Friday, May 29, 2026

'Like having sex and they hand you the baby': Beloved animator uses AI, gets backlash

Fast Company: Writer and director Jorge R. Gutierrez is best known for creating the 2014 animated film The Book of Life. A labor of love and a tribute to Mexican folk art, the movie took Gutierrez 14 years to make, and it paid off: The Book of Life’s beautiful handcrafted 3D animation was near universally lauded. But Gutierrez’s next project is taking a different approach. It won’t take him 14 years—in fact, his upcoming animated series Punky Duck was green-lit just two months after he pitched it to Amazon MGM Studios.
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1 comment:

  1. Jackson Watts10:27 AM

    I'm on the fence about AI being used in this way, on one hand it seems like it can speed up some of the more tedious and time consuming tasks that don't take as much creativity. If done right this could allow for artists to focus more on the parts of the process that they find important and use AI to fill in the parts they believe are less essential to their creative process. However, as an artist myself I find that every step in creating art is part of the creative process, even the tedious parts that might seem unimportant. Art is a culmination of the millions of tiny decisions you make while working on it as much as it is the larger decisions. I'm also worried about this leading to a similar situation that software development companies have started to find where the more entry level positions they eliminate the less opportunity people have to work up to the higher level positions. I fear that something similar could happen with animation. Automating the "tedious" portions takes away opportunities for entry level animators to shine.

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