300,000 Stops in an Instant: My Visit to Disney Studios and the New Reality of Animation.
On a warm fall afternoon at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, a cool breeze blows through the graceful trees that line the walkways. A ray of sunlight reaches the famous Team Disney building, where a 19-foot-tall stone sculpture of the seven dwarfs of Snow White’s fame lifts the roof.
The famous sculptural structure is a nod to the film that helped build the Disney empire. And just across the street, inside Disney’s Main Street Cinema, the entertainment giant is exploring ways to preserve that legacy with the help of technology, such as artificial intelligence. Four startups gathered in a theater to present their technology to a crowd of executives and media attendees. One startup, Animaj, shows how it uses AI to speed up the animation process.
Brightly colored, overlapping images run and connect on the wide screen in front of me, characters from a YouTube children’s series called Pocoyo. Animaj — selected by Disney as one of its 2025 startups to fund, platform and mentor through the Disney Accelerator program — now uses human artists and AI to produce these shorts, allowing it to bring series to screens faster.
“Thanks to this tool, it takes less than five weeks to produce a 5-minute clip, whereas it used to take five months,” said Animaj CEO and co-founder Sixte de Vauplane, speaking in front of the company’s demo space after the launch.
That dramatic acceleration of a painfully normal process flows directly into the rapid development of generative AI a few years ago, and that development is not only for workers: AI-powered video production tools will be normalized by 2025. Google’s Version 3 and OpenAI’s Sora 2 now let anyone create a cartoon animation from the comfort of their phone, without any drawing experience or artistic inclination required. Productive use of AI is one such thing In Hollywood it strives to restrain itself, lest it rob human artists of their jobs.
But Animaj says its technology is not a replacement for animators. It just makes their jobs less boring. The animator will still be drawing each main pose, and the AI will be used to fill in all the movements between the character that take them from A to Z. And even then, the company says, the animator is in control of those AI-generated movements.
It’s an interesting sight when I think about the building across from me, which houses hundreds of Disney animators. Will they see AI the same way? Disney has confirmed that it will soon launch its partnership with Animaj, with the two companies in discussions about how to use this AI animation system across Disney Branded Television and Disney Television Studios.
“We plan to announce something in the coming months,” said David Min, vice president of Disney Innovation.
Keeping artists focused with AI tools
Hand drawings become 3D animations.
Animators will control the AI aspect as another part of the digital toolkit, according to de Vauplane. The storyboarding process will remain the same as it is with traditional computer-generated graphics, he says. The AI tool will “bring the idea to life very quickly.”
“The artist is in control. For us, it’s very important because we know that AI can be seen as a threat to the artist,” said de Vauplane. “We want to show that there is another way to use AI in a more ethical way.”
I’ve reached out to the Animation Guild for comment and I’m still waiting for a response. But late last year, after four months of negotiations, the union representing the animators was unable to include more AI safety provisions in its contract. They won’t be able to avoid using AI tools when the job requires it, for example, or opt out of having their work used to train those AI tools.
But artistic expression has a long history of technological development.
Animators moved from hand-drawn watercolors — used to animate Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty in the 1930s and 1950s, respectively — to CGI in movies like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin in the 1980s and 1990s. It switched to 3D CGI with the release of Tangled and Frozen in the 2010s. Each technological innovation has accelerated the animation process. So is AI just another tool in the modern CGI toolkit, especially if it maintains key aspects of an animator’s workflow?
To maintain a “creator-first approach” that focuses on human artists — a hallmark of Walt and Roy Disney’s century-old partnership — Min says Disney is looking “a lot at all AI companies.”
“We looked at thousands of companies, all big and small, and what Animaj does well is that the artist really drives the process,” he said, adding that you don’t really see this in AI video-generating apps like Sora and Veo, which read your text message and spit out (often silly) videos. “This is an artist who draws keyframes from A to Z, then lets things fill in. That’s why we chose Animaj.”
To speed up the animation process
The “motion in-betweening” feature from Animaj allows artists to insert the main character’s locations, with an AI model filling in the gaps of what makes the character move from standing to sitting.
Animaj’s AI tool is used to speed up the animation process. Trained solely on footage from the show in question, and working within the confines of the photographer’s real-time sketches, the AI tool predicts the character’s next move — and the animation corrects it when it goes wrong. This can save a lot of time: hours, weeks, months, depending on the type of animation and show being worked on.
Min says that it takes longer to make an animated series than most people realize.
“It can be like a year before you get a pilot for something to test. With Animaj, they can do it in 30% of the time,” said Min. We are standing in front of Disney’s Stage 1 building, among a crowd of Disney cast members, startup reps and other tech executives and enthusiasts. “The future of animation is a big, broad statement, but it’s definitely where the future of animation is going and trending.”
Like many media companies over the years broadcastDisney needs to produce high-quality content at a fast rate to keep up with audience demand. Animaj also uses AI to gather data to understand what topics are trending or resonate with online audiences, then quickly animates episodes to meet those interests while they’re still current and popular.
Because its animation process is so fast, Min says, Animaj can also test new ideas very quickly.
“Not only do they have AI for content generation to help create animated shorts quickly,” Min said, “but they also use AI to learn statistics about what’s going on with video views that can help inform and tell a story.”
How does AI animation work?
Outside, sitting under a tree in the California sunshine, Pocoyo animator draws a character on the screen with a 3D model that appears on the screen next to him. I watch as he uses the stylus to make small changes to the arm and leg movements generated by the AI.
An animator draws the Pocoyo characters while an AI model rapidly generates the drawings into 3D versions.
“Our proprietary animation tool allows the artist, Joe sitting here, to draw a sketch and control the animation based on the sketch,” said Antoine Lhermitte, Animaj’s chief technology officer, as we watched the artist work. It’s a huge time saver, he adds.
A blog post about Animaj details how it uses AI to bring animation to life, while maintaining the animation’s unique art style. The company used Pocoyo’s four seasons to build a database of more than 300,000, using both drawings and their corresponding 3D poses for each character that the AI model could learn from. The artists were also asked to produce some sketches of the characters to be used in the next season.
Artists can enter the 3D modeling program in different positions of the character, for example, standing and sitting. The AI model will then fill in the blanks for what makes the character go from standing to sitting, something Animaj calls “mid-motion.”
Working with an AI model, the artist makes corrections to any AI-generated animation, such as removing an arm or a leg where it should be. Saving time by not having to manually draw each pose that comes with a character’s actions means animators “can focus more on refining the style and flow of scenes rather than starting from scratch with each new pose,” Animaj said.
As a result, artists are freed from repetitive tasks to spend more time on the creative side. At the same time, it allows those artists to use an AI tool that suits their style of work, rather than one that is generated based on text recognition. AI sloplike all those animations that invade YouTube or social media, where the characters’ features change in every frame or have three tails and 17 fingers.
“We know how frustrating it can be when you’re using third-party AI models and you’re telling something, it’s creating something very different than what you have in mind,” says de Vauplane. “Here, it creates something, it creates something that you can easily adjust… something that is fully compatible with the brand DNA.”
Retaining that Disney DNA is important as the entertainment giant seeks to uphold its 100-year legacy while keeping up with modern technology. As the seven dwarfs sang in the 1937 classic Snow White, which established Disney as an animation powerhouse, “Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s up and running.” In future animations, it will work with the help of AI.
