Not letting go of the frame: What is animation willing to keep upholding in the era of automation?
Animation has always evolved alongside technology. The history of the medium is filled with technological shifts that changed how animated works were created. The transition from hand-painted cels to digital coloring, the adoption of computer-generated imagery, the rise of digital compositing, and the globalization of production pipelines all transformed the industry. Yet through each transformation, animation culture remained remarkably resilient. New tools emerged, workflows changed, and production accelerated, but audiences continued to form deep attachments to animated stories and the communities that surrounded them. Today, animation faces another transformative moment. Automation technologies are becoming increasingly capable of assisting with tasks that once required extensive manual labor. In-betweening, coloring, background generation, lip-syncing, compositing, and even aspects of story development can now be accelerated through increasingly sophisticated software. M...