Like ‘having sex and then they hand you the baby’: A beloved animator on using AI

Writer and director Jorge R. Gutierrez is best known for creating the 2014 animated film The Book of Life. A labor of love and a tribute to Mexican folk art, the movie took Gutierrez 14 years to make, and it paid off: The Book of Life’s beautiful handcrafted 3D animation was near universally lauded. But Gutierrez’s next project is taking a different approach. It won’t take him 14 years—in fact, his upcoming animated series Punky Duck was greenlit just two months after he pitched it to Amazon...