What goes into making an animated film?

We had an animator do an AMA a few days ago that didn't quite catch on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187389

I remember seeing a Pixar documentary a really long time ago where someone talked about attention to detail. The designers would fully texture out the inside of a dresser draw that will never be shown in the film. The idea was imagine how much attention to detail and time is spent on the things that will be seen. Pure craftsmanship.

Now go watch "Kono Express". Disney laid off an animator from the Star Wars factory, and he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself. With Unreal Engine and AI tools, of course. It's been a long time since there was an ink and paint department.

How much of this is AI automating? That drawing of the car design, the storyboarding... isn't generative AI aiming to do away with most of it? I've been seeing some of the lengthier AI films on X (i.e. the one about badgers vs. rats that looks like Lord of the Rings), and there is certainly a lot of work put into them. However the type of work that goes into them is substantially different than what is shown in this article about Zootopia. There are a lot less decisions made by humans. AI is driving a lot of the creative decisions. In the end you get something good, but is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it? I think this is an interesting question.

Hm that’s interesting, I would have thought that Pixar and Disney Animation use the same render software, but no.