Glen Keane
Animator & Artist
Legendary Disney animator behind Ariel, the Beast, Aladdin, and Tarzan, and director of the Oscar-winning Over the Moon. He sees a genuine “path for using AI” — but one that, in his words, “really requires artists to use it.”
In his words
It doesn’t take anything away from us; it’s giving us something to choose to work with. I really believe there’s a path for using AI, but it really requires artists to use it.
Biography
Glen Keane (born 1954) is one of the most celebrated animators in Disney history, the supervising animator who brought Ariel, the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Tarzan to life across the studio’s late-20th-century renaissance. After leaving Disney he directed the Netflix feature Over the Moon, which won an Academy Award, and created the VR short Dear Basketball with Kobe Bryant.
A path — driven by artists
Speaking at a 2024 masterclass, Keane placed AI in a long historical arc of technologies that felt threatening on arrival. “The concept of AI is not new,” he said. “We’ve lived through it so many times in history, the idea of technology coming along and feeling like it’s going to replace the things that we love.”
His conclusion was optimistic but pointedly conditional: AI “doesn’t take anything away from us,” he argued — instead it “gives us something to choose to work with.” The catch is that the tool is only as good as the artist steering it. There is “a path for using AI,” he said, but it “really requires artists to use it.”
That artist-first framing keeps Keane firmly in the pro camp while sidestepping the boosterism of the technology industry: for him, AI is inert without the human eye and hand that give animation its life.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/glen-keane