Upscale 90s and early 2000 American cartoons

90s Cartoon v1

Upscaling of Animation based on The Legend of Korra.

ATLA KORRA

Purpose: Anime/Pretrained

A 2x Ultra Lite model coming in under 8MB. Trained with over 15 sets of LRs ranging in a wide amount of issues. Handles Rainbows, Dot Crawl, MPEG/H.264 Compression, and may even assist in removing halos, and fixing blurriness in certain cases. This is my first public model for everyone. Best when used on old anime that is grainy. I can't say what anime it's best suited for as I have tried multiple series, and have found it does a good job on most all the tests. I wouldn't say use this for Western Animation, but it may work. I have done a few tests that I have shown in the upscale results, but that was chained with other models to achieve such a result. This model is meant to retain the more natural look of a series. There is a color shift on the end result, not drastic, but still noticable. I figure you should fix any color issues in post that way to give a more polished upscale. Big thanks to @SaurusX for the model name, and just helping out in general with anything.

AnimeClassics UltraLite

Purpose: Anime

This release contains an ESRGAN and an RCAN version. Both provide superior quality compared to AnimeSharpV2 in nearly every scenario. It has most of the advantages of the old V2 Sharp models, while not having issues with depth of field. 

The RCAN model outperforms the ESRGAN model by a significant margin, with much more consistent generation and overall better detail retention. Currently it is NOT compatible with chaiNNer, but will be available on the nightly build soon (hopefully).

RCAN vs ESRGAN: https://slow.pics/c/Zqgl62Ni

__Comparisons:__ <https://slow.pics/c/A2BRSa0U>


![1729798851 305732](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/4d7aaf33-5a39-4f75-8a05-90b90a693e49)

AnimeSharpV3

AnimeSharpV3_RCAN

Pretrained: 4x_muy4_035_1.pth

This is my first model, so it's not perfect, but I wanted to see if I could train an upscaling model that didn't result in a lot of detail loss and deblurring like the current Compact upscaling models. I believe I accomplished this, but I was unable to reduce contrast shifting. The contrast shifting may cause skin tones to appear incorrect on bright frames, but it's not too bad overall! I'll list a few examples below; more can be found by clicking the Overview link on the Github release page.

Pretrained model: Kim2091_CrappyCompactV2.pth

Bubble AnimeScale Compact v1

2x_Bubble_AnimeScale_SwinIR_Small_v1 was trained to upscale anime frames faithfully without major contrast shifting compared to my compact model. Although much slower compared to my compact model, the results look significantly better! A few example upscales are listed below; more can be found by clicking the Overview link on the Github release page.

Bubble AnimeScale SwinIR Small v1

Using the Kineko 4K scan the hope was to clean up the Funi DVD releases and upscale to something comparable. This model degrains the series pretty damn well, but what's revealed beneath is a lot of moving noise that's probably best dealt with in pre- or post- with a video editor like AVISynth. So while the model is remarkably temporally stable, the DBZ sources certainly aren't. The movies look really nice when upscaled with raw input, though.

2x_DBZScanLite

Category: Cel Animation
Purpose: Traditional Animation

Upscaling Dragon Ball Z DBox DVD's. - grainy sources. It keeps some grain, but also doing some cleaning, sharpening, and fixing.

DigitalFilmV5 Lite

Category: Digital Animation


This was trained on the dataset that OptimusPrimal used for his DigitalFilm models. This model cleans up the image removing some noise while upscaling. This model is very fast, running around 200x the speed of a standard ESRGAN model on my system. This is primarily a proof of concept for how fast Real-ESRGAN models can get while still producing nice results.

DigitalFlim SuperUltraCompact

This model is designed to upscale the standard definition digital era of the Pokémon anime, which runs from late season 5 (Master Quest) to early season 12 (Galactic Battles). During this time, the show was animated digitally in a 4:3 ratio. This process was also used for Mewtwo Returns, most of Pokémon Chronicles, and the Mystery Dungeon specials.

Advice/Known Limitations:
* This OmniSR model can occasionally produce black frames when run in fp16 mode. This seems to be more common in the TPCi era (seasons 9 and later). The issue is sporadic enough that it probably makes sense to do a first pass in fp16, then re-upscale any affected shots in fp32.
* I recommend using QTGMC on a preset of "Slow" or slower for deinterlacing. While the show is primarily animated at 12/24 fps, some elements like backgrounds are animated at a full 60i, particularly for the Diamond & Pearl era, which increased the base animation frame rate to 15 fps.
* The model is not great at handling fonts, particularly the italicized text in the episode credits. This is despite including font images in the training data.

Version History:

* 1.1.0 (9/16/2025): Added images from SD portion of season 12, augmented training to better handle slightly resized images.
* 1.0.0: Initial Release

Digital Pokémon-Large

This model is designed to upscale the standard definition digital era of the Pokémon anime, which runs from late season 5 (Master Quest) to early season 12 (Galactic Battles). During this time, the show was animated digitally in a 4:3 ratio. This process was also used for Mewtwo Returns, most of Pokémon Chronicles, and the Mystery Dungeon specials.

Advice/Known Limitations:
* I recommend using QTGMC on a preset of "Slow" or slower for deinterlacing. While the show is primarily animated at 12/24 fps, some elements like backgrounds are animated at a full 60i, particularly for the Diamond & Pearl era, which increased the base animation frame rate to 15 fps.
* The model is not great at handling fonts, particularly the italicized text in the episode credits. This is despite including font images in the training data.

Version History:

* 1.1.0 (9/16/2025): Added images from SD portion of season 12, augmented training to better handle slightly resized images.
* 1.0.0: Initial Release

Digital Pokémon-Small

This model upscales while doing some sharpening and line darkening. Can also clean up some minor artifacts of various types. It is intended to to be a good general purpose upscaler that will work well with most animation.

Futsuu Anime

This is my first 2xcompact model, the main purpose of it is to upscale Dragon ball GT. for upscaling videos that have grain I would recommend denoising and dehaloing it before passing it to the model for temporal stability.

GT-evA

This is the v2 of my 2xGT model, the main purpose of it is to improve upon the v1 model and make more it generalized.
for upscaling videos that have grain I would recommend denoising and de-haloing it before passing it through  the model.

GT-v2-evA

Meant to preserve original 4:3 framing of G&F while upscaling. Trained to handle all seven seasons, which drastically differ in quality. Fixes include rainbowing, dot-crawl, halos, general noise, and of course MPEG-2 artifacts. It should be generally flexible in dealing with different degrees of those artifacts, but as always the cleaner the source the better. The model could be useful with other shows from the '80s and '90s with ugly video sources. Maybe.

2x_Garfield1_308k

Purpose: A lightweight anime 2x upscaling model with realistic degradations, based on musl's HFA2k_LUDVAE dataset

2x lightweight anime upscaler with realistic degradations (compression, noise, blur) based on musl's HFA2k_LUDVAE dataset.

Original Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Fe1Uu3-L5YWaVSwPGBTIPG4xU7kK9rZK?usp=drive_link

HFA2k LUDVAE SPAN

Purpose: A lightweight anime 2x upscaling model with realistic degradations, based on musl's HFA2k_LUDVAE dataset

2x lightweight anime upscaler with realistic degradations (compression, noise, blur) based on musl's HFA2k_LUDVAE dataset.

HFA2k LUDVAE compact

Upscale modern animation images/videos. Compression, blur, and un-sharpening degradations were used on the dataset. First model I trained and I think it came out pretty well.

ModernSpanimationV1

Upscaling model for 1990s cartoon series "Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?" May also be useful for other shows of that era.

Note: Before using this model, you will need to either:
* Deinterlace the episodes (I recommend QTGMC on Slower) to 60 fps (I recommend 60 fps because that's the rate of the live-action footage and some other components).
* Repair the existing deinterlacing via one of the related models for this show.
Which method will depend on the episode and release. See the related deinterlacing models for details.

This show is...complicated. Unlike, say, the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, where live action and animated segments are generally separated into large chunks, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego repeatedly switches between live-action, traditional animation, 3D CGI, 2D computer graphics, stock photography, and other sources, sometimes combining them in the same frame. As such, rather than create multiple models for each type, I've created a single model for all footage types.

Known Weaknesses:
* The model performs less well on the live-action (Player) and 3D CGI (C5 Corridor) segments due to a scarcity of usable data in those scenes.
* I don't own the 2025 DVD release, so I can't comment on how well this model works on that footage.

Where On Earth-Upscale-Large

Where On Earth-Upscale-Small

This model is based on a private model by @eula 5600x 3070 named 4x_eula_anifilm_v1_225k. He sent me a copy of the model, and I decided to train a compact model based on it with his permission. This model seems to fix the majority of the issues the original model had while being far faster, it's just a tiny bit softer in some images.

The dataset consists of Dragon Ball movies converted to YUV24 with @sgdisk --zap-all /dev/sda's help to reduce artifacts, then upscaled with ArtClarity and eula_anifilm. LRs are the original frames right from DVD. As a result, this model corrects some color space issues. The 2x model's HRs were downscaled by 50% with Lanczos.

The 2x and 4x models are pretty close in output despite being trained separately. The 2x model is a bit softer overall.

The models in the Real-ESRGAN Compatible folder are the original output from Real-ESRGANs training code for compatibility reasons.

Anifilm Compact (2x)

A 2x model designed for hand-drawn animation of the 80's, 90's and early 2000s.

The Super Mario Bros. Super Show is a hybrid animated and live-action show that debuted in 1989. Each episode featured a cartoon segment sandwiched between live-action segments. The combination of the two formats makes the show very difficult to upscale, and creates the need for multiple model files.

These models were trained using footage from the show itself (except for some title images that were recreated in Photoshop) by finding cases where the same image was shown at different resolutions. For the animated footage, I also did some retouching to reduce haloing, color bleed, and other issues.

A few notes:

- The opening sequence (in particular, the first shot with the giant talking Mario face) is very difficult to upscale due to the picture being degraded from multiple layers of compositing. Ideally, a professional remaster of the series would have access to the individual elements, upscale those, then recomposite them.
- Although live-action models are provided, you will likely get better results from commercial upscaling software (I recommend  the Proteus model in Topaz Video AI).
- Footage must be deinterlaced before processing (I recommend QTGMC for both live-action and animated segments).

[Full Read Me](https://www.mediafire.com/file/brp4c0pvv5s42rw/ReadMe.txt/file)

[Sample Animated Result](https://www.mediafire.com/view/wtieecra7iov35f/Animation_Sample.png/file)

[Sample Live Action Result](https://www.mediafire.com/view/xa7jenxl18xd1y7/Live_Action_Sample.png/file)

Architecture	OmniSR
Scale	2x
Color Mode	RGB
License	MIT Private use Commercial use Distribution Modifications Credit required No Liability & Warranty Disclaimer
Date	2025-09-16
Dataset	Screenshots from seasons 6-12 of the English Pokémon dub, plus some manually created images for fonts.
Dataset size	80
Training iterations	510000
Training HR size	64
Training OTF	No

Digital Pokémon-Large

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