Nice. Can they interpolate frames, too, so that old 5fps anime can get an upgrade?
But with 5fps, each frame can be so radically different, I think interpolation is generally just not possible. You can generate something smooth, but it will be so far away from whatever an animator would actually have inserted, that it will seem more strange/surreal than natural, and thus achieve the opposite effect as intended.
E.g. see [1] which shows animation at 15/30/60fps... you can see that even with the 15, it's hard to imagine an algorithm that would port well to 60. (Use the period on your keyboard to advance frame-by-frame.)
Even high grade interpolation sometimes has this problem - or the comparable "wake of water near moving object" one. Essentially you'd get tons of inpainting kind of artifacts.
By the way, most animated sequences are about 8fps even now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/bikp2u/tom...
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/biixsf/t...
Aside from the obvious problem of motion interpolation having problems with acceleration/deceleration, there's a lot of nuance in the original animation that gets lost when you try to interpolate from one sprite to the next.
Even if you can avoid obvious artifacts, no interpolation algorithm can create new information, it can only derive from what's already there and guess at what's missing.
EDIT: If you dig through twitter you'll find some tweets from animators explaining why the results are bad. As mere consumers we might be tempted to dismiss that criticism as snobbery but animating is a craft and the interpolated results are objectively worse than the original.
Old cartoons lend themselves to be converted to vector images and these are better to animate automatically.
Direct link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjViy6kyiqs