Bollywood veteran Amitabh Bachchan recently joined the viral Ghibli art trend on social media, sharing animated images of his weekly meet-and-greet session with fans on Tumblr.

“What would not perhaps meet immense debate would be the GOJ... and Ghibli .. invades the world," wrote Bachchan, sharing the AI-generated images on the blogging platform on Sunday.

Recently, other film stars like Vicky Kaushal, Katrina Kaif, Arjun Kapoor, and Sanjay Dutt hopped on the viral trend on social media.

While many users posted their Studio Ghibli-inspired images, other netizens condemned the trend, slamming it as being disrespectful to the artistic legacy of legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of the iconic animation studio.

Some social media users also shared an old interview clip of Miyazaki, where he expressed his disdain for machine-made artworks, calling it an “insult to life”.

“Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all,” he said, adding, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

Last week, leading Bollywood studios — including Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, Dinesh Vijan’s Maddock Films, and Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment — joined the trend. They shared Ghibli-style posters and images from their films, using ChatGPT’s latest model, GPT-4o, to reimagine iconic Bollywood scenes in the dreamy, hand-painted aesthetic of Ghibli films, merging Miyazaki’s signature artistry with the vibrancy of Indian cinema.