The Anime Industry Is Making More Money Than Ever. It's Spending That Money on AI to Replace the People Who Make It.
By Jimigrimm
There’s a moment in Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 where Gojo and Toji fight and every single frame feels like it’s about to tear itself apart. The camera moves in ways that shouldn’t be possible in animation. The weight of every hit lands because a human being sat at a desk and drew it that way. Not because an algorithm calculated it. Because an artist with years of training made a creative choice about how that motion should feel, and poured hours into making it real.
That scene was produced at MAPPA Studios. One of the animators who worked on that season was paid $17 for a six-second scene she spent ten hours drawing. That’s $2 an hour. For one of the most popular anime on the planet. A show that generated hundreds of millions in revenue across streaming, merchandise, and theatrical releases.
Meanwhile, Toei Animation, the studio behind Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Sailor Moon, just announced plans to invest in artificial intelligence for anime production. Not to help their animators work better. To replace what their animators do. Storyboards. In-between frames. Backgrounds. Coloring. The core of what makes anime look and feel like anime. Toei wants AI to do it.
And they’re not the only ones. KADOKAWA is also investing in AI for anime production. In March 2026, an anime called Twins Hinahima debuted on Japanese television as a partly AI-produced show. The door isn’t just open. Studios are walking through it.
The People Making Your Favorite Anime Are Being Worked Into the Ground
This isn’t new. But the scale of it in 2026 is worse than it’s ever been.
MAPPA Studios, the studio behind Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, Attack on Titan’s final season, and Vinland Saga, has become the poster child for what’s wrong with the industry. During the production of Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2, animators publicly broke their silence about the working conditions. They described being forced into 80 to 100 hour work weeks. Episodes airing on television that were only 30% finished. A director who requested a delay from the production committee and was denied. An episode director who publicly apologized for the quality of his own work because he was given 250 cuts to complete in two weeks. Animators sleeping under their desks to meet deadlines.
Vincent Chansard, a MAPPA animator who worked on Jujutsu Kaisen, posted on social media: “2 years ago I said I would never work for MAPPA again.” Reports surfaced that MAPPA made animators sign non-disclosure agreements about the production conditions during Season 2. The Animator Supporters nonprofit, which has been providing housing assistance to new animators since 2010 because the industry doesn’t pay them enough to afford rent, confirmed that the pay at MAPPA, while technically higher than the industry average, was still not enough for the kind of crunch being demanded.
And MAPPA isn’t an outlier. They’re just the studio that got caught in the spotlight. A 2024 United Nations report condemned Japan’s anime industry broadly for exploiting workers, citing excessive hours, low pay, and disregard for intellectual property rights. Japan’s first freelancer protection law, the Freelance Act, took effect in November 2024 as a direct response to these conditions. The industry that generates record revenue year after year is built on a workforce that can barely survive in it.
Instead of Fixing the Problem, Studios Are Automating Around It
This is where it gets infuriating.
The logical response to an overworked, underpaid workforce would be to hire more people and pay them better. The anime industry’s response has been to invest in technology that could eventually make those workers unnecessary.
Toei’s fiscal year 2025 presentation laid out their AI roadmap clearly. They want to apply AI to storyboard creation, in-between animation, background generation from photographs, coloring, and frame correction. They even showed examples using characters from the Precure franchise, which angered fans in Japan and worldwide. After the backlash, Toei edited the presentation, removed the character images, and added a note clarifying they’re not currently using AI in production. But the AI section remains in their FY2026 outlook. The plans haven’t changed. Just the public messaging.
One Piece animator Vincent Chansard (the same animator who spoke out about MAPPA) responded to the Toei news by saying “everyone’s as confused as me” and that the announcement felt like “an overblown disconnected PR statement aimed at shareholders.” Even the animators inside these studios don’t fully understand what’s coming.
Hayao Miyazaki, the most respected figure in anime history, has publicly expressed his disgust for AI-generated animation. Shinichiro Watanabe, the creator of Cowboy Bebop, has spoken against it. The people who built the art form are telling the industry that AI threatens the soul of what makes anime special. And the industry is pressing forward anyway.
What Fans Are Actually Afraid Of
The fear isn’t that AI will be used as a tool to help animators. Nobody is against technology that makes the creative process smoother while keeping human artists at the center. The fear is that AI will be used to cut costs by cutting people.
When a studio can generate backgrounds from photographs using AI instead of paying a background artist, the background artist loses their job. When AI can produce in-between frames (the drawings that create smooth motion between key poses), the in-between animators who currently do that painstaking work become expendable. When storyboards can be generated algorithmically, the artists who translate a director’s vision into visual plans are no longer needed.
The anime industry already has a labor shortage because it doesn’t pay enough to retain talent. Young animators leave the industry within their first few years because they can’t survive on the wages. Instead of solving that problem by paying animators a livable wage, studios are investing in AI to fill the gaps that their own labor practices created. They broke the pipeline and now they’re building a machine to replace it.
And here’s the part that should concern fans on a creative level: anime looks the way it looks because of human hands. The slight inconsistencies in hand-drawn frames. The personal style that different animators bring to different scenes. The emotional weight that comes from knowing a human being drew every single frame of that fight sequence or that quiet conversation. AI can replicate the aesthetic of anime. It can’t replicate the intention behind it.
Where This Leaves Fans
Anime is bigger globally than it’s ever been. The audience is massive and growing. Revenue is at record highs. And the industry is simultaneously treating the people who make the product worse than ever while investing in technology to eventually not need them at all.
As fans, we don’t control studio budgets or production committee decisions. But we do control where our attention and our money go. The conversations happening right now in the community about AI, about animator pay, about Crunchyroll’s pricing, about physical media, about which studios deserve support and which don’t, those conversations matter because they shape the expectations that studios have to respond to.
The anime you love was drawn by human beings who poured their skill, their training, and their passion into every frame. The question the industry is asking right now is whether that still matters when a machine can do it cheaper. The question fans should be asking back is whether anime made by AI is still anime at all.
What do you think? Is AI in anime production inevitable and we just have to accept it? Or is this the line the community needs to draw? We want to hear where you stand.
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