A warm fall afternoon at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. A gentle breeze blows through the trees along the carefully manicured walkways, and a ray of sunlight hits the famous Team Disney building. There, a 19-foot-tall stone sculpture of the Seven Dwarfs (of Snow White fame) supports the roof.
The famous sculptural architecture pays homage to the films that helped build the Disney empire. And across the property, inside Disney’s Main Street Cinema, the entertainment giant is exploring ways to preserve its heritage with the help of technology. artificial intelligence. Four startups will gather in the theater to showcase their technology to a large audience of executives and media attendees. One of the startups, Animaj, is demonstrating how AI can be used to accelerate the animation process.
Brightly colored, fuzzy figures, characters from a children’s YouTube series called Pocoyo, jump and tie themselves across the wide screen in front of me. Animaj was selected by Disney as one of the 2025 startups to be funded, platformed and mentored through the Disney Accelerator Program, and is currently using both human artists and AI to create these shorts, allowing the series to quickly reach screens.
“Thanks to this tool, it now takes us less than five weeks to produce a five-minute episode instead of five months,” Animaj CEO and co-founder Sixte de Vauplane told me in front of the company’s demo space after the presentation.
The dramatic acceleration of traditionally laborious processes is a direct result of rapid advances in technology. Generation AI These advances aren’t just for experts. AI-powered video generation tool It will go mainstream in 2025. Google’s veo 3 and OpenAI sora 2 Anyone can now comfortably create manga animations on their smartphone, even without sketching experience or artistic talent. The use of generative AI is hollywood They’re fighting to keep human artists at bay so they don’t take their jobs away from them.
But Animage insists its technology won’t replace animators. It simply makes their work less boring. Animators will continue to sketch each major pose and use AI to fill in all the intermediate movements that move the character from A to Z. And even then, the company says, animators control the fine-tuning of the AI-generated movements.
This is an interesting perspective considering the building across the street from me that houses hundreds of Disney animators. Will they view AI the same way? Disney has confirmed that it will soon introduce a partnership with Animaj, and the two companies are in discussions about how this AI system could be used in animation across Disney-branded television and Disney Television Studios.
“We plan to announce something in the coming months,” said David Ming, vice president of Disney Innovation.
Keeping artists at the center with AI tools
Instantly turn your hand sketches into 3D animations.
According to de Vauplane, animators will control AI capabilities as another part of their digital toolkit. The storyboarding process will remain the same as for traditional computer-generated images, he says. AI tools simply “bring ideas to fruition faster.”
“Artists are in the driver’s seat. For us, this is very important because we know that AI can be seen as a threat to artists,” says de Vauplain. “We want to show that there is another way to use AI in a very ethical way.”
I’ve reached out to Animation Guild for comment and am still waiting for a response. But late last year, after four months of negotiations, the union representing the animators was unable to include many AI safety provisions in the contract. For example, you can’t avoid using AI tools if your job requires it, or you can’t opt out of having your work used to train AI tools.
However, artistic expression has a long history of evolving alongside technology.
Animators moved from the hand-drawn watercolor sketches used to animate Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty in the 1930s and 1950s, respectively, to CGI for films such as The Little Mermaid and Aladdin in the 1980s and 1990s. With the release of Rapunzel in the 2010s, it moved to 3D CGI. With each technological innovation, the animation process has sped up. So is AI just another tool in the modern CGI toolkit, especially when it comes to preserving key elements of an animator’s workflow?
In order to maintain the “creator-first approach” centered on human artists that was a hallmark of Walt Disney and Roy Disney’s partnership last century, Disney considered “just about every AI company,” Min said.
“We looked at thousands of companies, both large and small, and what’s great about Animaj is that the artists are actually driving the process,” he says, adding that you don’t see this as often with video-generating AI apps like Sora and Veo, which read text prompts and spit out (usually meaningless) videos. “It allows artists to draw keyframes from A to Z and fill in anything in between. That’s why we chose Animaj.”
Speeding up the animation process
Animaj’s “Motion In-Between” feature allows the artist to input the main character’s position, and the AI model fills in the blanks moving the character from a standing position to a seated position.
Animaj’s AI tools are used to speed up the animation process. The AI tool, trained only on images from the show in question and operating within the parameters of the animator’s real-time sketches, predicts the character’s next move, and the animator corrects it. This can save you hours, weeks, or even months, depending on the type of animation or show you’re producing.
Min says that creating an animated series takes much longer than many people realize.
“It can take up to a year to get a pilot version of something and test it. With Animaj, we can do that 30% of the time,” says Min. We’re standing in front of Disney’s Stage 1 building, surrounded by a crowd of Disney cast members, startup reps, and other tech executives and enthusiasts. “The future of animation is a big and broad term, but definitely this is where the future of animation is going and trending.”
Like many media companies in the era of streamingDisney needs to produce high-quality content at a faster pace to meet audience demand. Animaj also uses AI to collect data to understand what themes are trending and resonate with online audiences, and quickly animate episodes to meet those interests while they’re current and popular.
Min says Animaj allows him to test new ideas more quickly because the animation process is so fast.
“Not only do they have content creation AI that actually helps them create short animations faster, but they can also use AI to analyze what’s happening in the video viewing and inform the storytelling,” Min said.
How does AI animation work?
Outside, sitting under a tree in the California sunshine, Pocoyo’s animators sketch characters on screen while 3D models pop up on the screen beside them. I watched him use the stylus to make slight adjustments to the arm and leg movements generated by the AI.
“Our unique animation tools allow Joe, the artist sitting here, to draw a sketch and then control the animation based on that sketch,” says Animaj Chief Technology Officer Antoine Lhermitte as he watches the artist work. It’s a huge time saver, he added.
When an animator sketches a Pocoyo character, an AI model instantly generates a 3D version of that sketch.
Animaj’s blog post details how they use AI to animate their sketches while preserving the animation’s unique art style. Using four seasons of Pocoyo, the company has built a database of over 300,000 poses, both with sketches of each character and their corresponding 3D poses, which the AI model can learn from. Artists were asked to create more character sketches for the next season.
Artists can input various positions of the character, such as standing or sitting, into a 3D pose modeling program. The AI model will fill in the gaps as the character moves from a standing position to a sitting position. This is what Animaj calls “intermediate movement.”
Using the AI model, artists modify the AI-generated animation, such as moving an arm or leg into the desired position. By not having to hand-draw every pose that goes along with a character’s actions, Animaj says, time is saved, allowing animators to “focus on refining the style and flow of a scene rather than creating new poses from scratch.”
As a result, artists are freed from repetitive tasks and can spend more time on the creative side. At the same time, artists will be able to use AI tools that suit their working style rather than text prompt-based AI tools. AI slopLike all the scary animations that are invading YouTube and social media, the characters’ features change from frame to frame, and they have three tails and 17 fingers.
“We know how frustrating it can be when you’re using a third-party AI model and you prompt something and it creates something completely different than what you have in mind,” says de Vauplane. “Here, we create something and produce something that can be easily adjusted… something that perfectly matches the DNA of the brand.”
Maintaining Disney’s DNA is critical as the entertainment giant seeks to preserve its 100-year tradition while keeping pace with modern technology. As the seven dwarfs sang in “Snow White,” the 1937 classic that established Disney as an animation powerhouse, “Hi-ho, hey-ho, I’m going to work, I’m going.” Tomorrow’s animators will begin their work with the help of AI.
