The first 100% AI-made anime film is now free on YouTube

On October 22, Anime Day, The Song of the Stars Can Be Heard, a 117-minute feature film generated entirely with artificial intelligence, was published on YouTube. It was announced by DELINE PRIME, a production house of the company SPEED EFFECT, and the film is available for free and without restrictions.

The detail that draws the most attention is the team: three people. And the production time: about three months of effective work. The project started in April 2026, was paused to concentrate resources, and resumed in August. By October it was finished.

It is not a short or a music video. It is almost two hours of footage, something uncommon in AI-generated animation. Most projects using these tools stay as short pieces because keeping backgrounds, characters, and emotions coherent throughout a long story is complicated.

1,500 cuts and more than 10,000 attempts

The team used several tools depending on the stage. For video, Seedance and MiniMax. For still images, ChatGPT image and Nano Banana. The music came from Suno. In total they worked on around 1,500 cuts, with an average of five touch-ups per cut. The total exceeds 10,000 attempts before reaching the final result.

The director, screenwriter, and person responsible for almost the entire creative side is Yūno Hirotaka, also an entrepreneur. He signed the script, direction, storyboard, music, backgrounds, character design, sound effects, and editing. He also voiced one of the characters.

The story is inspired by his own experience as a business owner. The protagonist, Rei Shinomiya, loses his parents as a child and grows up measuring his worth only by results. He becomes the founder of a social media marketing company, but the more success he accumulates, the emptier he feels inside. The death of a close friend, a betrayal, and the distance from his family push him back to Aso, in Kumamoto, where his grandfather used to take him as a child to a hill to wish upon the stars.

That is the heart of the film: the idea that making wishes, something so simple, can give someone back the ability to care about others. The press release itself defines it as a fable for those who no longer know what they are working for.

Oshitoishi Hill was photographed to take care of the position of the stars in the sky.prtimes.jp

Rei Shinomiya hugs his daughter Hikari in a scene from the film.prtimes.jp

References to Makoto Shinkai and a clear stance on rights

The team does not hide its influences. The press release mentions Makoto Shinkai as a reference for the detailed landscapes and the beauty of the scenes. The backgrounds of Aso were worked on one by one, rewriting the prompts until achieving the desired composition. They even photographed Oshitoishi Hill and took care of the position of the stars in the sky.

At a time when the use of AI generates rejection due to the fear of plagiarism, the production company clarifies that it did not directly incorporate any anime work into the prompts or the references. The script, lyrics, and prompts were written by hand, and the main voices are from real actors.

That decision responds to a conviction that the press release states bluntly: what moves a human can only be done by another human. AI works as a tool, not as a total replacement for creative judgment.

The film does not seek profit. It is published for free with the intention of sharing technical advances and remaining available at no cost. The stated goal is to expand the genres of anime and join the spread of Japanese culture around the world.

It has to be said: the team admits the work has shortcomings. It is Hirotaka's first direction and first script, and he has barely a year of experience working with video. Even so, completing a feature of this size with so few resources is a technical achievement worth observing closely.

Are you going to watch it? Tell me in the comments what you thought of the result.