It is a heat fall afternoon at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, and a delicate breeze blows by means of the meticulously landscaped timber lining the walkways. On one finish of the campus, a ray of sunshine hits the famed Group Disney constructing, the place 19-foot-tall stone carvings of the seven dwarfs (of Snow White fame) maintain up the roof.
The famend sculptural structure is a nod to the movie that helped construct the Disney empire. And simply throughout the lot, inside Disney’s Essential Avenue Cinema, the leisure large is exploring methods to protect that legacy with the assistance of know-how, resembling synthetic intelligence.
4 startups are gathered within the theater to current their know-how to a crowd of executives and media attendees. One startup, Animaj, is demonstrating the way it makes use of AI to speed up the animating course of.
Brightly coloured, blobby figures prance and sure throughout a large display screen in entrance of me, characters from a kids’s YouTube collection known as Pocoyo. Animaj — chosen by Disney as one among its 2025 cohort of startups to finance, platform, and mentor through the Disney Accelerator Program — is now utilizing each human artists and AI to supply these shorts, permitting it to deliver the collection to screens shortly.
“Because of this device, it takes lower than 5 weeks to supply a 5-minute-long episode, whereas it used to take 5 months,” Animaj CEO and co-founder Sixte de Vauplane tells me, talking in entrance of the corporate’s demo house after the presentation.
That dramatic acceleration of a historically painstaking course of flows straight from the fast advances in generative AI during the last a number of years. And people advances aren’t only for the professionals: AI-powered video-generating instruments surged into the mainstream in 2025. Google’s Veo 3 and OpenAI’s Sora 2 now permit anybody to create a cartoon animation from the consolation of their telephone, with none sketching expertise and even creative inclination required. The usage of generative AI is one thing that Hollywood has been preventing to maintain at bay, lest it take jobs away from human artists.
However Animaj says its know-how would not substitute animators — it merely makes their jobs much less tedious. An animator will nonetheless be sketching out every of the principle poses; AI shall be used to fill in all of the in-between actions of the character that transfer them from A to Z. And even then, the corporate says, an animator is in command of tweaking these AI-generated actions.
It is an fascinating perspective after I take into consideration the constructing proper throughout from me, which homes a whole lot of Disney animators. Will they see AI the identical manner?
Disney confirmed to me that it’s going to quickly introduce its partnership with Animaj, with the 2 corporations in discussions round the way to doubtlessly use this AI system in animation throughout Disney Branded Tv and Disney Tv Studios.
“The plan is to announce one thing within the coming months,” says David Min, vice chairman of Disney Innovation.
Protecting artists centered with AI instruments
Hand sketches turn into immediate 3D animations.
Animators will management the AI function as one other a part of their digital toolkit, in keeping with de Vauplane. The storyboarding course of will stay the identical as it’s with extra conventional computer-generated imagery, he says — the AI device will simply “deliver the concept to life a lot quicker.”
“The artist is in management. For us, it is tremendous essential as a result of we all know that AI will be seen as a risk for the artist,” de Vauplane says. “We need to present that there’s one other manner to make use of AI in a really moral manner.”
I reached out to the Animation Guild for remark and am nonetheless awaiting a response. However late final 12 months, after 4 months of bargaining, the union representing animators wasn’t capable of embrace many AI security provisions in its contract; they don’t seem to be capable of keep away from utilizing AI instruments if required by a job, as an illustration, or to choose out of getting their work used to coach these AI instruments.
However creative expression has an extended historical past of evolving with know-how.
Animators moved on from watercolor hand sketches — used to animate Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Magnificence within the Thirties and ’50s, respectively — to CGI for films like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s. This transitioned into 3D CGI with the discharge of Tangled and Frozen within the 2010s. Every technological innovation has sped up the animation course of. So is AI merely one other device within the fashionable CGI toolkit, particularly if it preserves the important thing components of an animator’s workflow?
To keep up the “creator-first strategy” that facilities human artists — an indicator of final century’s Walt and Roy Disney partnership — Min says that Disney regarded into “just about all the AI corporations.”
“We checked out hundreds of corporations, all huge and small, and what Animaj does effectively is that the artist is basically driving the method,” he says, including that you do not actually see this in video-generating AI apps like Sora and Veo, which learn your textual content prompts and spit out (normally nonsensical) movies.
“That is the artist drawing the important thing frames from A to Z, after which permitting issues to be crammed in in between. That is why we chosen Animaj.”
Expediting the animation course of
Animaj’s “movement in-betweening,” which permits artists to enter the principle character positions, with the AI mannequin filling within the blanks of what will get the character from standing to sitting place.
Animaj’s AI device is used to expedite the animation course of. Educated solely on pictures from the present in query, and dealing throughout the parameters of an animator’s real-time sketches, the AI device predicts the character’s subsequent strikes — and the animator corrects it when it goes awry. This will save plenty of time: hours, weeks, months, relying on the kind of animation and present being labored on.
Min says it takes for much longer to make an animated collection than many individuals perceive.
“It may be like a 12 months earlier than you may even get a pilot of one thing to check out. With Animaj, they’ll do it in 30% of the time,” Min says. We’re standing in entrance of Disney’s Stage 1 constructing, amid a throng of Disney solid members, startup reps and different tech execs and fans. “The way forward for animation is a giant, broad assertion, however positively that is the place the way forward for animation goes and trending.”
Like so many media corporations within the age of streaming, Disney wants to supply high-quality content material at a quicker charge to maintain up with viewers demand. Animaj additionally makes use of AI to gather knowledge to know what themes are trending or resonating with on-line audiences, after which animate episodes shortly to fulfill these pursuits whereas they’re present and common.
As a result of its animation course of strikes so quickly, Min says, Animaj may also check new concepts a lot quicker.
“Not solely have they got the content material manufacturing AI to truly assist construct the animated shorts quicker,” Min says, “however then they’re utilizing AI to additionally learn the analytics on what is going on on with the viewing of the video that may then assist inform the storytelling as effectively.”
Filling within the blanks or ‘movement in-betweening’: How does AI animation work?
Outdoors, sitting beneath a tree within the California sunshine, a Pocoyo animator sketches a personality on a display screen, with a 3D mannequin popping up on the display screen beside it. I watch as he makes use of a stylus to make slight changes to arm and leg actions generated by the AI mannequin.
“Our proprietary animation device permits the artist, Joe sitting right here, to attract a sketch and to manage the animation simply primarily based on the sketch,” Antoine Lhermitte, Animaj CTO, says as we watch the artist work. It is a huge time-saver, he says.
An animator sketched Pocoyo characters whereas the AI mannequin immediately generated these sketches into 3D variations.
Weblog posts by Animaj element the way it makes use of AI to deliver sketches to animated life, whereas nonetheless retaining an animation’s distinctive artwork fashion.
The corporate used 4 seasons of Pocoyo to construct a database of greater than 300,000 poses, utilizing each sketches and their corresponding 3D poses for every character that the AI mannequin might be taught from. Artists have been additionally requested to supply extra sketches of the characters for use within the subsequent season.
Artists can enter right into a 3D pose modeling program varied positions of the character — as an illustration, standing after which sitting. The AI mannequin would then fill within the blanks of what will get the character from standing to sitting place, one thing Animaj calls “movement in-betweening.”
Working with the AI mannequin, the artist makes corrections to any of the AI-generated animations, like shifting an arm or a leg to the place it ought to be.
The time financial savings in not having to hand-draw each single pose in a personality’s actions means animators can “focus extra on refining the fashion and movement of scenes fairly than ranging from scratch with every new pose,” Animaj says.
In consequence, the artists are freed up from repetitive duties to spend extra time on the artistic aspect. On the similar time, it is enabling these artists to make use of an AI device that’s matched up with their working fashion, and never one which’s producing textual content prompt-based AI slop — like all these horrific animations invading YouTube or social media, the place the characters’ options change in each body or have three tails and 17 fingers.
“We all know how irritating it may be while you use third-party AI fashions and also you immediate one thing, it creates one thing so completely different than what you bear in mind,” de Vauplane says. “Right here, it creates one thing, generates one thing you may simply tweak … one thing which is totally in keeping with the model DNA.”
Preserving that Disney DNA is important because the leisure large seeks to uphold its hundred-year legacy whereas maintaining tempo with fashionable know-how. Because the seven dwarfs sang within the basic 1937 movie Snow White, which established Disney as an animation powerhouse, “Heigh ho, heigh ho, it is off to work we go.” For tomorrow’s animators, it is off to work with the assistance of AI.
