A game from the team that offended Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki with its AI zombie animation is out next week
The viral clip from 10 years ago had Miyazaki call its work “an insult to life itself”
The company behind a famous viral clip that saw it offending animation legend Hayao Miyazaki has a game out next week.
The clip, from a Japanese TV show which aired back in 2016, showed the CEO of Tokyo-based company Attructure demonstrating an animation prototype to the Studio Ghibli co-founder, who looked on stony-faced.
The demonstration showed a creature, which looked like a zombie, using machine learning to figure out how to move itself across a room, rather than have an animator create the movement for it.
The video went viral for the awkward moment where Miyazaki says the animation insults him because it reminds him of his disabled friend, and calls the prototype “an insult to life itself” – a statement which leaves Attructure’s CEO looking mortified.
Now (as spotted by Automaton) Attructure is releasing ANLIFE: Motion-Learning Life Evolution, a game which appears to have evolved from the tech seen in that prototype.
The game features creatures made out blocks, which “shuffle around awkwardly under a physics engine” as they learn how to move.
Taking the role of a God-like being, players can either watch as the creatures evolve and grow more adept to the physics engine, or interfere by shaping the world and either helping them out or creating meteor storms to make life harder for them.
“Creatures that learn to move effectively toward food will survive, reproduce, and pass on their traits,” the game’s description reads. “Through each generation, their bodies gradually evolve.”
Claiming that the game has “no story, no complex ecosystem, no goals”, the studio says the aim is to “simply relax in a soothing atmosphere and watch these creatures do their best to live”.
