Can Newgrounds Save Us from Soulless AI Animation?

AI is fantastic. As a tool, it allows us to do so much more than our meat selves could do alone. If used correctly. The danger lies in becoming lazy and letting human creativity bum on the couch. AI animation is becoming “better” and accessible, and soulless AI animation is starting to clog feed algorithms. Can crazy creatives from Newgrounds save us? Why is this important for the anime industry? Let’s find out.

Animation Under the Microscope

Put on your lab coat. Let’s consider animation as a whole.

Anime is — essentially — made up of cell animation (the moving pictures), stills (such as backgrounds), sound effects, and recorded dialog. But animation is a medium for telling stories, and animators have found resourceful and innovative ways to entertain, often against tight budgetary and time constraints. That includes putting stock photos through filters to make them look like an artist drew them.

Computer animation, and by extension AI, have given animators more tools to tell their stories. Those same backgrounds can now be produced with quick AI prompts. Animation; faster, stronger, better? Anyone with a computer and a story to tell can get into animation.

And that has been the state of the world ever since the birth of the internet and vector animation software Adobe Flash. Flash, an animation program, was initially created by FutureWave as an animation update to their SmartSketch drawing program, FutureSplash Animator. That was in 1995. Macromedia acquired FutureWave at the end of 1996 and renamed the editor Macromedia Flash.

Flash Freaks and Newgrounds Geeks

Flash put animation tools in the hands of bored graphic designers and web developers, who brought us caffeine-infused insanity like Happy Tree Friends, Arj and Poopy, Badger, and Charlie the Unicorn. Actionscript, Flash’s scripting language, provided a way to program elements in Flash, flooding the internet with astounding (and unhinged) browser games. This content found a home on Newgrounds, a site that felt like an exclusive underground club for DIY game makers and animators. But everyone was welcome.

Newgrounds was formed in 1995. Flash (then FutureSplash) and Newgrounds were practically joined at the hip from birth. From its inception, Newgrounds was a melting pot of creative ideas. Animators inspired, challenged, and collaborated with each other, and they grabbed their fans’ attention by the round, squishy bits.

As we rolled into the 2000s, Newgrounds established itself as a vital pillar of internet culture. Before social media was a thing yet. Remember Castle Crashers for the Xbox 360 and Super Meat Boy? Those all found their start on Newgrounds.

Manga, Moderation, and Massive Mommy Milkers

Play with all the toys, and you learn what makes those toys tick, why they hold a fan’s attention, and what happens when they break.

Newgrounds is to Western animation what doujinshi are to Japanese creators. The wonderful world of fan-made doujinshi gave many mangakas their start in the industry. Newgrounds animators could steal, rip off, and imitate any works and repackage them for irreverent young punks who appreciated a good dick joke. Nothing was safe, including anime. Without the restrictions faced by corporate animation studios, Newgrounds animators were free to do whatever they wanted.

“Steal like an artist” means borrowing great ideas and improving them. On Newgrounds, that sometimes meant adding boobs and violence to gags featuring famous characters like Mario and Sonic. That formula works when it works and is as entertaining as a slow-motion train wreck when it doesn’t. The point is this: let creators fool around, and eventually, they’ll produce better works than a million monkeys smashing pig Latin into AI prompts.

An Idea Isn’t Ideation

Flash animation takes work. That “work” — the time and effort it takes to produce a piece of animation — is an effective teacher. It doesn’t matter if the end result of the animator’s effort is crap or not, they’ve learned something. When they show that work to an audience on a site like Newgrounds or YouTube, the animator finds what sticks and what doesn’t. Rinse and repeat, and you get better animators.

AI offers remarkable tools, but remember the trap. If you generate images with AI, you’ve got to curate and edit the output if you want anything good. My best AI results have started with my own creative effort as the basis. Having an idea and running it through generative AI is not creativity. Creativity happens when an idea is bashed around, the bad bits stripped away, and better ideas formed. This is the creative process. You can use AI to do the bashing, but only if you hold its hand.

Super Panavision and AI Trashimation

So, what happens when you take an idea like “Sword Art Online as a ’70s TV show” and force it through a digital brain? You get a visualization of an idea. Or an exploration of an idea. The idea is still there, realized in some form, but the idea hasn’t been beaten into shape. Creativity hasn’t been injected into the process. Not yet. This trashimation is animation, but it lacks soul.

Thankfully, the human creative spirit is indomitable. The best AI artists are figuring out how to pull the levers and be entertaining, much like new Flash artists in the early 2000s. Newgrounds was home to a lot of crap (I know, I uploaded lame junk myself), but the cream rose to the top. Human artists either stuck around, learned their craft, and built a career, or died by the wayside of distracted attention spans. We can only hope the AI algorithm plays fair in the new age of AI animation.

AI and Anime

Have you ever raged at CGI in your anime? There’s a good chance that AI will see more use in anime and that it’ll annoy fans whenever we spot it. But it is just a tool, and we can hope that the best animators will use it to become efficient masters of their craft.

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Have you got your pitchfork ready? Are you joining the anti-AI mob? Or do you worship at the pixel feet of our new AI overlords? Do you think AI will take over animation entirely, or are AI-rendered tentacles in hentai too horrifying to contemplate? Let us know in the comments below.

Writing about Hiroyuki Imaishi’s work brought me back to the frenetic, colorful animation that characterized many of the best Newgrounds works. I’m sure there’s a link between Imaishi and Newgrounds. Until I find it, I’m back to enjoying Dead Leaves and Gurren Lagann. That’s a long segue to tell you that we have the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann XL Size POP UP PARADE Figure in stock, but I’ll take it.

Videos Featured in this Article

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Arj and Poopy: Shpants
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