First screen, captured 23 hours ago. Hover to scroll the page, or open the video.

What goes into making an animated film?

What HN thinks

A loving tour of Disney's pipeline that promptly became a referendum on whether AI shorts are art or slop.

AI animation is mostly slop
Many commenters dismissed the claim that a solo creator's AI series rivals Disney, citing continuity errors, morphing and lack of craft; a few defended AI work when guided by good writing and taste.
Detail work has practical reasons
Ex-industry folks said studios don't texture things known to be unseen; such work exists because modeling starts before shots are locked or scenes get cut.
Studio pipelines and renderers differ
Former PDI/DreamWorks staff reminisced about custom renderers versus RenderMan, noting the pipeline integration matters more than the renderer itself.

Consensus: Most agree that the human creative decisions and attention to detail are what make animation good, and that current AI video falls short of professional work.

Recommended in the comments

Neural Viz ↗ (other): Praised for strong writing and working around AI's limitations, unlike typical AI video.
Laika ↗ (other): Suggested as another place to look for craft-heavy animated filmmaking.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 11 hours ago.

Points: 157
Comments: 67
Best rank: #2
Posted: 2026-10-25 by embedding-shape
Category: Design

animation disney-animation filmmaking zootopia-2 computer-graphics visual-effects

All captures:

Full page

Captured 23 hours ago. Click for the whole screenshot. The page is longer than 25,000px, so the screenshot stops there: read the rest on disneyanimation.com ↗