In the current conversation about AI film-making and uncredited creators, the backlash has reignited discourse about plagiarism in the director’s previous work.
Aronofsky vs AI
On This Day… 1776 is a series of shorts produced by Primordial Soup, an AI Studio founded by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. TIME Studios announced that the series was “made in part with AI from Google DeepMind“, “animated using generative AI tools, and voiced by SAG actors”. The announcement also made mention of the role of “Slack, a Salesforce company” (in other words: a bunch more non-filmmakers messaged eachother about it on the company group chat).
Between the praise for and the backlash to this release…
… I personally have been fighting the urge to pile on to the pile-on with my 20-year slow-cook hot take (“You all saw The Fountain and The Whale but only now are throwing shade?”). In the meantime, more meaningful receipts of director Aronofsky’s hackery are surfacing.
Aronofsky vs Anime
Animator Satoshi Kon talked about how Requiem for a Dream (2000) took from his film Perfect Blue (1997) (more on that here and here):
Satoshi Kon talks about how Requiem for a Dream took from his film Perfect Blue (1997) pic.twitter.com/apBQtPoY0W
— Animation Obsessive (@ani_obsessive) January 30, 2026
There are side-by-side comparisons of sequences from the two films…
… as well as similar side-by-sides of Perfect Blue and another of Aronofsky’s films, Black Swan (2010):
Black Swan vs Perfect Blue pic.twitter.com/AGjwRQvklX
— Nostalgia (@nostalgiaa) February 1, 2026
Further Viewing
This is perhaps an occasion to revisit this moment from Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki:
Recent years have seen developments in AI for film-making that are both scary and helpful: