Japanese-style animation (colloquially known as 'anime') is an art form that generally involves frames that are drawn frame-by-frame and organized using timesheets, which are time-series pointer-tables for frames. The word 'anime' in English communities have been semantically broadened to mean 'an art style that is reminiscent of popular art styles in Japanese manga / animation', but in this article we will refer to 'anime' as specifically 'animations created in a Japanese-style production flow'.
While a large portion of the rest of the 2D animation world evolved to a rigged, cutout animation style, Japanese anime productions kept the traditional frame-by-frame method of animation and have evolved in its own ways. In the midst of this, however, the adoption of technology has been relatively sparse compared to for rigged animation. This is due to a number of different reasons, but one of them is that technology that actually suits the frame-by-frame production workflow has generally been sparse.
This repository aims to curate papers, talks, and blog posts which seem promising to be used inside production workflows for anime production. Eventually the long-term goal is to create a comprehensive document / paper / course to highlight opportunities and challenges for technological development for anime production.
This is very much work in progress.
Storeoboard: Sketching Stereoscopic Storyboards
Rorik Henrikson, Bruno De Araujo, Fanny Chevalier, Karan Singh, Ravin Balakrishnan
CHI 2016
Griffith: A Storyboarding Tool Designed with Japanese Animation Professionals
Jun Kato, Kenta Hara, Nao Hirasawa
CHI 2024
CollageVis: Rapid Previsualization Tool for Indie Filmmaking using Video Collages
Hye-Young Jo, Ryo Suzuki, Yoonji Kim
CHI 2024
Neural Storyboard Artist: Visualizing Stories with Coherent Image Sequences
Shizhe Chen, Bei Liu, Jianlong Fu, Ruihua Song, Qin Jin, Pingping Lin, Xiaoyu Qi, Chunting Wang, Jin Zhou
MM 2019
ASAP: Auto-generating Storyboard and Previz
Hanseob Kim, Ghazanfar Ali, Bin Han, Hwangyoun Kim, Jieun Kim, Jae-In Hwang
SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 Real-time Live!
Dynamic Storyboard Generation in an Engine-based Virtual Environment for Video Production
Anyi Rao, Xuekun Jiang, Yuwei Guo, Linning Xu, Lei Yang, Libiao Jin, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai
Inbetweening for computer animation utilizing moving point constraints
William Reeves
SIGGRAPH 1981
Deep Geometrized Cartoon Line Inbetweening
Li Siyao, Tianpei Gu, Weiye Xiao, Henghui Ding, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy
ICCV 2023
Efficient Interpolation of Rough Line Drawings
Jiazhou Chen, Xinding Zhu, Melvin Even, Jean Basset, Pierre Bénard, Pascal Barla
Pacific Graphics 2023
Optical Flow Based Line Drawing Frame Interpolation Using Distance Transform to Support Inbetweenings
Rei Narita, Keigo Hirakawa, Kiyoharu Aizawa
ICIP 2019
Improving the Perceptual Quality of 2D Animation Interpolation
Shuhong Chen, Matthias Zwicker
ECCV 2022
End-to-End Line Drawing Vectorization
Hanyuan Liu, Chengze Li, Xueting Liu, Tien-Tsin Wong
AAAI 2022
Joint Stroke Tracing and Correspondence for 2D Animation
Haoran Mo, Chengying Gao, Ruomei Wang
Transactions on Graphics 2024
Graph Matching based Anime Colorization with Multiple References
Akinobu Maejima, Hiroyuki Kubo, Takuya Funatomi, Tatsuo Yotsukura, Satoshi Nakamura, Yasuhiro Mukaigawa
SIGGRAPH Posters 2019
Anime Character Colorization using Few-shot Learning
Akinobu Maejima, Hiroyuki Kubo, Seitaro Shinagawa, Takuya Funatomi, Tatsuo Yotsukura, Satoshi Nakamura, Yasuhiro Mukaigawa
SIGGRAPH Asia Technical Communications 2021
The Animation Transformer: Visual Correspondence via Segment Matching
Evan Casey, Víctor Pérez, Zhuoru Li, Harry Teitelman, Nick Boyajian, Tim Pulver, Mike Manh, William Grisaitis
ICCV 2021
Improved Automatic Colorization by Optimal Pre-colorization
Taiki Watanabe, Seitaro Shinagawa, Takuya Funatomi, Akinobu Maejima, Yasuhiro Mukaigawa, Satoshi Nakamura, Hiroyuki Kubo
SIGGRAPH Posters 2023
Learning Inclusion Matching for Animation Paint Bucket Colorization
Yuekun Dai, Shangchen Zhou, Qinyue Li, Chongyi Li, Chen Change Loy
CVPR 2024
Deep Line Art Video Colorization with a Few References
Min Shi, Jia-Qi Zhang, Shu-Yu Chen, Lin Gao, Yu-Kun Lai, Fang-Lue Zhang
Coloring Anime Line Art Videos with Transformation Region Enhancement Network
Ning Wang, Muyao Niu, Zhi Dou, Zhihui Wang, Zhiyong Wang, Zhaoyan Ming, B. Liu, Hao Li
Area Flooding Algorithms
Marc Levoy
SIGGRAPH 1982 Course Notes
LazyBrush: Flexible Painting Tool for Hand-drawn Cartoons
Daniel Sykora, John Dingliana, Steven Collins
Eurographics 2009
TV Paint Plugin
Merging and Transformation of Raster Images for Cartoon Animation
Bruce Wallace
SIGGRAPH 1981
Compositing Digital Images
Thomas Porter, Tom Duff
SIGGRAPH 1984
The original 'pre-multiplied alpha' paper!
Digital Compositing Derivations (CS 248)
Marc Levoy
A Color Animation System Based on the Multiplane Technique
Marc Levoy
SIGGRAPH 1977
Computer Animation Production System (CAPS)
Proposal by Alvy Ray Smith
Executive Summary by Alvy Ray Smith
Spreadsheets for Images
Marc Levoy
SIGGRAPH 1994
TicTacToon: A Paperless System for Professional 2D Animation
Jean-Daniel Fekete, Érick Bizouarn, Éric Cournarie, Thierry Galas, Frédéric Taillefer
SIGGRAPH 1995
SmartShadow: Artistic Shadow Drawing Tool for Line Drawings
Lvmin Zhang, Jinyue Jiang, Yi Ji, Chunping Liu
ICCV 2021
Learning to Shadow Hand-drawn Sketches
Qingyuan Zheng, Zhuoru Li, Adam W. Bargteil
CVPR 2022
Sprite-from-Sprite: Cartoon Animation Decomposition with Self-supervised Sprite Estimation
Lvmin Zhang, Tien-Tsin Wong, Yuxin Liu
SIGGRAPH Asia 2022
Voice Animator: Automatic Lip-Synching in Limited Animation by Audio
Shoichi Furukawa, Tsukasa Fukusato, Shugo Yamaguchi, Shigeo Morishima
Instance-guided Cartoon Editing with a Large-scale Dataset
Jian Lin, Chengze Li, Xueting Liu, Zhongping Ge
APISR: Anime Production Inspired Real-World Anime Super-Resolution
Boyang Wang, Fengyu Yang, Xihang Yu, Chao Zhang, Hanbin Zhao
LACES: Live Authoring Through Compositing and Editing of Video Stream
Dustin Freeman, Stephanie Santosa, Fanny Chevalier, Ravin Balakrishnan, Karan Singh
CHI 2014
Thanks to Chenxi Liu for helping to put together this list!