I tried asking for a shot from a live-action remake of My Neighbor Totoro. This is a task I’ve been curious about for a while. Like Sonic, Totoro is the kind of stylized cartoon character that can’t be rendered photorealistically without a great deal of subjective interpretation, which (like in Sonic’s case) is famously easy to get wrong even for humans. Unlike Sonic, Totoro hasn’t had an actual live-action remake, so the model would have to come up with a design itself. I was wondering what it might produce – something good? something horrifying? Unfortunately, neither; it just produced a digital-art style image, despite being asked for a photorealistic one, and kept doing so even when I copied some of the keyword-stuffing from the post. At least it tried. I can’t test this with ChatGPT because it trips the copyright filter.