Walking through Pixar - and into animation’s AI reckoning

For decades, Pixar's films have shaped our visual vocabulary. Now, the studio is faced with a new frontier, as the future of animation is rewritten in code. Minnie Stephenson explains.

There’s something faintly surreal about standing in Andy’s bedroom in Wembley.

The bedposts are enormous. The carpet feels impossibly wide. You are, quite literally, toy-sized — transported into the universe of Toy Story.

A few rooms away, children will dart through the neon headquarters of Inside Out, while parents linger longer than they perhaps intend, quietly revisiting their own core memories.

For more than 30 years, Pixar hasn’t just made films. It has shaped our visual vocabulary.

From Woody’s existential crisis to Nemo finding himself, Pixar mastered something rare in blockbuster cinema: stories that trusted children with complexity. Grief. Purpose. Fear. Joy. Loss. Ambition. The messiness of being human.

Pixar’s largest immersive exhibit

Now, in a purpose-built space in Wembley, the Mundo Pixar Experience — billed as the studio’s largest immersive exhibition in the world — turns those two-dimensional memories into something you can touch (strictly speaking, you shouldn’t touch the set).

It is, unmistakably, nostalgia monetised. But it is also something more revealing.

Because while families will queue for photos with oversized props, the animation industry itself is confronting a technological shift as significant as the one that birthed Toy Story in 1995 — the first fully computer-animated feature film.

Back then, Pixar was the disruptor. Computer animation was the radical frontier.

Now, the frontier is artificial intelligence.

A creativity debate

Generative AI can already draft scripts, produce concept art, mimic visual styles and assist in animation. Disney, Pixar’s parent company, has struck major agreements with AI developers, signalling a landmark moment in Hollywood - and anxiety from some.

The debate, however, cuts to the core of what creativity means.

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Supporters argue AI is simply the next tool: lower costs, and allow artists to focus on storytelling.

Critics see something more existential. If a machine can replicate a “Pixar-style” aesthetic in seconds, what happens to the animators who spent decades perfecting it? Can a system trained on past human expression truly create something new — or does it only remix what we’ve already felt?

Adaptation is ‘part of Pixar’s DNA’

Jay Ward, Pixar’s long-serving Creative Director for Franchise, pictured below, told me adaptation has always been part of the studio’s DNA. Pixar was born from technological risk. Change, in that sense, is not new.

But this shift feels different.

The move to computer animation expanded human possibility. AI risks diluting the role of the human altogether.

And yet, walking through Wembley’s immersive sets, you’re reminded of something stubbornly analogue. The laughter of children. The misty-eyed parents. The shared recognition of Buzz Lightyear shouting, “to infinity and beyond!”

Enduring questions

Pixar’s genius was never just its software. It was its emotional intelligence - stories that understood the quiet fears inside us.

Technology will evolve. It always does.

But if the future of animation is being rewritten in code, the enduring question isn’t whether AI can generate images that look like Pixar.

It’s whether it can make us feel the way Toy Story did.