At View Conference, Sony Imageworks, ILM and Skydance Animation bosses talk AI and innovation, and the room keeps asking about jobs

At View Conference, seven studio bosses kept every option open on AI, and an hour later the Forgotten Island co-director said his film used none, to applause. Every quote rests on one Cartoon Brew reporter.

At View Conference in Turin on Wednesday, seven executives who run some of the biggest visual effects and animation studios spent an hour talking about AI and kept every door open. Laurens Ehrmann of The Yard said AI "can compress execution time, but it cannot compress taste." ILM's Janet Lewin warned of "a fallacy about this magic bullet," and later admitted that many studio heads answer to "a parent company that makes decisions that we can't control."

Seventy-five minutes later, in the same room, the moderator asked four directors how AI had been used on their films. Januel Mercado, co-director of DreamWorks' Forgotten Island, answered at once: "We didn't use any AI." The crowd shouted and applauded. Pixar's Kenna Harris chose narrower words, saying they "didn't use generative AI on Toy Story 5," and Joel Crawford said AI "copies the hell out of what we've done."

There is one caveat on all of it, because every quote comes from a single Cartoon Brew reporter, Jamie Lang, and we found no recording of either session.

In practice, both rooms named the same scarce thing, which is judgment. If you make work, show the decisions in your reel, treat your credits as part of the film, and say exactly what you did and did not use, because "no AI" and "no generative AI" are not the same answer.

Source: Cartoon Brew, View Conference, Oct 15, 2026.