It’s a warm fall afternoon at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, and a gentle breeze blows through the meticulously landscaped trees lining the walkways. On one end of the campus, 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.
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 both human artists and AI to produce these shorts, so that it can bring the series quickly to screens.
“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.
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?
“The plan is to announce something in the coming months,” says David Min, vice president of Disney Innovation.
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.”
“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.”
Min says it takes much longer to make an animated series than many people understand.
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.
“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.”
“Our proprietary animation tool allows the artist, Joe sitting here, to draw a sketch and to control the animation just based on the sketch,” Antoine Lhermitte, founder of Animaj, says as we watch the artist work. It’s a big time-saver, he says.
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.
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