Is AI Replacing Animators? Not Yet

Will AI Replace Animators?

There is a lot of doom and gloom about AI right now in the creative industries, a general assumption that we are living on borrowed time and that AI is coming for our jobs. 

But is it really? Early this year I took a break from teaching at Escape Studios (though I still teach online at Animation Apprentice) to work as Animation Director on a new feature film. And right now, I’m reminded every day that while AI tools are making waves, animation is still — at its heart — a craft driven by human creativity.  

Traditional Pipeline

Hogarth in Iron Giant. Could this be done by AI?

I'm under NDA right now (Non Disclosure Agreement) so I can't talk much about the production, but it's safe to say that our production pipeline hardly uses any AI, and that’s not because we’re ignoring new technology.  It’s because character performance, timing, and emotion still can’t be automated in any meaningful way. 

Story, Story, Story

If you want a coherent storytelling performance, you still need to do it the traditional way. And the pipeline hasn't really changed that much since the days of Walk Disney. 

Animation Dailies

To make a feature film work, the audience needs to connect emotionally with the characters. They need to care what happens to them.  Can AI do this? Not yet. And especially not at scale, not over 90 minutes.  In animation dailies a thousand micro decisions are made to make the story as believable as possible, to push the performances, and tweak the storytelling.  This is still a very human process.  AI cannot (yet) replace the collaborative artistry that makes a performance believable and engaging.

Animators Still Matter
The rise of AI may be a reminder of why animators are more valuable than ever. As technology gets better at doing mechanical tasks, it leaves the human side — empathy, imagination, storytelling — at the core of what we do. And that is exactly what audiences come to animation for.

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