Former Disney Animators Sound Off on the Mouse House’s OpenAI Deal as It Sparks Fear, Frustration, and a Creative Divide
When Disney locked in its $1 billion deal with OpenAI last week, the company moved fast to calm actor concerns. Disney said it will “respect the rights of individuals to appropriately control their voice and likeness,” even as it prepares to license characters like Mickey Mouse, Simba, and Luke Skywalker to Sora, OpenAI’s generative video platform.
That reassurance didn’t extend nearly as cleanly to animators. Their work may legally belong to Disney, but for the artists who poured years of their lives into these characters, ownership feels personal.
So what happens when those characters can now be summoned with a text prompt? Is Disney adapting to the future, or cashing in at the expense of the people who built its legacy?
Deadline spoke with two former Disney creatives who see the deal from very different angles, and together they capture the tension rippling through the animation world.
For Aaron Blaise, animation was never just about drawing. While working on Beauty and the Beast, he didn’t simply sketch the Beast. He became him. When the Beast was angry, Blaise snarled. When the Beast felt awkward, Blaise physically mirrored those emotions at his desk. That connection still defines how he views the craft.
“That’s what it takes to bring these characters to life,” he says. Blaise was one of only a few animators who worked on the Beast under Glen Keane, which makes the idea of the character living inside Sora complicated.
Asked how he feels about it, Blaise pauses before answering. “That’s interesting,” he says cautiously. He is being careful with his words. After more than two decades at Disney, he still speaks fondly of the studio and is actively searching for upsides in emerging tech. Even so, the idea of typing prompts to generate performances from the Beast sits uneasily with him.
“It degrades it for the filmmakers,” he says, before acknowledging that audiences, especially kids prompting Elsa on a tablet, probably won’t care much about artistic provenance. In Blaise’s view, Disney didn’t have much of a choice. “This is them trying to hold the reins and play damage control. If you can’t beat them, join them.”
And Disney is fully joining them. Select Sora-generated fan creations will appear on Disney+, placing AI-generated shorts alongside a century of animation history. Blaise doesn’t see that as a threat to traditional filmmaking, though.
“Of the people I know [at Disney], the notion of creating films with AI couldn’t be further outside the universe of what they want,” he says.
Dana Terrace, creator of the Disney Channel series The Owl House, couldn’t disagree more. She publicly urged fans to cancel Disney+ when Bob Iger first hinted at a short-form AI strategy, and the OpenAI deal has only reinforced her concerns.
She argues the partnership shows Disney leadership doing everything it can to “take people out of the equation,” a claim the company would almost certainly dispute. Terrace believes AI is fundamentally harmful to creatives, consumers, and the environment, pointing to the massive energy demands of data centers.
“I think it’s soulless,” Terrace despairs. “I don’t think there’s any artistic integrity behind it. Art, whether it’s technically beautiful or a child’s drawing, is created with intent, with heart, and with meaning — even if that meaning is just to f**k around. AI doesn’t have any of that.”
Terrace says she still talks regularly with former colleagues at Disney TV, and what she hears is grim. “Everyone is scared for their jobs. There’s barely any shows in development, there’s barely any shows in production … and this is just scaring people even more.”
While Blaise and Terrace clash on Disney’s partnership with OpenAI, they share a deeper fear about what instant creation might do to the next generation of artists.
Terrace says: “With Sora, we won’t have the time or patience to sit down and create works of art that help us deal with our feelings or communicate with others, or create something big and beautiful like a movie because we’ll be used to just getting it instantly.”
Blaise knows exactly what’s lost when patience disappears. His Oscar-shortlisted short Snow Bear took two full years of meticulous hand-drawn animation. The film follows a lonely polar bear trekking through a melting wilderness, a story shaped directly by Blaise’s experience of losing his wife to cancer and watching her, in his words, almost “melt away.”
The 10-minute short has already pulled in more than a million YouTube views in just two weeks, and the response has been emotional. “The general, consistent comments we’re getting are that it’s so refreshing to see handmade animation — and they’re bashing AI,” Blaise chuckles.
As Disney embraces generative AI as part of its future, and while technology may help move content faster, it’s still the human emotion and experience that turn drawings into characters people love.