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.
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 Theatre, the entertainment giant is exploring ways to preserve that legacy with the help of technology like 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 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.
That dramatic acceleration of a traditionally painstaking process flows directly from the rapid advances in generative AI over the last several years. And those advances aren't just for the 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 has been fighting to keep at bay, lest it take jobs away from human artists.
But Animaj says 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; 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 to me that 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.
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