Three minutes long, and it started one of the ugliest fights the anime internet has had in years. WIT Studio, the studio that gave you Attack on Titan's early seasons, put its name on a quiet little boy-and-his-robot-dog short where every background was machine generated, then rolled a credit reading "background designer: AI (+human)." That parenthetical is the whole story. The hand-drawn characters carry real warmth, a kid and a mechanical companion in a countryside that keeps dissolving into smeared, illogical mush the second you look past them, and the irony writes itself: a piece about human feeling for artificial things, made by cutting out the humans who paint the world. Netflix framed it as easing the industry's labor shortage without touching working conditions, which is either the most honest press line ever written or the most damning. Watch it as an artifact, not a film. Every background artist who saw it knew exactly what it meant.

A young boy comes across an abandoned robot dog and takes it in. The two become friends, and the robot stays at his side through the years as he grows up. Once the boy reaches adulthood, war looms and threatens to separate them. The one-episode sci-fi adventure short was an experimental production from WIT Studio with Netflix Anime Creators Base and the AI character platform rinna, and every background was made with image generation technology.