Disney has revealed its first AI-generated children’s cartoon series, the soon-to-debut Ozzy Fox.
The series, following a family of fuzzy anthropomorphized foxes aimed at pre-schoolers, is now on Youtube and will debut next July on Disney’s streaming platform, Disney, according to CNET.
The show will feature “bright colors, catchy songs and a cute family of foxes,” CNET noted. It will also add AI-created musical numbers.
But Disney’s AI animation studio, Amimaj, insists that the AI engines are not replacing human animators. The AI is just speeding up the end result, they say.
According to CNET, human animators create the characters and draw out several poses, but they then run the images through the AI software to give the cartoon figures a wider range of movements.
Animaj CEO and co-founder Sixte de Vauplane says that the workflow they engineered takes the full suite of AI tools available, and determines which tool best fits the prompts from the project’s director.
“We had one agent reading the notes, another one coordinating to see which kind of model we have to use,” de Vauplane told CNET. “Here, what we wanted is to build the ultimate pipeline, CGI pipeline, for animators, for directors, that is built on a closed ecosystem of data.
The tools help reduce the time between the director’s notes and the finished product.
“If you can do twice the notes in the same amount of time, that means twice better in terms of quality, and that’s overall what the industry is looking for,” de Vauplane explained. “This use of AI, which is artistic-centric, is really the answer we think the industry should embrace.”
Animaj claims that human animators have control of “every frame” of the cartoon.
The studio also insists that they are not putting out AI slop, calling low-end generative software the enemy. Indeed, the studio insisted that the entertainment industry needs to focus on high-end generators so that AI slop does not get a foothold, “because rejecting AI leaves more ground to those producing slop.”
The Animaj manifesto adds that since its AI system puts out content so much faster and cheaper, it leaves the door open for more opportunities to take risks on the more offbeat projects.
“AI makes more ideas affordable to try: the strange character, the unfamiliar culture, the story nobody would have greenlit,” Animaj exclaims. “We can put them in front of families, learn what moves them and go again.”
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