View's studio bosses hedged on AI. An hour later, the directors said they used none, and the room cheered

The question assumed the answer. On Wednesday evening at View Conference in Turin, the moderator of the directors panel told the four filmmakers on stage that AI was "touching every facet of the films you guys make" and asked how it had been used in their productions. Januel Mercado, co-director of DreamWorks' Forgotten Island, did not take the premise. "We didn't use any AI," he said, according to Cartoon Brew, which reports that he answered immediately and that the line drew "supportive shouts and applause from the View crowd."

Seventy-five minutes earlier, in the same room, seven executives who run some of the biggest visual effects and animation houses in the business had spent an hour talking about the same technology in far more careful terms. Put the two sessions side by side and you get the clearest picture yet of where the industry actually is this fall: the people who sign the budgets are keeping every door open, and the people who make the films are being cheered for keeping one shut.

One caveat sits on top of everything that follows. Both sessions were written up by a single reporter, Jamie Lang of Cartoon Brew, on 15 October, and we found no recording and no second account. Every quote below is Cartoon Brew's rendering, and we have checked the line-ups, times and room against View's own session page and the conference's printed schedule.

An hour earlier, the bosses hedged

The executive roundtable, "Industry Executives Shaping the Future of Cinema", ran from 16:30 on 14 October and was moderated by Ian Failes, editor of befores & afters. On stage were Michelle Grady (president, Sony Pictures Imageworks), Janet Lewin (SVP and general manager, ILM), Holly Edwards (president, Skydance Animation), Ron Frankel (Proof), Laurens Ehrmann (The Yard), Henrik Fett (Opsis Studio) and Shawn Walsh (Cinesite and Image Engine). AI was one thread of four, alongside pipelines, new audiences and jobs.

The sharpest line came from one of the smaller shops. "We talk about how AI can compress execution time, but it cannot compress taste," said Ehrmann, founder of the French studio The Yard. "So, we really need our new generation of artists to understand how to judge an image, how to improve it." Lewin was more guarded. "There's a fallacy about this magic bullet of AI and machine learning, and we just don't know the extent to which these tools are going to transform," she said, before adding that "we have to keep an open mind about the possibilities."

Walsh put the practical problem plainly, saying that dumping "one entire process for something else that has an unknown end is not something that's easy to adopt." Frankel, whose previs company announced a permanent New York studio at View the same day, said a creative conversation "at the speed of ideas" would be powerful and then added: "I don't think we're there yet."

The most concrete technology news on the panel was not about generative AI at all. Grady described Imageworks' Unreal Engine pipeline with Sony Pictures Animation, first used on KPop Demon Hunters (Epic confirmed that part in February) and pushed further on GOAT and Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse. That is real-time rendering inside a traditional artist-driven pipeline, and it is worth keeping separate from the prompt-to-video tools most of our readers use. Lewin, meanwhile, said traditional feature-film VFX is now about 40 percent of ILM's work; that figure is Cartoon Brew's paraphrase, not a direct quote, and it does not appear in any ILM release we found.

The jobs question came from the press row

Cartoon Brew's headline says questions about jobs "loom large", and they did, though it helps to know who raised them. When the session opened to the floor, the outlet writes, "we had to ask": how do executives balance protecting artists' livelihoods with keeping studios running? The other audience questions it reports were about tax incentives and what young artists should learn.

Grady answered first and most forcefully. "We don't exist without artists, full stop," she said, adding that if studios fail to use the technology "in a way that creates great images using great artists, then we've completely failed." Fett called the well-being of his artist pool "paramount" and said it is what he goes to bed and wakes up with.

Lewin gave the most candid answer in the room: "Many of us are part of a parent company that makes decisions that we can't control." Greenlights, VFX volume and budgets sit above her, she said, and what a studio leader can offer is transparency and retraining. That line explains more about the hedging than any of the forecasts did, because the people on that stage run the vendors, and the vendors do not set the budget.

The context is real but easy to overstate. Sony Pictures Entertainment cut a few hundred roles and shut Pixomondo in April, according to Variety, and Marvel Studios laid off most of its visual development team in May, according to Screen International. Netflix announced about 1,000 job cuts on the day of the panel, but those fell mostly on product, tech, legal and HR teams rather than artists. On the other side of the ledger, Screen reported from company filings that ILM's UK arm added 55 staff in 2025, most of them artists.

What the directors actually said

The directors panel, "The Future of Filmmaking", began at 17:45 with Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado of Forgotten Island, Kenna Harris, co-director and co-writer of Pixar's Toy Story 5, and Tyree Dillihay of Sony Pictures Animation's GOAT. Cartoon Brew spells her name McKenna; View's schedule and Disney's credits say Kenna, which is what we use.

Their answers were not identical, and the difference matters. Mercado said no AI, then pointed to Forgotten Island's end credits, which show the cast and crew pictured with their best friends. Harris chose narrower words: "We didn't use generative AI on Toy Story 5." She also said Pixar is "at a crossroads of, like, what does that mean for the identity of Pixar?" and that she hopes new tools "benefit those artists and not take away their jobs."

Crawford went furthest, saying that "AI copies the hell out of what we've done and is always looking back" and adding: "It's frustrating that these big corporations don't understand the art that they're stealing." Dillihay said nothing about AI in Cartoon Brew's report, and his film is one of those Grady named as using Imageworks' Unreal pipeline, which is a rendering tool and not a generator.

Both films had already proved their point at the box office before anyone asked. Toy Story 5 has taken $1.148 billion worldwide, and Forgotten Island opened to $13.0 million domestic on 25 September and stands at $52.8 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. Meanwhile, a pro-AI session called "From Sketch to Screen: AI-Powered Storytelling" ran at exactly the same time in another room, and we could find no coverage of it at all.

Both rooms named the same scarce thing

Strip away the tone and the two sessions agree on more than they disagree. The executives said taste cannot be compressed and that the industry needs people who can judge an image. The directors drew shouts and applause for saying their films came from people. Both rooms are pricing the same input, which is judgment, and neither is pricing button-pushing.

In practice, for anyone making work this week, that is the opening. The studios still have to answer to a parent company, and their hiring pitch is already about taste rather than tools. An independent maker answers to nobody, can show their process openly and can put their own judgment on the screen. A few things follow from that:

• Your reel should show the decisions, because the people hiring said out loud that judging and improving an image is the skill they want.
• Your credits are part of the work, and Forgotten Island turned its end credits into a statement about who made the film.
• Your disclosure is worth getting precise, since Harris's "generative AI" and Mercado's "any AI" were heard as the same answer and are not.

The reach so far is small. Cartoon Brew's two posts on X drew about 2,800 and 2,600 impressions by Friday morning, though the no-AI piece got twice the likes on fewer views. Nobody else has written up either session yet, so the next thing to watch is whether befores & afters, whose editor moderated the executive panel, publishes its own account.

Timeline

• Date: 27 Feb 2026. What happened: Epic spotlight confirms Imageworks used Unreal on KPop Demon Hunters; Source: unrealengine.com
• Date: 7 Apr 2026. What happened: Sony Pictures Entertainment cuts a few hundred roles and shuts Pixomondo; Source: Variety
• Date: 29 May 2026. What happened: ILM UK reported to have added 55 staff in 2025; Marvel visual development team laid off; Source: Screen International
• Date: 19 Jun 2026. What happened: Toy Story 5 opens (now $1.148B worldwide); Source: Disney; Box Office Mojo
• Date: 25 Sep 2026. What happened: Forgotten Island opens to $13.0M domestic; Source: Box Office Mojo
• Date: 12-16 Oct 2026. What happened: View Conference 2026 runs in Turin; Source: viewconference.it
• Date: 14 Oct, 16:30. What happened: Executive roundtable, moderated by Ian Failes; Source: View session page and schedule
• Date: 14 Oct, 17:45. What happened: Directors panel; Mercado: "We didn't use any AI"; Source: View schedule; Cartoon Brew
• Date: 14 Oct 2026. What happened: Netflix announces about 1,000 job cuts, mostly non-artist teams; Source: AP, BBC, TechCrunch
• Date: 15 Oct 2026. What happened: Cartoon Brew publishes both reports (Jamie Lang); Source: cartoonbrew.com

Sources and what is unconfirmed: both Cartoon Brew reports by Jamie Lang (15 Oct 2026), read in full; View Conference's session page and printed schedule; Disney's Toy Story 5 credits; Box Office Mojo (read 16 Oct); Epic Games' KPop Demon Hunters spotlight (27 Feb); ilm.com (24 Sep); Variety (7 Apr); Screen International (29 May); AP, BBC and TechCrunch on Netflix (14 Oct); X API figures for Cartoon Brew's posts (16 Oct, 05:30 UTC). All quotes rest on one reporter with no recording; ILM's 40 percent figure is a paraphrase; the directors panel moderator is not named in any source; befores & afters had not published a write-up when we checked on 16 Oct. We did not contact the studios or the panelists.

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