Postmodernism has already mixed everything
In "The Postmodern Condition" (1979) the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote about the end of grand narratives — single, all-explaining stories. Fredric Jameson described postmodernism as a culture of pastiche and endless recycling of existing images. AI is an almost literal embodiment of this idea: it learns from a vast archive and gives it back to us, remixed.
Benjamin and the aura
As early as 1936, in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Walter Benjamin argued that copying strips a work of its "aura" — its unique presence in time and space. Generative models have pushed reproducibility to the limit: images have become infinite. And so value shifts — from the image itself to the gaze, the choice and the meaning.
What AI really changes
- Speed and cost of drafts, storyboards, backgrounds and style options.
- Access to visual languages — you can quickly test how a story will look in different techniques.
- New hybrid forms, where hand-drawn animation, collage and generated images work together.
What AI does not replace
It doesn't know why a story is being told. It doesn't choose the protagonist, decide what to leave off screen, or take responsibility for ethics towards real people. In documentary and social filmmaking this is what matters most: care, accuracy, responsibility to subjects and viewers.
How we used AI in the film about Kandinsky
In the film about Wassily Kandinsky we ran a large part of his paintings through AI to show, with examples, how the artist's visual language works. Here AI is not a replacement for animators but a tool for explanation: it helped show viewers what Kandinsky wrote about in his book "Concerning the Spiritual in Art". See the case →
So what will replace animation?
Nothing — because animation was never just a technique. It is a way of thinking in images and time. Tools change, but the question stays the same: what do we want to say, and to whom? AI speeds up the journey, but it doesn't chart the course.
Want to figure out where AI can help your project and where handcraft is needed? Write to us.