Pokemon Animation Studio OLM Shows an AI Tool That Colours Frames From Three Examples
Japanese animation studio OLM has built an AI tool that learns a show's look from just three hand-coloured frames, Variety reported on 7 November 2026.
OLM is the group behind the Pokemon anime series and films. A frame is one still picture, and an animated show plays many of them every second. Colouring every frame by hand is slow work, so the idea is to let software do most of it.
According to OLM Digital board director Yotsukura Tatsuo, who described the tool at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei, the system works in two steps. First, it studies three hand-painted frames and picks up the show's line shapes and colour palette. That takes about 90 seconds. After that, it colours each remaining frame in around 15 seconds.
At proof-of-concept stage, meaning an early test that shows an idea can work, the tool cut painting workload by around 30%.
The tool came out of ANIMINS, a 15-month research project led by Yotsukura. The project was run under GENIAC, a generative AI programme overseen by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Generative AI is software that creates new images, text or sound from patterns it has learned. The ANIMINS project wrapped up in February.
OLM employs around 600 staff across Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and the United States. That spread matters for an animation studio, because the drawing and painting work on a series is often shared among teams in several countries.
For viewers, the change would be hard to spot. The goal, as described, is to take some of the repetitive colouring off the artists' desks so they can spend more time on the parts of a frame that need a human eye. Whether and when the tool will be used on a series has not been announced.
