What Would Your Favorite Iconic Anime Characters Look Like If They Were Redesigned by Tim Burton?

Ely Bulnes • Writer and Editor

Nov 9, 2024 11:30 AM EST

Welcome, otakus. Stop motion animation is an underrated art form. Artists must handcraft puppets and dolls with a wide variety of different facial expressions, build detailed 3D environments, and reposition their characters and backgrounds millions of times. Then, fingers, hands, and wires must be edited out in post production. It is unbelievably painstaking work. Because there are no shortcuts in stop motion, the types of artists that get hired to work on these films have a deep love and respect for their craft.
Before he started being too generous with CGI, Tim Burton was renowned for his stop motion films infused with his characteristic, woeful yet whimsical, Victorian Era aesthetics. He was a hit with the alternative kids and outcasts of the 90s and early 2000s — and so was anime! So, what if we mashed these two emo Millennial fixations together? While AI images by @unearthly.ai may help us envision what Guts and Griffith would look like after a Tim Burton makeover, it is up to our own minds to imagine how something as horrifying as the Eclipse would play out in jittery, doll-like, stop motion glory.