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OLM, the Japanese animation group behind the “Pokemon” anime series and films, has developed an AI coloring tool that picks up a show’s look from just three hand-painted frames, OLM Digital board director Yotsukura
Tatsuo said at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei.
The tool came out of ANIMINS, a 15-month research project Yotsukura led under GENIAC, a generative AI program overseen by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The project, which looked at how anime creators could put AI to use, wrapped in February.
Because AI models usually need vast amounts of training data that studios struggle to assemble, OLM took the opposite approach. An artist colors three frames by hand, and the system learns that show’s line shapes and color palette on the spot in about 90 seconds, then colors each remaining frame in around 15 seconds. The more frames an artist paints by hand, the more accurate it becomes.
“Strictly speaking, it isn’t generative AI,” Yotsukura said.
Training only on a production’s own frames means no other works are harmed, he added, and the tool can adapt immediately when a new character or creature, such as a dragon, appears. The point OLM most wanted to stress, he said, is that it fits into existing anime workflows without disrupting them. At proof-of-concept stage, Yotsukura estimated it has cut painting workload by around 30%, though the checkers who review every colored frame have somewhat more to do.
Toon Boom Animation, the Canadian maker of animation software Harmony and Storyboard Pro, is tackling the same bottleneck. Product marketing director Harry Ravelomanantsoa said the beta of the coloring tool in Ember, the company’s AI suite, is wrapping up, and in-betweening is expected to enter beta within a couple of weeks. One Manila studio that tested the coloring tool cut the painting time on a scene of 90 seconds to two minutes from 15 hours to two or three.
OLM employs around 600 staff across Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and the U.S. “As you probably saw passing through the first floor, we make the ‘Pokemon’ anime – not the games – including the TV series and the theatrical films,” Yotsukura said, referring to the 2026-27 Pokemon Asia Championship Series: Taiwan Premier Ball League, held Nov. 7–8 on a lower floor of the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, where TCCF is running Nov. 6–9.
The group’s slate also includes kids’ titles “Beyblade” and “Hanakappa” and the adult-skewing “The Apothecary Diaries.” Yotsukura, who also serves as CTO for the group’s Malaysian and Thai arms, noted that an in-house R&D division is unusual for a Japanese animation company.
The group is experimenting with AI for in-betweening as well. But Yotsukura said the bigger gains may come from indirect uses across productions that involve more than 100 staff. With a startup partner from the GENIAC project, OLM is exploring anime-specific AI agents that could help new directors or production managers joining a series that has run for a decade or more, for instance by recalling what a director intended for a given cut. Agents could also speed up approvals and license management for secondary uses of its titles, which Yotsukura called the most revenue-critical part of the business. Because those areas are sensitive, OLM is proceeding with care, he said.
Yotsukura likened the gap between AI demos and production reality to gacha, the Japanese capsule-toy machines where each JPY500 ($3.30) turn may or may not yield the prize you want – roughly what an AI generation credit costs, he said. AI gets close enough to 80% to raise expectations. “Raising it from there to 90 or 100% turns into work so hard it can make you heartsick.”
Hobbyists may be happy with 80%, he said, but professional animators need tools that return their direction 100% of the time and let them make corrections. Anime is also highly sensitive to color, and AI tools that edit an image can shift its RGB values even when the result looks fine.
“The creative stays with the artist, and the mechanical time goes to AI, to Ember,” Ravelomanantsoa said.
Yotsukura said he agreed almost entirely with that split. “AI can only do what it has learned,” he said, adding that the kind of images that move audiences in cinemas, and the never-before-seen ideas behind hit anime, still have to come from people.
He compared AI’s arrival to that of 3DCG, which took around 20 years to be accepted in anime. “Twenty years ago, I kept rejecting it, saying, ‘How could this ever be used in anime?’ Now it’s unthinkable for anime not to have 3DCG,” he said. AI will move far faster, Yotsukura said, because its quality is already high from the start.
Charles Beirnaert, chief creative officer of Blue Spirit, the French studio behind Netflix’s “Blue Eye Samurai,” said the studio uses no AI at all on that series. “We’re not allowed to use AI for the Netflix projects,” he said. Blue Spirit asks every time at what stage AI might be permitted, he added, and the answer is always no – though he acknowledged the rule may not apply to every Netflix partner. On an Amazon series, the studio may use AI only to pre-visualize characters and robots, with none of it reaching the final image. Netflix’s published guidelines for production partners, issued in August 2025, require them to disclose any intended use of generative AI, with written approval needed for certain uses, including generative AI material in the final product.
Away from those shows, Beirnaert’s team is testing AI on a series it is greenlighting as a conventional CG show, with a shorter YouTube version under consideration. A team of around 20 spent roughly three months on the traditional pilot. Using AI, one person recreated that work, covering everything from modeling and layout to animation, within days. The animation fell short of the original, Beirnaert said, but the backgrounds came out better.
“For me, AI is not meant to replace animators. The day every animator is replaced, I will change job and do something else,” Beirnaert said.
The two diverged when an audience member asked how much money AI could save. Beirnaert offered what he called a random estimate of €1 million on an €8 million budget, and said AI may help projects that stall at 80%–90% financed find the rest. Yotsukura said OLM is in a different position: it is brought in only after a budget is fixed, and sees AI as a way to gain more creative freedom within that budget rather than to shrink it. A year or two ago, the question was how many staff AI could replace, he said. Now it is shifting toward new shots that AI tools made possible.
Moderator Kao Chieh, a lecturer at Shih Chien University, put the split down to a difference between Eastern and Western animation companies.
Japanese anime already has creativity in abundance, Yotsukura said, but technology could play a bigger part, with the two driving the industry forward like a pair of wheels. “I think ‘not using AI’ is probably no longer an option from here on,” he said.
