“In the good old days… It took 500 artists five years to make a world class animated movie. I think it won’t take 10% of that… that will likely mean drastic cuts in the number of people needed to produce the art forms.”
After the actors strike, these were certainly not inspiring comments from Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, about an industry that has already weathered more than its fair share of cuts. And those cuts were before AI was on the table.
We have a different take. Our take does not refer to a time period when few storytellers were able to secure work on these projects with long production timetables, and the majority of animation jobs were shipped overseas, as “the good old days.”