Did Disney use Gen AI in their latest animated movie?!?! There’s this tweet going super viral accusing Disney of using gen AI in the trailer for their latest movie called Hexed. The post says How come Walt Disney Animations, a $2.3 billion dollar company is laying off animators and make ai slop garbage to save money? It’s not even hard to tell. These frames are milliseconds apart yet she has an earring in one and not the other. I’m seeing a lot of people debating this, and I am a professional 3D animator, I worked on some shows like Sonic Prime and Lego Ninjago so I have quite a bit of experience in 3D animation. So I have a lot to say on this topic. I decided to take a look at the trailer to find the moment they’re talking about and inspect it myself. So as we can see, these come from two different shots. Saying these 2 frames are miliseconds apart is pretty misleading, because it implies they’re from the same shot. This could clearly have been animated by 2 different animators. I saw a lot of people in the comments saying it’s 3D, so it’s impossible for the character to go off model. Yes it’s true it’s easier to accidentally go off model in a 2D animation because you redraw the character and can forget to draw details or draw them incorrectly. It’s still possible for there to be continuity errors in 3D films. Like maybe the computer was running slowly, and the animator hid the earring to save on computer processing power, then they submitted the shot without unhiding the earring and the directors didn’t notice. Another thing that can happen in films is sometimes the directors can change their mind about how a character should look. The character could have originally had no earring, then the director changed their mind and said “Add earrings to the girl in every shot!” and the animators added an earring prop and constrained it to her ear, but maybe they forgot to add it in this shot. Final piece of evidence for this trailer not being AI, is that it clearly doesn’t look like AI at all. AI animations are very glossy, and add this really shiny blurriness to it. This trailer clearly doesn’t have that, and the movements and acting decisions are way too intentional. With AI animation the characters always move very slowly, or in an unappealing way. This just looks way too keyframe animated. I declare Disney NOT GUILTY of using AI in this trailer. But it is a shame people are accusing this of being AI, because it shows how much AI has made people distrusting of the things they see. Nowadays we have to examine every picture and video under a microscope to see if it’s real. It’s made everyone more suspicious and distrusting of one another. Video sources: Hexxed Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtC4sjABZNw Sonic Prime (Netflix) Lego Ninjago: Crystalized (Netflix) Sonic The Hedgehog Movie Trailer 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4dYb-NTyKA - @apokeanimation