Plenty of human generated content, like ThroughLine Games’ puzzle platformer Forgotton Anne (2018), takes direct inspiration from Ghibli. Thinking through the similarities and differences between human generated and machine generated art helps highlight the shortcomings of AI.
The ongoing coverage of GPT-4o’s ability to “Ghibli-fy” almost everything, raises questions about the ethics and potential of generative AI. The images may look great, but using machines to reproduce an art style associated with loving, painstaking, human labor, has left many feeling pessimistic about the future of the arts.
GPT users aren’t the only ones inspired by Ghibli-esque animation. Human creators have long taken inspiration from Ghibli, including ThroughLine Games, a Danish company whose debut game, Forgotton Anne, was ubiquitously compared to studio Ghibli.
Forgotton Anne is a 2.5D puzzle platformer known for its stunning anime-style graphics. The comparison between Forgotton Anne and Studio Ghibli is typically positive—rather than view the similarity as derivative, most reviewers view ThroughLine as taking inspiration from Ghibli while making it their own. The Ghibli influence is in part attributable to the fact that ThroughLine’s animators studied under Ghibli animators in Japan.
The game has also been praised for its story. Forgotton Anne takes place in “The Forgotten Lands,” a place where objects go when they are forgotten. You play as Anne, one of two humans in this world, who acts as an enforcer, punishing the objects who are rebelling against your authoritarian rule in order to maintain “order.” Over the course of the game, Anne, and the player, come to realize the unethical cruelty of her actions.
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Players and reviewers have read the game as commenting on authoritarianism and fascism. In an interview with Game Pilgrim, the CEO of ThroughLine Games, Alfred Nguyen, notes that the game’s dark themes are intended to offer commentary on issues including “consumerism, surveillance, and what it means to be human.”
While Forgotton Anne received positive reviews for its art and storytelling, the game also received criticism for its clunky, uninspired mechanics. The puzzles and platforming are forgettable and unoriginal.
Like most pieces of art, Forgotten Anne is directly inspired by many different preexisting artworks. In addition to Ghibli, Nguyen talks about how the game was inspired by Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, and Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. The puzzle and platforming components are similar to countless other games that came before.
And, like most pieces of art, sometimes Forgotten Anne is successful in borrowing from its inspirations and sometimes it’s not. When such acts are successful, we typically call them creative. When they aren’t not, we call them derivative.
Human creativity is often a matter of combining or recycling a wide assortment of influences. Shakespeare borrowed plots, ideas, and sometimes exact phrasing from a wide variety of sources including Plutarch’s Lives, Montaigne’s Essays, and the plays of his contemporaries.
The fact that humans don’t create art in a vacuum, makes me skeptical of recent dismissive claims that AI can’t match “genuine creativity.” It’s true that AI models, like GPT-4o, are predictive–the content they produce is based on statistical probabilities in their training data. But, arguably, aspects of human creativity—including our ability to blend and pull from multiple sources of inspiration—work in much the same way.
Because of this, I think it is entirely possible that generative AI models will, in several years’ time, be able to make a game much like Forgotten Anne. But I wouldn’t want to play it.
Games make statements and arguments—sometimes these statements are artistic, political, and ethical. Forgotten Anne, for example, makes arguments against authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Its story encourages us to treat each other with kindness. What would a Ghibli-esque game about authoritarianism, kindness, and the human condition, mean coming from an AI model?
When we play games, much as when we engage with any other storytelling media, we are entering a dialogue with the creators. This might result in players feeling recognized or seen. Or it might result in players vehemently disagreeing with a game’s content or messaging. Either way, we are engaging with people who have put their beliefs, ideas, and talent into a piece of art. Ideally, this is something consumers will continue to support.
Forgotten Anne’s sequel, Forgotlings, has a free demo available on Steam. The game releases on Steam on June 12, 2025.
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