Wow, this looks like the beginning of the end for in-between animation.<p>A large chunk of an anime's budget goes to in-betweening. Essentially human interpolation of graphics between two key frames (Its usually like 6-12 inbetweens per key frame). People hate this job, and it is highly unproductive, so generally outsourced by Japan to other countries.<p>Western animation decided to abandon it altogether, and move first to flash, then to 3d animation. But in retrospect that was a mistake, as it lost so much of the creative flexibility of 2d animation. Anime today is substantially bigger than western animation as a result. Crunchyroll has 13 million subscribers.<p>AI will solve the problems with 2d animation. Something like SORA fine-tuned on anime-keyframe data like this. Can probably easily solve in-betweening. Then the 2d animation workflow will dominate 3d. Its so much easier to just draw a beginning and end key-frame, then have the AI fill it in. Than to model and rig and render a entire scene.