Studio Ghibli films are know for their crisp, naturalistic, and meticulously crafted animation. The Lord of the Rings is a story about evil tools so powerful they must be destroyed at all costs. How on the nose, then, that someone should decide to use generative AI to try to remake Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s saga in the art style pioneered by Hayao Miyazaki, a man who once infamously rejected an AI-augmented animation experiment as an “insult to life itself.”
If you’ve been anywhere online in the last couple of days, you’ve probably been bombarded with social media users deploying the latest version of OpenIA’s image generation tool Sora to Ghibli-fy random photos of everything from friends and family to famous memes and historical moments. It’s been a lot like when the Dancing Hot Dog Snapchat filter was having a moment back in 2017. That was kind of fun.
Except that this time around, it’s a company valued at over $250 billion who keeps promising it will invent Artificial General Intelligence that will completely change the world and is instead just burning billions in investor capital to provide random internet users (or the White House) with more ways to shitpost or delude themselves into thinking they are doing art by typing prompts into a chat field. It sucks and the GPUs are literally melting. Also the stuff people are making doesn’t even look cool.
Exhibit A is a trailer for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy by PJ Ace that’s ben re-rendered using OpenAI’s hallucination of what a Studio Ghibili movie might look like. I organically encountered it earlier today when scrolling through Reels on Instagram. I then saw it spread to LinkedIn and Bluesky. Some people were very impressed by it, or at least pretending to be in order to continue hyping up the next promised revolution in moviemaking and their self-identified role as an important voice in that new creative world order.
Look, I’m not above looking at random AI slop in my Instagram feed. My favorite two genres are Warhammer 40K-style imaginings of the Roman Empire if it had never fallen and was colonizing the galaxy, and AI-invented slideshows of what life was back in the ‘90s while spooky melancholy music plays. The algorithm knows what I’m a sucker for, and on more than one occasion I’ve been willing to prove it right.
But Studio Ghibli Lord of the Rings lost me within five seconds. The edits are crude. The animation is stilted. The colors are flat. The compositions are boring. While talking, everyone’s mouth looks like it’s in the middle of a dental exam. Discernable facial expressions are nonexistent. And the Ghibli-fication, such as it exists, is almost exclusively about rounding off corners and turning people’s faces into beige ovals with big anime eyes while the landscapes and backgrounds that are usually what give Ghibli films so much texture, richness, and vitality all look like The Simpsons by way of the Lo-Fi Beats Girl’s color palette.
PJ Ace wrote that he spent nine hours and $250 on generating the clip. For just $50 more he could have purchased the entire 22-film World of Studio Ghibli Bluray bundle. It would have occupied way more than nine ours of his time with beautiful animated storytelling. Most importantly, it wouldn’t have required large-scale artistic theft to earn five seconds of viral fame on social media.
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