At this year's Anime Expo in Los Angeles, Polygon found that an unexpected theme emerging from interviews with leading anime creators was a renewed appreciation for the human hand in animation, particularly amid the rise of AI-generated art. Speaking to figures including artist Yoshitaka Amano and the Science Saru team behind The Ghost in the Shell, the outlet reports that these creators repeatedly arrived at the same conclusion: audiences feel something uniquely powerful when animation is drawn by a human being. The discussion matters because it reframes the industry's debate away from paper versus tablets and towards whether viewers can still sense the artist and artistry behind a work.

The article notes that anime never truly stopped being hand-drawn, with major productions such as Frieren, Dandadan and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 still animated frame by frame, albeit digitally with a stylus rather than a pencil. It cites classics like Akira, the 1995 Ghost in the Shell and Princess Mononoke — Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 film, which reportedly comprised over 144,000 frames, of which he personally redrew an estimated 80,000 — as examples of the tactile quality of human craftsmanship. Amano argued that "AI cannot create zero to one" and is "only a tool", framing imperfections as an essential extension of humanity, while executive animation director Shuhei Handa said his team used traditional hand-drawn techniques specifically to emphasise the human body in The Ghost in the Shell.