Pokemon anime studio OLM's AI learns a show's look in 3 frames

OLM, the studio behind the Pokemon anime, built an AI tool that learns a show's look from three hand-painted frames.

OLM Digital board director Yotsukura Tatsuo described the tool at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei, according to Variety, which published his remarks on November 7. OLM Digital is the CG and R&D arm of OLM, which employs around 600 staff across Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and the US.

An artist paints three frames by hand. The system learns that production's line shapes and color palette on the spot, then colors each remaining frame. Yotsukura said the learning step takes about 90 seconds and each frame after it around 15 seconds, and that painting more frames by hand makes the tool more accurate.

"Strictly speaking, it isn't generative AI," Yotsukura said. Because the tool trains only on the production's own frames, he said, no other works are affected, and it can pick up a new character or creature, such as a dragon, the moment one appears.

The tool came out of ANIMINS, a 15-month project Yotsukura led under GENIAC, a generative AI program run by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry with the research body NEDO. METI's GENIAC page lists OLM Digital among its data and generative AI demonstrators. OLM's parent, IMAGICA GROUP, said in its own February 2025 interview with Yotsukura that ANIMINS began in December 2024 and that the coloring tool was developed with Nara Institute of Science and Technology and Chiba University and verified at OLM Asia. Variety reported the project wrapped in February.

Yotsukura estimated that, at proof-of-concept stage, the tool cut painting workload by around 30%, while the checkers who review every colored frame have somewhat more to do. IMAGICA's earlier account described a reduction in work hours of about 30% during that verification.

Toon Boom Animation is working on the same bottleneck. Product marketing director Harry Ravelomanantsoa said the beta of the coloring tool in its Ember AI suite is wrapping up, and in-betweening should enter beta within a couple of weeks, Variety reported. Toon Boom's own Ember page describes Ember as a suite of AI-powered tools for its Storyboard Pro and Harmony software, and features a coloring tool. Ravelomanantsoa said one Manila studio cut painting time on a 90-second to two-minute scene from 15 hours to two or three.

For creators, the three-frame approach avoids the large training sets that studios struggle to assemble, but Yotsukura's figures are his own estimates from a research project, and no product has shipped. Anime is sensitive to color, he said, and AI tools that edit an image can shift its RGB values even when the result looks fine.

No product, price or release date was announced; ANIMINS wrapped in February and OLM has not said when, or whether, the tool will ship.