Toniko Pantoja
Animator & Story Artist
Professional animator and story artist — credits include How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Croods: A New Age, Blue Eye Samurai, and Invincible — who teaches hand-drawn animation to 380K+ YouTube subscribers and argues generative AI defeats the artistic growth that gives art its meaning.
In his words
Touching AI in our community is like necromancy in the magic world. It’s forbidden. It’s despised. It’ll get you ostracized.
AI collects data. To be inspired means to be emotionally moved.
I’ll always have a sense of pride knowing that the things I have made are human-made, based on very personal experiences and things I have learned during the process.
Biography
Toniko Pantoja is a story artist, 2D animator, and character designer whose CalArts student film “Crayon Dragon” (2012) went viral and earned an Annie Award nomination before he built a studio career: storyboards on How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Croods: A New Age, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Blue Eye Samurai, and Invincible, and animation on Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. On YouTube he teaches hand-drawn animation to over 380,000 subscribers, with the channel doubling as a journal of his creative process.
The process is the point
Pantoja engaged early and carefully: his December 2022 video “AI Art is the ‘FUTURE’ ….and why its not” conceded that automation could help with meticulous tasks while condemning the scraping economy — “fragments of signatures found in some AI generated art” — and the stable-diffusion “tribute” made from the late Kim Jung Gi’s work a week after his death, which he called the most dishonest way to honor an artist. By April 2025, in “How AI defeats the purpose of artistic growth,” his verdict had hardened.
I do think that the ethical issues with AI is pretty bad. The biggest issue is that there’s a lot of stolen data within it.
His core argument is developmental: the frustrating, laborious middle of making something — “where a lot of artists grow” — is exactly what generative tools amputate, replacing self-discovery with a slot-machine loop of prompting that he compares to a gambling addiction. In June 2026, as respected animators he knows personally began adopting generative AI, he responded with “Our heroes are turning to gen AI” — disappointed, especially in those “very loud in their stance against AI” who now spearhead it, yet refusing to join the dogpiles: death threats and attacks on families are “inexcusable,” and the lesson he draws is to stop putting heroes on pedestals. He keeps a portfolio on Cara, the artist platform built to exclude AI scraping.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/toniko-pantoja