Drawn to Extinction, Weekly 0002
The week in Ai and the creative trades, with my two cents. Friday 24 July 2026.
Forget SDCC and the culture-war noise for a second, because the most interesting thing to happen to comics and Ai this week didn't come from a courtroom or a convention. It came as a free download, out of Japan, and it's aimed squarely at the part of the craft nobody outside the industry ever thinks about.
On the 17th a Japanese outfit called AIdea Labs released AnimeGen, a model that turns a line of text or a single still into anime-style video. It's free, cleared for commercial use, built on top of Alibaba's Wan model, and backed by two arms of the Japanese state. The pitch is gentle. It'll help you draft storyboards, test backgrounds, and generate the in-between frames, a tool to support trial and error and reduce the workload. Read that last part again. The workload it reduces is the in-betweening, the patient tweening that junior animators have always used to learn their trade and pay their rent. Nobody's waiting for permission either; one recent short, Twins HinaHima, ran Ai on more than ninety-five percent of its cuts, and the likes of Toei and Sony have been funding this quietly for a while. CBR has the details.
Then a name that stopped me cold; Inio Asano, who drew Goodnight Punpun and Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction, some of the most tender and carefully built comics of the last twenty years, says his current series is on hiatus partly because his publisher won't let him touch Ai. He reckons it could lift the work by a mile. He already constructs his worlds with 3D models pulled out of Unreal and Blender, so this isn't a purist suddenly going soft. He'd rather pause than pretend the tools aren't sitting right there, and he's hoping the ban lifts by 2027. That flips the story I keep telling. My version has the suits forcing Ai onto reluctant artists. Asano is a master craftsman asking for it, and the publisher is the one holding the line. ComicBook.com has his words.
The money shows you where the current's pulling. Japan's trade ministry, METI, is reported to be lining up around seventy million dollars to steer nine of the big anime and manga houses, Crunchyroll and Shueisha among them, toward generative Ai for translation, the stated aim being faster releases abroad and a head start on the pirates. Translators have been resisting this since 2024, when the Japan Association of Translators called machine translation extremely unsuitable for high-context, story-centric writing, and warned that its members were being treated as throw-away commodities. That phrase has stuck with me all week. The association also made a sharper point that tends to get lost. Rushed machine translation of a high-context language produces flat, wrong-footed prose, and flat prose sends readers straight back to the pirate scans the whole scheme claims to be fighting. So the cost-cutting could hollow out the quality that made the work worth exporting in the first place. It's the same broken ladder, one country over. Localisation is how a huge number of people first get a foot into this industry, and it's being redrawn, line by line, as a cost to be trimmed. Kotaku lays out the subsidy; Automaton West covers the pushback.
There's a longer echo underneath all this. In the book I set manga inside a lineage that reaches back through Hokusai's woodblocks, image married to word, a craft handed down slowly across centuries. AnimeGen's headline trick is generating the in-between. The first thing it automates is the very apprenticeship the whole form was passed along through. I don't think that's a coincidence, and I don't think it's harmless.
I'm not here to sneer at the software. Asano isn't a fool, the studios aren't cartoon villains, and a well-made tool in a tired animator's hands is a mercy, not a threat. What I keep coming back to is the shape of the decision. A ministry, a few publishers and a handful of studios are setting the terms, and the in-betweeners and the translators are finding out how it went afterwards. Next week I want to hear from the mangaka and the animators themselves, the people holding the pen, rather than the companies that own the pages.
Further reading
Japan releases AnimeGen, a free Ai anime-video model: CBR
Inio Asano would rather pause than draw without Ai: ComicBook.com
METI reportedly paying publishers to adopt Ai manga translation: Kotaku
Japanese translators protest the government's Ai translation push: Automaton West