How do you make an AI animated or anime series?

Q: How do you make an AI animated or anime series?

Choose one animation look and apply it to characters and backgrounds alike, build a reference sheet per character and set in that look, then generate every shot from those references with one video model. Mixing painted backgrounds with photoreal people is the most common way an AI animated series breaks.

Pick one look and hold it

Our series span several animated looks: Blood Sun: The Fall of Kratos uses a 1970s–90s pulp paperback oil-painting style for characters and backgrounds alike; High Note uses a prestige 3D-animation look; RatKid and the Red Balloon is a storybook city. The lesson from Blood Sun is that the style brief must apply the same painting language to people and places, or the cast looks pasted onto the sets.

Steps

Write a style brief: medium, palette, lighting, linework, and one or two hard rules (for example, one colour reserved for one meaning).
Generate character sheets in that style and iterate until each character reads clearly as a silhouette and a colour.
Generate set sheets in the same style, with no characters in them.
Write shots as single actions and attach the character and set references to each.
Render every episode with one video model so the animation style does not shift.
Add voices, music and captions in the edit.

Things that go wrong

Style drift toward photorealism on close-ups. Restate the medium in the project style, not in each shot.
Colour leaks: a rule about one red object made an image model add that object to sets. Phrase rules positively.
Costume or form changes: give each version its own reference, as we did on Blood Sun.
Small background characters turning into the wrong species or gaining wings, as fairy guards did on one of our series. Give recurring extras their own sheet.

Cost

Animated looks cost the same to render as photographic ones; price depends on model, resolution and length. Blood Sun and High Note were rendered on Seedance 2.0 Mini at 720p, at about $2.26 per finished minute across our series.

Where Katechon Arc fits

Arc has built-in styles including storybook and painterly animation, accepts your own style references, and applies the project style to every reference and shot.

Arc is not a traditional animation tool: there is no rigging, keyframing or frame-by-frame control.