Anduril's head of design on anime films, the Studio Ghibli moment, and why they never use generative AI for their art

Summary

Jen, Anduril's head of design, leads the team responsible for the company's increasingly distinctive visual identity — including a series of short animated films that have made Anduril one of the most copied brands in tech.

The anime pivot

Jen pitched the anime direction roughly two years ago. The sell to Palmer Luckey was easy — he's a well-known Sword Art Online fan — but the timing wasn't right until the team was in place. The genre fit was also strategic: anime has historically leaned into military themes, futuristic machines, and advanced technology defeating adversaries, which maps cleanly onto what Anduril builds. Their first anime short, Barracuda, launched last year. The most recent maritime short went from initial sketch to final video in five weeks.

No generative AI in the art

Despite being an AI company, Anduril uses no generative AI in its creative work. The toolchain is conventional 3D production: Cinema 4D, Blender, Redshift, Rhino, Keyshot. The production pipeline starts with a concept of operations ("conop"), moves through storyboarding, key frames for lighting and texture, previs for blocking, and then final production with art, motion, editing, graphics, music, and sound all collaborating in parallel. Storyboards are vetted with customers throughout.

Where Jen does want to invest in AI is pre-production — using it to plan composition, lighting setups, and camera movements before committing to expensive or one-take shoots involving real hardware.

The Studio Ghibli moment

Anduril's maritime film launched the same week the Ghibli filter spread across ChatGPT. Jen's read: the generative Ghibli aesthetic is genuinely impressive, and the trend had been building — McDonald's and the LA Chargers had both done anime-style pieces — but it also signals that the style is becoming commoditized. Her response isn't to chase accessibility. Anduril's subject matter is too operationally specific to prompt effectively with generative tools. Visualizing how two autonomous systems communicate in a contested environment isn't something you can easily describe in a text prompt, so the work stays with the in-house team.

ITAR and the CAD problem

The design team doesn't pull engineering CAD files directly into production. Designers scrub and rebuild models into clean OBJ files suitable for texturing and lighting — a deliberate process that also ensures the rendered assets don't expose what Anduril is actually building.

Recruiting shift

Five years ago, defense work was a frequent dealbreaker for designers. That's changed. Jen says applicants now actively seek out Anduril, citing a desire to apply their skills toward a larger mission. She attributes the shift partly to the visibility of global conflicts and partly to Anduril's own brand presence raising the profile of design in defense.

The team also runs a separate experimental pipeline alongside production work — one designer is pushing Blender textures to their limit, another (a veteran of Avatar) is doing world-building in Unity — to build technical capability ahead of future projects.

Anduril's design output has become a talent and brand asset in its own right. The five-week turnaround on a technically complex animated short, produced entirely in-house without generative AI, is the clearest signal of how seriously the company treats visual communication as a competitive differentiator.