Exploitation of animators has a long, long history in the industry. I certainly hope that the push for unionization helps, but there are a lot of forces working against it.
One of the issues lately is that even without AI it’s already becoming pretty cheap to make new films that are just slightly less well-animated than the big-budget animated films from places like Disney and Pixar. So DreamWorks and others can pump out mediocre, somewhat generic stuff at a fraction of the price of a Pixar movie. Despicable Me 4 had a production budget that was half of Pixar’s Onward or Elemental, but made way more profit, so it feels like there’s going to be a race to the bottom, and the major studios are going to be willing to accept a little more drop off in quality by making use of generative AI and hiring fewer animators. I hope that at least a few of the studios remain committed to making quality, human-made films, but they’re also going to need to come up with some good stories to tell if they want to bring in enough of an audience to pay for it. From what I heard Disney’s Wish wasn’t absolutely terrible but it also felt like a generic script that Chat GPT could have come up with.
