Your Creativity Is the Real Super Tool: The Future of AI and Animation

Animation is the art of making still images look like they’re moving. That’s the whole trick — your brain fills in the motion when it sees a sequence of slightly different pictures fast enough. From the age of flipbooks to blockbuster feature films today, the concept has remained the same. The technology behind it, though, has changed again and again.

Hand-drawn era: Early animations like Steamboat Willie or Disney’s golden age of films were drawn one frame at a time — thousands of individual drawings per short film, photographed frame by frame. Many studios still rely on hand-drawn animation even today.

Cel animation: Studios sped up the process by drawing characters on clear plastic sheets (cels) layered over painted backgrounds, so artists didn’t have to redraw the background in every single frame. Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke used over 144,000 individual cels!

Digital 2D: Computers replaced the ink and paint, but animators were still drawing (or posing) frame by frame — just on a screen instead of paper.

3D/CGI: Pixar and others introduced fully three-dimensional characters built in a computer, posed and moved in 3D space, rather than redrawing every frame each time.

Every one of those shifts was originally considered disruptive, but ultimately, each became a new set of tools animators learned to use. And those tools and skills are still the foundation of animation today.
“We want to be aware of AI, but we don’t use it in our classes,” says Champlain College Professor of Animation Felipe Lega. “We want the students to learn every single step of the process as if they were doing that by hand. And I think that it’s important for them to understand and have those skills, so that if they decide to use AI, they have the knowledge and understanding to do so.”

AI is landing mostly on the slow, repetitive steps of production — not the creative ones. It’s more of a workflow upgrade rather than a replacement.

Inbetweening and Rigging Help

Some 2D software can generate rough in-between frames from key poses, speeding up a process that used to be entirely hand-drawn, frame by frame. On the rigging side, some tools can automatically generate a starting rig and rough weights, giving riggers a head start instead of a blank scene.

Rotoscoping and VFX Assistance

In VFX, modifying an isolated object or an actor in a live-action film used to mean painstaking frame-by-frame masking. Star Wars’ light saber is a great example of rotoscoping. Today, AI tools can now auto-track those edges, so artists can directly clean up the results instead of building them from scratch.

Previsualization, Storyboarding, and the Animatic Process

From a script, a director can generate a rough animatic to test pacing before a storyboard artist draws the real thing. The storyboard artist will still need to draw up the work, but AI-assisted previsualization allows them to quickly test things like angles and framing, which ultimately helps the artist cut down the number of revisions they’ll need to make.

Voice, Lip-Sync, and Crowd Generation

Some tools can automatically match a character’s mouth movements to recorded dialogue. Additionally, video games and films are increasingly using AI to generate believable movement for background characters, without the need for someone to spend hours individually animating thousands of individual characters. This isn’t new technology. Did you know that the iconic battle scene in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the Battle of Helm’s Deep, leveraged AI to generate an army of thousands and thousands of individual Uruk-hai? And that was nearly 25 years ago.

Notice the pattern? None of these AI tasks is “design this character” or “decide how this scene should feel.” Instead, each of these tasks used to require hours of busywork with little creative judgment. Now this work can be supported and streamlined with these AI tools, giving animators back valuable time to put toward creative work.

If you’re thinking about a future career in animation, go for it! Animation jobs will be around for the foreseeable future. When you’re ready, you should start by studying animation at a reputable school, preferably one that emphasizes hands-on, project-based work.

Animation Fundamentals and Core Software (Maya, Toon Boom, After Effects)

At a minimum, the animation skills you’ll need to build for a successful career in the industry are:

• The Fundamentals: Timing, staging, character design basics, and the classic principles of animation. These matter whether you’re drawing by hand or working in 3D software, and they matter regardless of what AI does or doesn’t do next.
• Core Software Familiarity: Programs like Maya (3D), Toon Boom Harmony (2D), and After Effects (motion graphics and compositing) are industry standards worth learning early.

Working With — Not Replacing — AI Tools

Comfort with AI tools is optional, but useful. Knowing when an AI-generated pass is usable and when it needs to be redone by hand is a nice-to-have skill for some studio pipelines.