Animon launches Animon.ai letting you AI-generate anime from pictures

Animon has opened access to its Animon.ai website, a site that offers users the ability to create 5-second anime video clips from still reference images. This service is the first from Japan that offers Japanese-style anime output using generative AI that can be used for an unlimited number of times for free.

Generative video AI has advanced quickly in recent years and offerings from the largest AI companies can create very realistic looking scenes and humans for general use, but they are not designed to generate Japanese-style anime exclusively.

Animon.ai is targeted to beginning and advanced anime creators who are seeking an automated solution to the tedious traditional process of hand-drawing each frame. As noted in a company presentation, animating merely five seconds of anime can take over 72 hours of manual work, which includes about 8 hours for storyboarding, 12 hours for key framing, 24 hours for in-between frames, 16 hours for coloring, and 12 hours for assembling the frames into a video.

With the company's free service, animators simply upload a still reference image of the scene they want animated, then type a prompt describing the action and movement that should occur. The AI service then takes 3-4 minutes to draw the new frames that are required in a five second animation, eliminating the 72+ hours of manual work.

This speed-up enables animators to try different ideas and emotional presentations of a scene quickly, and allows them to focus on the creative process of storytelling. Also, it helps tackle the challenges facing the Japanese anime industry, such as low pay, long working hours, and the lack of sufficient animators.

Three service tiers are offered:

• Free - 5 GB of storage is offered and 480p videos are watermarked.
• Fans at $9.90 per month - 50 GB of storage is offered and 480p videos are not watermarked. Two tasks can be queued with priority processing.
• Studio at a negotiated price - 500 GB of storage is offered and 1080p videos are not watermarked. Unlimited jobs can be queued with the highest level of priority processing and support.

Since the primary focus of Animon is to speed up the animation process, music, sound effects, and voices are not offered as part of the service. However, other AI companies have shown that it is not difficult to add such to generated videos.

In a brief test to animate a still frame from Steins;Gate (which can be viewed here) only the foreground character was successfully animated, not the background characters, so users should know that this leading-edge AI service still has some way to go. Nonetheless, such output might be more than sufficient for fan works such as AMVs.

Readers who love to draw can create animations by hand using software such as Clip Studio Paint sold here on Amazon.