300,000 Pose and AI Moments: My Visit to Disney Was a Peek into the New Reality of Animation

It’s a warm fall afternoon at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, and a gentle breeze blows through the meticulously landscaped trees that line the walkways. At one end of campus, a ray of sunshine hits the iconic Disney Team Building, where 19-foot-tall stone sculptures of the Seven Dwarfs (of Snow White fame) top the roof.

The iconic sculptural architecture is a nod to the film that helped build the Disney empire. On the other hand, inside Disney’s Main Street Cinema, the entertainment giant is exploring ways to preserve this legacy with the help of technology, such as artificial intelligence.

Four startups gather in the theater to present their technology to a crowd of executives and media attendees. One startup, Animaj, demonstrates how it uses artificial intelligence to speed up the animation process.

Brightly colored inflatable figures leap and bound across the wide screen in front of me, characters from children’s toys YouTube String called Pocoyo. Animaj – Selected by Disney as one of its 2025 cohort of startups to fund, platform and mentor across Disney Accelerator Program — now uses both human artists and artificial intelligence to produce these short films, allowing them to bring the series to screens quickly.

“With this tool, it takes less than five weeks to produce a 5-minute episode, whereas it used to take five months,” Animaj CEO and co-founder Sixte de Vauplane told me, speaking outside the company’s demo space after the presentation.

This significant acceleration in a traditionally laborious process stems directly from rapid progress in… Generative artificial intelligence Over the past few years. And these advances aren’t just for professionals: they’re powered by artificial intelligence Video generation tools Rise to the mainstream in 2025. Google I see 3 And OpenAI Sora 2 Now let anyone create cartoon animations from their phone, without needing any drawing experience or even any artistic inclination. Using generative AI is something like this Hollywood was fighting You should stay away from them, lest they take jobs away from human artists.

But Animaj says its technology doesn’t replace animators, it simply makes their jobs less boring. The animator will still draw each of the main poses; Artificial intelligence will be used to fill in all the in-between movements of the character you move from A to Z. Until then, the company says, the animator is in control of modifying those AI-generated movements.

It’s an interesting perspective 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 to me that it will soon introduce its partnership with Animaj, as the two companies are in discussions about how this AI system can be used in animation across Disney Television and Disney Television Studios.

“The plan is to announce something in the coming months,” says David Min, Disney’s vice president of innovation.

Keep artists focused on AI tools

Animators will control the AI ​​feature as another part of their digital toolkit, according to de Vaublin. He says the storyboarding process will remain the same as with traditional computer-generated imagery — the AI ​​tool will “bring the idea to life much faster.”

“The artist is in control,” de Vaublin says. “For us, this is very important because we know that AI can be seen as a threat to the artist.” “We want to show that there is another way to use AI in a very ethical way.”

I have reached out to the Animation Guild for comment and am still waiting for a response. But late last year, after four months of bargaining, an agreement was reached with the union representing the animators It was not able to include many safety provisions for the AI In her contract; They are unable to avoid using AI tools if the job requires it, for example, or to opt out of having their work used to train those AI tools.

But artistic expression has a long history of evolving with technology.

Animators moved from hand-drawn watercolor drawings — used to animate Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty in the 1930s and 1950s, respectively — to CGI for films like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin in the 1980s and 1990s. This moved to 3D CGI with the release of Tangled and Frozen in the 2000s. Every technological innovation has sped up the animation process. So is AI just another tool in the modern CGI toolkit, especially if it maintains the core elements of the animation workflow?

In order to maintain the “creator-first approach” that focuses on human artists — a hallmark of Walt and Roy Disney’s partnership last century — Min says Disney looked at “almost all AI companies.”

“We’ve looked at thousands of companies, large 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 creation AI apps like Sora and Veo, which read your text prompts and spit out (usually nonsensical) videos.

“This is an artist who draws keyframes from A to Z, and then allows things to be filled in between. That’s why we chose Animaj.”

Speed ​​up the animation process

Animaj AI tool is used to speed up the animation process. The AI ​​tool is trained solely on images from the show in question, and working within the parameters of the animator’s sketches in real time, it predicts the character’s next moves – and the animator corrects them when they go awry. This can save a lot of time: hours, weeks, months, depending on the type of animation and show being worked on.

Producing an animated series takes much longer than many people realize, says Min.

“It can take about a year before you can even get a beta program of something to test,” Min says. “With Animaj, they can do it in 30% of the time.” We’re standing in front of the Disney Phase 1 building, among a crowd of Disney cast members, startup representatives, and other executives and technology enthusiasts. “The future of animation is a big, broad statement, but this is definitely where the future of animation is going and heading.”

Like many media companies of our time My neighborDisney needs to produce high-quality content at a faster rate to keep up with audience demand. Animaj also uses AI to collect data to understand what topics are trending or resonating with online audiences, then quickly animate episodes to meet those interests while being fresh and popular.

The animation process moves very quickly, Min says, and Animaj can also test new ideas much faster.

“Not only do they have content production AI to help create animated shorts faster,” Min says, “but they also use AI to read analytics about what’s happening while you’re watching the video which can then help tell the story as well.”

Filling in the gaps or “moving in between”: How does AI animation work?

Outside, sitting under a tree in the California sunshine, animator Pocoyo draws a sketch of a character on the screen, with a 3D model appearing on the screen next to him. I watch him use a stylus to make slight adjustments to the arm and leg movements generated by the AI ​​model.

“Our animation tool allows the artist, Joe sitting here, to draw a sketch and control the animation based solely on the drawing,” says Antoine Lhermitte, CTO at Animaj, as we watch the artist work. He says it saves a lot of time.

Blog posts by Animaj detailing how AI is used to achieve this Bring graphics to animated lifewhile retaining the unique art style of the animation.

The company used four seasons of Pocoyo to build a database of more than 300,000 poses, using both graphics and corresponding 3D poses for each character that the AI ​​model can learn from. The artists were also asked to produce more character sketches for use in the following season.

Artists can enter different poses for the character into the 3D modeling software – for example, standing and then sitting. The AI ​​model then fills in the spaces that move the character from a standing position to a sitting position, which Animaj calls “Movement between them“.

Working with an AI model, the artist makes corrections to any of the AI-generated animation, such as moving an arm or leg to where it should be.

The time saved in not having to draw every pose in a character’s movements by hand means animators can “focus more on improving the style and flow of scenes rather than starting from scratch with each new pose,” Animaj says.

As a result, artists are freed from repetitive tasks to spend more time on the creative side. At the same time, it enables these artists to use an AI tool that matches their working style, not one that produces prompt-driven text. Back up ramp — like all those horrific cartoons that take over YouTube or social media, where the characters change their features every frame or have three tails and 17 fingers.

“We know how frustrating it can be when you use third-party AI models and claim something, it creates something completely different from what you had in mind,” de Vaublin says. “Here, it creates something, and it generates something that you can easily modify…something that is completely consistent with the brand identity.”

Preserving Disney’s identity is crucial as the entertainment giant seeks to preserve its hundred-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, “Hee-ho, hee-ho, we’re up and running, let’s go.” For tomorrow’s animators, they will start working with the help of artificial intelligence.