Studio Ghibli films are renowned for their detailed, naturalistic animation, crafted with meticulous care. The Lord of the Rings is a story centered on powerful, corrupting artifacts that must be destroyed at all costs.
So it feels fitting—almost too on the nose—that someone decided to use generative AI to recreate Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s saga in the art style pioneered by Hayao Miyazaki, a filmmaker who once famously dismissed AI-augmented animation as an “insult to life itself.”
If you’ve spent any time online recently, you’ve likely encountered a wave of social media users experimenting with OpenAI’s latest image generation tool, Sora.
They’ve been using it to transform everything from family photos to famous memes and historical moments into Ghibli-esque images.
It’s reminiscent of when the Dancing Hot Dog Snapchat filter was all the rage back in 2017—except this time, instead of just a fun gimmick, it’s backed by a company valued at over $250 billion.
OpenAI continually promises that it will revolutionize the world with Artificial General Intelligence, yet it’s instead burning billions in investor funds to give the internet more ways to generate AI content—or, in some cases, provide government entities like the White House with additional tools for social media engagement.
Meanwhile, GPUs are literally overheating, and the AI-generated creations themselves often fail to impress.
Take, for instance, a Lord of the Rings trailer by PJ Ace that’s been reimagined through OpenAI’s interpretation of a Studio Ghibli film.
Lord Of The Rings Turned Into Studio Ghibli AII first came across it organically while scrolling through Instagram Reels, only to see it quickly spread to LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Some viewers appeared genuinely impressed—or at least acted that way—to continue fueling the hype around AI’s supposed future in filmmaking and their own perceived importance in that creative shift. To be clear, I’m not above watching AI-generated content in my social media feed.
My personal favorites include Warhammer 40K-style alternate histories where the Roman Empire never fell and colonized the galaxy, as well as AI-created slideshows romanticizing life in the ‘90s with eerie, melancholic music in the background. The algorithm knows my weak spots, and I’ve fallen for them more than once.
But the Studio Ghibli Lord of the Rings trailer lost me almost immediately. The editing is rough, the animation feels stiff, and the color palette is flat.
The compositions lack energy, and the characters’ mouths look like they’re frozen mid-dental exam. Facial expressions are barely discernible.
As for the supposed “Ghibli-fication,” it mostly amounts to smoothing out edges and turning human faces into beige ovals with oversized anime eyes—while the landscapes and backgrounds, which are typically the defining beauty of Ghibli films, resemble something between The Simpsons and the muted tones of the Lo-Fi Beats Girl.
PJ Ace noted that he spent nine hours and $250 generating the clip. For just $50 more, he could have bought the entire World of Studio Ghibli 22-film Blu-ray collection.
That would have given him far more than nine hours of breathtaking, hand-crafted storytelling. Most importantly, it wouldn’t have required large-scale artistic theft just to go viral for five seconds on social media.
