How Is AI Changing the Traditional Animation Production Pipeline?

AI Is Entering the Pipeline in Stages, Not All at Once

Animation production has traditionally followed a well-defined pipeline: concept art and character design, storyboarding, key frame animation by lead artists, in-betweening to fill motion between those key frames, clean-up, coloring, background painting, and finally compositing and post-production. AI tools haven’t replaced this pipeline wholesale; instead, they’ve been introduced piece by piece at specific stages where the work is repetitive, time-intensive, or well-suited to pattern recognition.

Early in the process, generative AI image tools are increasingly used to quickly produce concept art variations, mood boards, and rough visual references that help creative teams explore a project’s look before committing significant production resources, a task that previously required a concept artist to manually produce each option.

Where AI Assistance Concentrates: The Labor-Intensive Middle Steps

The most significant AI applications tend to cluster around the most labor-intensive traditional steps. In-betweening — generating the intermediate frames between an animator’s key poses to create smooth motion — has historically required animators or assistant animators to draw large numbers of frames by hand. AI-assisted interpolation tools can generate draft in-between frames more quickly, which artists then review and refine rather than drawing entirely from scratch.

Similarly, background and environment art, clean-up work removing rough sketch lines, and even certain coloring tasks have seen AI tools introduced to handle first-pass work that an artist then reviews and corrects. Voice production has also seen AI tools used for tasks like generating temporary “scratch” dialogue during early production before final voice actors are cast, or assisting with translation and dubbing for international releases.

The Pipeline Remains Artist-Directed

Despite these changes, the overall creative direction of an animated production still runs through human artists, directors, and supervisors. AI-assisted output at any given stage is typically treated as a draft or accelerant rather than a final product, reviewed and refined by artists who ensure consistency with the established visual style, character design, and storytelling intent of the production. This is a meaningful distinction from AI generating entire animated sequences autonomously, which remains a separate and more limited capability discussed elsewhere.

Bottom Line

AI tools are being integrated into specific, often labor-intensive stages of the traditional animation pipeline — concept art, in-betweening, backgrounds, and voice work among them — generally speeding up production while artists continue to direct, review, and refine the final creative output.

Go deeper

• What role does AI play in generating game art and textures?
• What Are the Best AI Tools for Video Voiceovers?
• What Are the Best AI Tools for Illustration and Concept Art?