Best AI anime: 6 series actually made with AI

Lanterne wakes on an altar under the earth with no memory and a lantern where his face should be. Rose is a child he decides to protect without knowing why. Around them is a buried world of blue forests, cyan mist, and thirteen hollow knights bound by an old oath.

Episode One runs about seventeen minutes and it holds together, which is the part that is hard. The characters are recognisable across scenes, the underground world obeys its own bible, and the story kept going: Episode Two, The King Beneath the Vault, came out in September 2026 and runs about twenty-one minutes.

It is made by one person. Frank Houbre writes the screenplay, directs the shots, and cuts the episode. AI generates images and animation inside that direction, and a generated shot that breaks the world gets thrown away like any bad take. That is the difference between an AI assisted anime and a prompt reel.

Himari and Hinana are twin sisters who look nothing alike, act nothing alike, and both want to be famous for dancing on TikTok. The series aired on Tokyo MX on 28 March 2025 and on MBS the day after, with streaming from 30 March.

The figure everyone quotes is that around 95% of the animation cuts involve generative AI. In practice it is a hybrid: AI produces background art and character illustrations, human animators finish the images, and the studio also runs Unreal Engine 5, Clip Studio Paint, and the usual Adobe tools.

Watch it for what it proves about distribution. A Japanese broadcaster put this on air with the AI credited openly, which nobody had done before.

PIXTA relaunched Anipops on 12 August 2026 as a short form streaming platform carrying five original series from its own AI studio. The line up includes the monster battle fantasy Morks, the samurai period piece Bells of the Oni, and a slice of life show about a burned out office worker who moves to the countryside and goes viral filming stray cats.

Anipops began in March 2026 as a place where individual creators uploaded their own AI anime. That side moved to Anipops Creators. The main service is now studio output, with planning, writing, and animation done in house.

This is the first real test of whether an audience will pay a subscription for AI anime rather than watch it free on a feed. Ask again in a year.

A boy and his robot dog, directed by Ryotaro Makihara, released on YouTube on 31 January 2023. Backgrounds were drawn as concept art, passed through an AI model several times, then retouched by hand.

The credits list the background designer as "AI + Human". That line, more than the film, is what people remember. The backlash from professional animators was immediate and it was about jobs rather than pixels, especially since Netflix framed the experiment as a response to a shortage of background artists.

Three minutes long, and worth those three minutes as a historical marker rather than as a story.

Two friends play a ridiculously melodramatic game of rock paper scissors, and it is funny. Corridor filmed real actors, then repainted every frame with Stable Diffusion and a DreamBooth model trained on Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, with backgrounds built in Unreal Engine. It passed two million views in eight days.

Training that model on one film without permission is precisely the practice that put professional animators on a war footing, and the video is still the reference point in that argument three years later.

Technically it sits closer to rotoscoping than to generation, which is part of why the motion still reads better than a lot of what came after it.

Announced at Hong Kong FilMart in March 2025, this is a slate of fifty short science fiction episodes generated entirely with Vidu, the video model from ShengShu Technology, for release on social platforms. Aura Productions is the Los Angeles studio founded by producers Luo Yan and D.T. Carpenter.

The interesting choice here is the format. Rather than one long film, they went for a drip of vertical friendly episodes, leaning on Vidu's multi entity consistency to keep characters recognisable between shots.

If short form AI anime turns into a viewing habit instead of a novelty, this is roughly where that starts.