Creators vs. Artists - by Rei Inamoto - The Intersection

A few weeks ago, I noticed a 15-second clip from a Hayao Miyazaki movie circulating online in Japan. Hayao Miyazaki, if the name sounds unfamiliar, is a legendary Japanese animation film director. He and his colleagues founded Studio Ghibli in 1986 and since then, almost every movie they’ve released has become an acclaimed masterpiece such as Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), and Spirited Away (2001). Unlike most filmmakers, Miyazaki doesn’t write scripts. He crafts his stories by drawing storyboards from the get-go, making his process extremely rare as a filmmaker. Each scene in Miyazaki’s film is his imagination painstakingly hand-drawn by the master himself. Except that, this said clip wasn’t produced by Miyazaki or his studio. Or by hand. It was, as you guessed by now, created using a combination of generative AI tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. The creator of this video, based also in Japan, tagged it as “a ‘realistic’ version of ‘Spirited Away.’”

A few weeks ago, I noticed a 15-second clip from a Hayao Miyazaki movie circulating online in Japan. Hayao Miyazaki, if the name sounds unfamiliar, is a legendary Japanese animation film director. He and his colleagues founded Studio Ghibli in 1986 and since then, almost every movie they’ve released has become an acclaimed masterpiece such as Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), and Spirited Away (2001). Unlike most filmmakers, Miyazaki doesn’t write scripts. He crafts his stories by drawing storyboards from the get-go, making his process extremely rare as a filmmaker. Each sce