The main characters of South Park are imagined as realistic live-action figures in impressive new AI-generated art. First airing in 1997 on Comedy Central, South Park follows the misadventures of four grade-schoolers, including Cartman, Kyle, Stan, and Kenny. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the animated show, voice the four main characters in addition to a host of others.
While the long-running series has always remained firmly in the animated realm, AI-generated art shared by manmeetsmachine on Instagram imagines what the South Park characters would look like as real, live-action people. Check out the art below:
In order, the images show Cartman, Kyle, Kenny (with angel wings), Stan, Wendy, Butters, Mr Garrison, Chef, Randy, and Kanye West as featured in the season 13 episode “Fishsticks”.
Would South Park Work In Live-Action?
Like The Simpsons, the animation style of South Park is a big part of why it’s remained popular for so long. The stop-motion cutout style animation has a certain charm to it, and it helps to give life to the world and the characters. The animation is also sometimes where the humor comes from, with big dramatic moments undercut to hilarious effect by the jerky, limited movements of all the South Park characters.
That’s not to mention the fact that a lot of what South Park does in animation would literally not be possible in live-action. In addition to sometimes featuring talking inanimate objects, such as Towelie, there are some running gags that rely on animation to work. The show depicts Canadians, for example, with entirely different character models that don’t have mouths and are instead animated with a head that entirely disconnects from the jaw when speaking.
This is in addition to, of course, the fact that some humor in the show would feel a lot more inapproprite if it was presented in live-action. The charm of the animation works well considering the show often tackles issues of race, politics, and gender in a fairly biting way that walks the line of what some would consider to be inappropriate or offensive. Despite how impressive the latest batch of live-action South Park art is, the show would probably do well to remain in the world of animation.
Source: @manmeetsmachine/ Instagram
