China's AI War Anime Is Weird, Wild, and Strangely Fascinating
Right, so I’ve been down a bit of a rabbit hole this week, and honestly I’m still not entirely sure how to process what I’ve seen.
Chinese state media has released a second episode of their AI-generated animated series about the Iran conflict. Yes, you read that correctly. State-produced. AI-generated. Animated. War coverage. It’s a sentence I genuinely never expected to type, and yet here we are in 2025 where apparently this is just… a thing that exists now.
The reaction online has been fascinating. People seem genuinely impressed by the production quality, with comments ranging from “this is fantastic” to comparisons with mainstream Western news coverage — and not unfavourably. One person quipped that it’s “more fact-based than most Fox News coverage,” which got a laugh out of me, though it does carry a somewhat uncomfortable undertone if you think about it too hard.
And I have been thinking about it too hard, because that’s sort of what I do.
On one level, this is genuinely remarkable from a technical standpoint. The pace at which AI-generated video has gone from uncanny-valley nightmare fuel to something people are calling “very well made” is staggering. A year ago this stuff looked like melting wax figures having a stroke. Now we’re apparently getting episodic geopolitical animation that people are binge-watching and asking when season two drops. The technology has moved faster than most of us in the tech industry honestly expected, and I’ve been in and around this space for a while.
But here’s where my brain starts to itch a little.
This is state media. This isn’t some indie animator goofing around on YouTube. This is a deliberate editorial and propagandistic choice by a government to use AI-generated content to frame an ongoing geopolitical conflict in a particular way — and to make it entertaining. That’s not a small thing. The medium carries its own message here. By wrapping geopolitical narrative in the aesthetics of animation and the accessibility of episodic content, you’re doing something quite clever and quite calculated. You’re reaching an audience that might scroll past a dry news segment but will absolutely stick around for a stylised action series.
There’s a reason people are joking about waiting for the season finale.
We’ve always known that propaganda works better when it doesn’t feel like propaganda. That’s not new. But AI is removing the enormous cost and time barrier that previously limited how polished and prolific that kind of content could be. What used to require a full animation studio and months of production can apparently now be turned around fast enough to be episodic and current. That’s a genuinely new capability in the information warfare toolkit, and I think we’d be naive to treat it purely as a curiosity.
At the same time — and I want to be honest here — Western media outlets are hardly paragons of unbiased conflict coverage either. The comment about Fox News stings because it has a grain of truth. We consume narratively shaped media constantly, just wrapped in formats we’ve been conditioned to find credible. At least the animation is transparent about being a produced thing. There’s an argument, a slightly uncomfortable one, that the honesty of the artifice is its own kind of clarity.
What this really underscores for me is how urgently we need better media literacy frameworks. Not just for kids — for everyone. My daughter’s school does touch on this stuff, which I’m glad about, but the pace of change means the goalposts keep shifting faster than curricula can follow. The tools for generating convincing, emotionally engaging, narratively compelling content are now available to basically anyone with a state budget or a decent laptop. Teaching people to interrogate why content exists, who made it, and what it wants them to feel is more important than ever.
It’s wild out there. But it’s also, I’ll admit, kind of grimly compelling television.