AI animation acceleration

Disney is giving animators an AI tool to accelerate character animation.

To maintain the “creator-first approach” that centers human artists — a hallmark of last century’s Walt and Roy Disney partnership — Min says that Disney looked into “pretty much all of the AI companies.”

“We looked at thousands of companies, all big and small, and what Animaj does well is that the artist is really driving the process,” he says, adding that you don’t really see this in video-generating AI apps like Sora and Veo, which read your text prompts and spit out (usually nonsensical) videos. “This is the artist drawing the key frames from A to Z, and then allowing things to be filled in in between. That’s why we selected Animaj.”