Animaj opens up about FlipMove, its artist-led AI workflow behind Ozzy Fox

Most AI animation headlines I read are about one-click video generators, so it was refreshing to see a studio talk about the boring middle of production instead. Paris-based Animaj, the company behind Pocoyo, Maya the Bee and Ozzy Fox, has published a behind-the-scenes look at FlipMove, the AI workflow it first showed at Disney Accelerator Demo Day in Los Angeles on November 3.

What FlipMove actually does

FlipMove links several in-house tools into one pipeline that runs from an approved 2D animatic to finished animation:

• Animatic-to-Layout reads a 2D animatic and sets up cameras, props, character staging and poses in a 3D scene.
• Sketch-to-Pose turns drawings into editable 3D poses.
• Motion-In-Betweening fills in the poses between an animator's keys.
• Layout Retakes and Pose Retakes turn a director's notes into revised shots for artists to check.

According to Animaj, a director's note can become an editable revision in about two minutes instead of twenty, and everything stays editable inside Blender until final approval. The workflow is already in use on Ozzy Fox, the preschool series co-developed with Disney Junior, and the studio plans to bring it to Pocoyo and Maya the Bee.

The part I found most interesting

In the new interview, director Roberto Zincone and machine learning engineer Alice Lucas describe an early version that asked storyboard artists to draw directly inside a 3D environment. The engineers liked how predictable that was; the artists said it boxed them in. The team scrapped it, and artists now draw as usual and only add minimal 3D hints such as camera positions.

Their line is clear: FlipMove gives animators a starting blocking pass, while acting, timing, emotion and personality stay human decisions. Whether you're excited or wary about AI in animation, it's a useful look at how one studio is drawing that line in practice.

You can read the full conversation on the official Animaj site, and the original announcement is here.