What would Studio Ghibli’s beautiful animated eco fable Princess Mononoke look like if it were remade using AI? An awful, smelly trailer has the answer.
As Nikola Tesla once said, at least according to a quote attributed to the famous inventor, “You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.”
On a related note, along comes a an AI-generated “shot-for-shot remake” of animator Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 classic, Princess Mononoke.
The trailer’s the work of Portland, Oregon-based self-facilitating media node PJ Acetturo, who used a combination of generative AI services to pull together a collection of CGI shots that roughly line up in terms of timing and subject to Princess Mononoke's original promo.
We’ve embedded one of the creator’s tweets below, which handily shows both his trailer and the original side by side.
Acetturo says he spent $745 on making his clip, which in publicity terms has rapidly paid off. His work’s racked up some 4.2m views on Twitter at the time of writing, and the BBC even interviewed him about his latest effort. Acetturo describes his trailer as an “experiment” designed to see “how close are we to photo realism.”
On the strength of this trailer, at least, Studio Ghibli can rest easy. Like much of the AI-generated stuff we’ve seen so far, it features a bunch of glassy-eyed CGI characters who have that pristine, idealised look of underwear models and whose features vary from shot to shot.
Leaving aside the poor lighting, bland centralised framing and horrendous lip-synching, it’s hard to imagine sitting through two hours and 13 minutes of this (the duration of Miyazaki’s epic original).
Acetturo himself concedes that there “will be some criticism for this,” and also acknowledges that Miyazaki isn’t exactly a fan of this kind of tech. (“I am utterly disgusted,” Miyazaki said when he was shown some AI-generated footage about seven years ago.)
“I made this adaptation mostly for myself,” Acetturo writes on Twitter/X, “because his [Miyazaki’s] work makes me want to create new worlds. We should look for ethical ways to explore AI tools to help empower artists to create.”
The trailer concludes with a dedication, thanking Studio Ghibli for inspiring future filmmakers. As an homage, it’s a bit like making a full-size replica of the Sagrada Familia out of frozen dog dirt as a tribute to its architect, Antoni Gaudi: sure, you could do it, and do so with the best of intentions. The result would still be a massive pile of shit.
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