed by the preemptively released content. He also made an analogy that if such AI creation is indulged, before *One Piece* finishes, someone may use AI to generate 100 episodes of content, recycle all foreshadowing and mysteries to make a preemptive ending and release it; or directly make 300 episodes of content of the “Dark Continent Arc” of *Hunter × Hunter* and release it publicly. On October 18, Sato Masahiko, a Japanese animation business observer, specially wrote an article to discuss this matter, putting forward more valuable thoughts. He asked in the article, if a small number of fans can make good videos, what is the point of the costly and time-consuming official production? Sato Masahiko further concluded: “What has really changed is the production capacity of derivative works. Different from traditional fan art and short videos such as MAD, perhaps the era of personal full-length animation is really coming.”
Japanese animation usually goes through multiple links including planning, original work authorization, production committee establishment, script and storyboard, key frame and animation production, dubbing and post-production. Previous industry data from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry shows that from the establishment of the production committee to the broadcast of the work and subsequent commercial development, the whole process usually takes about 3 years, of which the actual animation production takes about 2 years; the visual production of one work usually requires the participation of about 200 people.
In the past, the mainstream chain of the animation industry was: manga artists serialized their works to accumulate readers, publishers and production committees promoted animation adaptation, animation companies completed production, and the broadcast of animation fed back to manga, peripheral products and IP commercialization.
The UP Animation Theater is different. Creators can first complete their works on the platform, accumulate audiences, and then obtain further production reividual creators can also use AI tools to take on most of the links, building a complete animation production process on their own
Production site of a Japanese manga studio
Compared with the long and fixed production cycle of traditional animation, this model is more flexible. Creators can adjust the subsequent plot and character development in time according to bullet comments, reviews and audience feedback, which can better meet the tastes of the fan group. The lower production threshold, coupled with the shortened cycle of creation and feedback, means that individual creators no longer can only make short films of a few minutes, but have the opportunity to continuously develop long-form animated series. The “era of personal full-length animation” mentioned by Sato Masahiko may really be just around the corner.
AI impacts the global animation industry
Previously, *Entertainment Capital Theory* once interviewed the creators of the two works *Invincible Superman* and *The Grand Duke is Here*, and discussed the relationship between AI creation and theater films with them. They both believe that from the perspective of technical maturity and work completion, AI image generation is still immature at this stage, and it is difficult to replace live-action films in the short term, but they also affirmed the advantages of AI in the generation of special effects, visual spectacles and fantasy scenes.
Compared with live-action films, animation may be a more suitable field for AI to give full play to its strengths. Live-action films need to capture the performance, subtle facial expressions and body movements of real actors, and also handle the interaction between characters and the real environment, which requires extremely high generation stability of AI. However, animation, whether 2D hand-drawn or 3D modeled, is essentially the design and construction of virtual characters, scenes and movements, which are visual elements that can be digitally processed, and are more consistent with the technical path of AI image generation and editing. In other words, current AI may not be able to replicate the real world, but it can already create a virtual world.
The reality is just like that. Nowadays, AI simulated live-action dramas and AI comic dramas share the market equally on various short drama platforms, but in terms of audience reputation, audiences generally complain that simulated live-action dramas have large flaws, are easy to break immersion, and have homogenized model faces. Topics such as “Reject AI Fake People” and “AI Face Uncanny Valley Effect” frequently hit hot search lists. In contrast, 2D and 3D comic dramas have a higher acceptance. For the works in Bilibili’s UP Animation Theater, most audiences also think they are no different from traditional animations.
AI comic drama *The Legend of Ten Thousand Demons*
The impact of AI on the animation industry is not limited to China. In Hollywood, Netflix is building an AI animation studio named INKubator, which focuses on producing animated short films and special programs with generative AI as the core, and its long-term goal is to develop content that reaches the quality of feature films. At the same time, Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of DreamWorks, is also preparing to establish an AI animation studio. He believes that AI is lowering the cost and threshold of film and television production, and more works will get production opportunities in the future. Katzenberg plans to cooperate with excellent creators to develop animated films and television content with AI, and hopes to first demonstrate the production potential of AI animation with high-quality works.
In Japan, AI has a great impact on the overall production process from manga to animation. As early as 2023, the manga *Cyberpunk Momotaro* made with the AI tool “Midjourney” appeared. In the same year, on the 50th anniversary of the birth of *Black Jack*, Osamu Tezuka’s creation team used AI to learn Osamu Tezuka’s existing works, and cooperated with human creators to launch a brand new sequel to *Black Jack*, *Mechanical Heart*. In terms of animation, in March 2025, Japan’s first AI-assisted animation *Twin Sisters* was broadcast, and AI was used for part of the drawing and background production. In August this year, Japanese material platform PIXTA launched the AI animation platform Anipops, and simultaneously established an AI animation studio, with five original series of works launched for the first batch, distributed to global audiences. AI has begun to penetrate multiple links of Japan’s ACG industry, and a brand new content production system has taken shape.
Japan’s first AI manga *Cyberpunk Momotaro*
AI is putting the initiative of making full-length animations into the hands of ordinary people. Compared with live-action film and television that is still tangled with realistic flaws, AI has already turned “one person is an animation company” from a joke into reality. When ordinary people can also “create anime” with their own hands, the era where the traditional animation industry decides everything has turned the page.
This article is from the WeChat official account “Entertainment Capital Theory” (ID: yulezibenlun), author: Mu Mu, published with authorization from 36Kr.
