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BBC Discusses AI Fan Film Based on Princess Mononoke

BBC News has produced a segment on the issues surrounding AI video generation, which has a particular relevance to anime fans. In the course of the discussion, the segment screens a new Princess Mononoke fan film created with AI. This is followed by an interview with the trailer's creator, PJ Acetturo, who is the CEO of an AI company, Battle Island, The BBC news segment is embedded below, with the fan film introduced at the 14-minute mark. The interview with Acetturo follows after that.

Acetturo's AI fan film is based on the American Princess Mononoke trailer, and the audio uses the voices of the English dub cast, including Billy Crudup (Ashitaka), Minnie Driver (Eboshi) and Claire Danes (San).

The BBC report puts the fan film into a wider context of issues about AI, starting from the announcement earlier in September that the studio Lionsgate is entering into partnership with the AI company Runway. The latter company's AI model will be "trained" on Lionsgate's film and TV library.

In an earlier text report on the Lionsgate announcement (linked above), the BBC quoted a number of strongly negative reactions to the news. However, it also quoted PJ Acetturo as saying on X/Twitter that the collaboration would be "amazing for the industry."

Acetturo's Princess Mononoke fan trailer has already provoked outraged reactions on social media. Acetturo also posted the film on his own X/Twitter feed, with an account of its production. Below there are numerous comments, with Acetturo replying to many of them. One commenter refers to Hayao Miyazaki's famously furious reaction to seeing animation generated by AI. Acetturo acknowledges this, but says his trailer "is just a fan adaptation for fun."

In the BBC segment, Acetturo says the AI trailer cost "a couple of hundred bucks" or less to make. Questioned by the filmmaker Samir Mallal, Acetturo claims, "We'll figure out a way forward that trains [AI on] ethical data sets... We're going to see a switch from studios being the primary sources of most of our narrative content, and it's going to go into the hands of creators, and I think that's a really beautiful thing."

Previous controversies involving AI and anime include an online backlash to the Wit Studio's short film The Dog & The Boy, which used AI-generated backgrounds. There was an even more intense storm over the Rock, Paper, Scissors film created by the American studio Corridor Digital. This used a mixture of rotoscoped actors and an AI-generated style where the AI model had been trained (without permission) on screenshots from the film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.

For Hayao Miyazaki fans outraged by the AI treatment of Princess Mononoke, there are still fan tributes to his work that do not use AI, such as this Brazilian-shot fan tribute to Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind.