Disney shows how AI is being built into its production

On November 3, the Disney Accelerator 2026 Demo Day was held on the Walt Disney Studios lot. Five companies summed up four months of work with Disney divisions: Promise, OpenArt, FieldAI, Physical Intelligence and Simile. At the same event, graduates of the previous cohort showed tools that are already being used in production. Animaj's FlipMove animation pipeline is being used on the series Ozzy Fox for Disney Jr., and the show already has a second season in production.

Some of the projects concern filmmaking, animation and music content. The rest are devoted to robots in the parks and guest data analytics.

From an animatic sketch to a 3D shot

Animaj, a member of the 2025 cohort, demonstrated FlipMove live. An artist draws an animatic, and the system assembles staged 3D shots from it. After that, the tool speeds up layout, revisions based on the director's notes and inbetweening. According to Disney, the team retains full creative control throughout.

On its website, Animaj describes FlipMove as a link-up of its previously disconnected animation tools. Two new capabilities have been added to them: translating an animatic into layout, and director's retakes. Each scene passes through a 3D pipeline in which it can be edited. The studio laid out its position in a manifesto with the thesis "AI is not the enemy of kids' animation, the enemy is slop."

Ozzy Fox was developed by Animaj and Disney Jr. over nine months. As Cartoon Brew writes, the first two episodes came out on YouTube and YouTube Kids almost without announcement and approached 800 thousand views within two days. According to the outlet, the series' creator is Jennifer Oxley (Peg + Cat, Wonder Pets!), and development was handled by Pocoyo co-creator Guillermo García Carsí, Animaj's creative director. As Creative Bloq has observed, the series owes its wide recognition largely to accusations of "AI slop."

A live actor in a gray box and music video concepts in hours

AI studio Promise gave a live demonstration of hybrid filmmaking, in which live action is combined with generative tools. An actor performed a scene in a "gray box," that is, in a rough environment without a final image. Then an artist transferred that performance into different story environments. Promise works with Walt Disney Studios and, in Disney's phrasing, expands the filmmaking toolkit "while preserving creative integrity and craft." Which stages are generated, what remains with VFX artists and how the pipeline is structured are not disclosed in the published materials.

OpenArt announced a collaboration with Disney Music Group. A toolset assembled for the client helps creative teams quickly search for and compare visual concepts for lyric videos based on a song's theme, mood and emotional tone. By Disney's estimate, several concepts can be generated and evaluated "in hours, not weeks." The goal is to give fans new content around Disney's music between major releases. In OpenArt's public lyric video generator, the user uploads a track and up to 10 references: cover art, photos or footage that has been shot. Style is set with text, and Director mode assembles the video with the song's lyrics synced to the music. How the version for Disney differs from the public one has not been reported.

Robots behind the scenes at the parks

FieldAI, together with Disney Experiences Technology and Walt Disney Imagineering R&D, is studying how robots can help with the upkeep of parking lots on difficult terrain and in unpredictable weather. Imagineering is separately studying how FieldAI's navigation could be useful to future character robots in the parks. Physical Intelligence, with Walt Disney Imagineering, is studying an applied task: collecting and sorting 3D glasses for cleaning between shows. Which model is used for this is not specified. Publicly, the company has described, for example, the π0.5 model, which was trained on data from various robots and on web data so that it would work outside the lab. Simile works with Walt Disney World on guest data analytics, from product names to digital trip-planning services.

Haddy, a company specializing in industrial 3D printing, printed sets and prototypes together with Walt Disney Imagineering. Among them a copy of the prop canoe from the Jungle Cruise attraction at Disneyland Resort, King Louie's throne from Shanghai Disney Resort, rock facades and themed light fixtures.

"This year's cohort brought deep industry expertise but, more importantly, held a clear point of view in every conversation about how these technologies can responsibly work for people."

That was how Bonnie Rosen, general manager of the Disney Accelerator, assessed the cohort. The program is in its 12th year, and more than 60 companies have gone through it over that time.

What this means for animators and studios

Judging by what was shown at Demo Day, AI at Disney is currently taking on primarily the preparatory and intermediate stages: layout, inbetweening, rough concepts, transferring a live performance into different environments. The key animatic drawing and the director's decisions, by the companies' description, remain with people. For layout artists and inbetweeners this is probably a signal that it is exactly this part of the work on kids' series animation that is being targeted for acceleration first. Whether "full creative control" stands for the ability to correct poses and timing by hand cannot be verified from the open materials.

The second conclusion concerns reputation. The example of Ozzy Fox shows that even with high view counts the subject of AI in animation provokes public argument, and client studios will apparently have to decide how openly to talk about it. In the published materials the companies so far give no details of the pipeline or of the division of roles between artists and models.