On a warm fall afternoon at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, a gentle breeze blows through the meticulously landscaped trees lining the walkways. A ray of sunshine hits the famed Team Disney building, where 19-foot-tall stone carvings of the seven dwarfs of Snow White fame hold up the roof.

The renowned sculptural architecture is a nod to the film that helped build the Disney empire. And just across the lot, 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 are gathered in the theater to present their technology to a crowd of executives and media attendees. One startup, Animaj, is demonstrating how it uses AI to accelerate the animating process.

Brightly colored, blobby figures prance and bound across a wide screen in front of me, characters from a children’s YouTube series called Pocoyo. Animaj — selected by Disney as one of its 2025 cohort of startups to finance, platform and mentor via the Disney Accelerator Program — is now using human artists and AI to produce these shorts, allowing it to bring the series to screens quickly.

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

That dramatic acceleration of a traditionally painstaking process flows directly from the rapid advances in generative AI in the past several years, and those advances aren’t just for professionals: AI-powered video-generating tools surged into the mainstream in 2025. Google’s Veo 3 and OpenAI’s Sora 2 now allow anyone to create a cartoon animation from the comfort of their phone, without any sketching experience or even artistic inclination required. The use of generative AI is something that Hollywood is fighting to keep at bay, lest it take jobs away from human artists.

But Animaj says that its technology doesn’t replace animators. It simply makes their jobs less tedious. An animator will still be sketching out each of the main poses, and then AI will be used to fill in all the in-between movements of the character that move them from A to Z. And even then, the company says, an animator is in control of tweaking those AI-generated movements.

It’s an interesting perspective when I think about the building right across from me, which houses hundreds of Disney animators. Will they see AI the same way? Disney confirmed it will soon introduce its partnership with Animaj, with the two companies in discussions around how to potentially use this AI system in animation across Disney Branded Television and Disney Television Studios.

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

Keeping artists centered with AI tools

Animators will control the AI feature as another part of their digital toolkit, according to de Vauplane. The storyboarding process will remain the same as it is with more traditional computer-generated imagery, he says. The AI tool will just “bring the idea to life much faster.”

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

I reached out to the Animation Guild for comment and am still awaiting a response. But late last year, after four months of bargaining, the union representing animators was unable to include many AI safety provisions in its contract. They would not be able to avoid using AI tools if required by a job, for instance, 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 on from watercolor hand sketches — used to animate Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty in the 1930s and 1950s, respectively — to CGI for movies like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin in the 1980s and 1990s. It transitioned into 3D CGI with the release of Tangled and Frozen in the 2010s. Each technological innovation has sped up the animation process. So is AI simply another tool in the modern CGI toolkit, especially if it preserves the key elements of an animator’s workflow?

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.”

Expediting the animation process

Animaj’s AI tool is used to expedite the animation process. Trained only on images from the show in question, and working within the parameters of an animator’s real-time sketches, the AI tool predicts the character’s next moves — and the animator corrects it when it goes awry. This can save a lot of time: hours, weeks, months, depending on the type of animation and show being worked on.

Min says it takes much longer to make an animated series than many people understand.

“It can be like a year before you can even get a pilot of something to test out. With Animaj, they can do it in 30% of the time,” Min says. We’re standing in front of Disney’s Stage 1 building, amid a throng of Disney cast members, startup reps and other tech execs and enthusiasts. “The future of animation is a big, broad statement, but definitely this is where the future of animation is going and trending.”

Like so many media companies in the age of streaming, Disney 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 themes are trending or resonating with online audiences, and then animate episodes quickly to meet those interests while they’re current and popular.

Because its animation process moves so rapidly, Min says, Animaj can also test new ideas much faster.

“Not only do they have the content production AI to actually help build the animated shorts faster,” Min says, “but then they’re using AI to also read the analytics on what’s going on with the viewing of the video that can then help inform the storytelling as well.”

How does AI animation work?

Outside, sitting under a tree in the California sunshine, a Pocoyo animator sketches a character on a screen with a 3D model popping up on a screen beside it. I watch as he uses a stylus to make slight adjustments to arm and leg movements generated by the AI.

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“Our proprietary animation tool allows the artist, Joe sitting here, to draw a sketch and to control the animation just based on the sketch,” says Antoine Lhermitte, Animaj’s chief technology officer, as we watch the artist work. It’s a big time-saver, he adds.

Blog posts by Animaj detail how it uses AI to bring sketches to animated life, while still retaining the unique art style of an animation. The company used four seasons of Pocoyo to build a database of more than 300,000 poses, using both sketches and their corresponding 3D poses for each character that the AI model could learn from. Artists were also asked to produce more sketches of the characters to be used in the next season.

Artists can input into a 3D pose-modeling program various positions of the character, for instance, standing and then sitting. The AI model would then fill in the blanks of what gets the character from standing to sitting position, something Animaj calls “motion in-betweening.”

Working with the AI model, the artist makes corrections to any of the AI-generated animations, like shifting an arm or a leg to where it should be. The time savings with not having to hand-draw every single pose that comes with a character’s actions means animators can “concentrate more on refining the style and flow of scenes rather than starting from scratch with each new pose,” Animaj says.

As a result, the artists are freed up from repetitive tasks to spend more time on the creative side. At the same time, it’s enabling those artists to use an AI tool that is matched up with their working style, and not one producing text prompt-based AI slop, like all those horrific animations invading 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 use third-party AI models and you prompt something, it creates something so different than what you have in mind,” de Vauplane says. “Here, it creates something, generates something you can easily tweak…something which is fully consistent with the brand DNA.”

Preserving that Disney DNA is critical as the entertainment giant seeks to uphold its 100-year legacy while keeping pace 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 off to work we go.” For tomorrow’s animators, it’s off to work with the help of AI.