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After years of AI disrupting industries and streamlining repetitive workflows, the technology is now poised to transform animation. In 2024, director and writer Tom Patons AiMation Studios released Where the Robots Grow, a fully AI-animated feature film. Everything from animation and voice acting to music was generated using AI, at a cost of just $8,000 per minutetotaling around $700,000 for the 87-minute production. While IMDB reviewers criticized the film as soulless and uninspired, it proved that AI can deliver full-length animated features at a fraction of traditional budgets. But its not just filmmakers driving this shift. Indie game developers want to prototype characters and worlds in hours, not weeks. TikTok and social media creators are looking to animate original characters without studio resources. Major brands, too, seek emotionally resonant storytelling without monthslong timelines or ballooning 3D animation costs.The challenge: most 3D animation tools are still slow, technical, and expensive. Hoping to remove these barriers, a team of developers from OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and Riot Games launched Cartwheel, an AI-powered 3D animation platform.Cartwheel promises to make high-quality 3D character animation 100 times faster, simpler, and more affordable. Users can record motion with a smartphone, describe a scene with a text prompt, or pull from a library of expressive 3D movements. The platforms AI transforms input into production-ready animations. Artists can refine them in Cartwheel or export into tools like Unity, Unreal Engine, Maya, or Blenderwithout disrupting their pipeline.The startup was cofounded by Andrew Carr, a former OpenAI scientist who helped develop Codex and ChatGPTs code generation, and Jonathan Jarvis, former creative director at Google Creative Lab and founder of the animation studio Universal Patterns.The two met after OpenAI, intrigued by Jarviss concept for a generative animation tool, introduced him to Carr, who had just left the company to explore how AI could make animation more accessible.I had a unique job, where I used animation to share complex research concepts clearly within Google, and make prototypes that couldnt yet be built by software. Andrew always wanted to animate, and later invented a way to talk to Blender, a popular open-source 3D software, with computer code, says Jarvis. We always wanted to build tools to help others get ideas moving and sensed the potential to animate in new ways using gen AI, that it would be centered around creative control.After two years in stealth, Cartwheel is gaining traction. The company recently closed a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, with support from WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg), Khosla Ventures, Accel, Runway, and Tirta Ventures (Ben Feder), bringing total funding to $15.6 million.Over 60,000 animators, developers, and storytellers joined Cartwheels wait-list during stealth. Early adopters from DreamWorks, Duolingo, and Roblox are already using the platform.All of our AI models are developed in-house. Behind the scenes, weve employed careful software engineering to ensure that all the pieces of our system work together in a way that can be plugged into existing animation pipelines, Carr says. Ensuring that the generated animation is properly scaled, moves naturally, and remains consistent throughout has been one of our biggest challenges.[Image: Cartwheel]A Creator-First AI Animation ToolWhile the generative AI field is increasingly crowded, Cartwheel positions itself differently: not as a replacement for artists, but as a tool that amplifies their creativity.Animators and creatives dont care if motion is generated, done by hand, motion-captured, or drawn from a library. They just want it to move to tell their story, make their game, or get their job done, Jarvis says. Our motion models can generate a lot of useful animation quickly, but they cant do everything. Thats why we love a hybrid approach. Computers are great at finding patterns, but its the artist who brings the soul.A key differentiator for Cartwheel is its team. Carr and Jarvis are joined by industry veterans with experience in film, games, and interactive design. Catherine Cat Hicks, former Pixar animation director on Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story 3, serves as head of Animation Innovation. Neil Helm, head of Interactive Animation, worked on crowd systems at Pixar for Turning Red, Lightyear, Up, and Inside Out 2.The platforms design is shaped by Steven Ziadie, former Sony and Riot designer, while production is led by Buthaina Mahmud, who helped define Unitys real-time animation workflows and developed shaders used in the Spider-Verse films.We reached out, and some reached out to us. Over time, we realized we all shared the goal to make storytelling faster, easier, and more powerful, Carr and Jarvis tell Fast Company. Culture is being shaped in increasingly dynamic, interactive, and immersive spaces like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Robloxall animation-driven experiences. Were building tools for where animation is headed, and thats resonating with industry veterans.User feedback has helped shape Cartwheels interface.We began with a focus on text to animation. In beta, we learned that while thats compelling in many situations, often folks want to browse motions for inspiration, use video reference, or act out the motion themselvesso weve moved to a multimodal interface, Carr says.Whats Next for Cartwheel?High-quality animation data remains scarce, with most data sets proprietary or lacking in diversity and detail. To address this, Cartwheel is using synthetic dataAI-generated animations that mimic real-world motionto train and refine its models.The next generation of AI companies has to find and curate the hard data types, and do the hard work to refine it and make it useful to people in that field. Thats where the value is, Carr says. While at OpenAI, I worked on the science of data quality and was able to generate millions of dollars of model improvements with just a few lines of code. We are following the same path at Cartwheel to ensure we produce he styles, qualities, and delightfulness in our motion data that artists need.With fresh funding, Cartwheel plans to deepen R&D, grow its team, and bring its platform to broader markets.Over the next 12 months, we aim to be a catalyst, enabling both large and small animation projects to flourish, Jarvis says. Ensuring ethically sourced data that empowers artists is fundamental to our approach. We are a team of artists building tools for artists.
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E-Commerce
Ma Yansong is gesturing at a spiraling staircase inside the atrium of a building. The founder of MAD Architectsthe Chinese firm behind the soon-to-open Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angelesis in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to inaugurate the opening of his first museum in Europe, and he is talking about movement. Of forms, yes, but mostly of people. Ma Yansong [Photo: Courtesy MAD Architects] The museum, called Fenix, sits on the edge of Rotterdam’s historic port, which was also the first Chinatown in continental Europe. It was here, from the banks of the River Maas, where millions of emigrantsAlbert Einstein includedboarded ships toward North America in search of better opportunities. And it is here, in the building that once housed the world’s largest harbor storage warehouse for the Holland America Line, that Yansong has come to reflect on the meaning of migration. Fenix is likely the first art museum in the world dedicated to the politically loaded theme of migration. Exhibitions stretch across two long, airy floors inside a century-old warehouse that was purchased by local art and culture foundation Droom en Daad in 2018, then restored by local architects from the design firm Bureau Polderman. MAD’s tangled staircase connects both floors, then swoops out through the roof into a panoramic platform that offers sprawling views of the city. “I think it’s an architectural element, but its also a metaphor; it has a storytelling function,” Yansong says. [Photo: Iwan Baan] “It’s not about numbers” Fenix is opening at a time in which migrants around the world are being vilified, humiliated, deported. The EU has been hardening its migration policy for years, and hard-right parties are fast gaining groundin the Netherlands as well. Since President Donald Trump took office, he has shifted nearly every aspect of U.S immigration policy to constrict regular immigration pathways, deport primarily black and brown immigrants living in the U.S. regardless of their legal status or criminal history, and instill fear among those who remain. By comparison, the team behind Fenix is approaching migration with empathy. “We show that migration is not about numbers or facts, but it’s really about people,” says Anne Kremers, director of Fenix. “There’s a migration story to tell in every family, so that really is our angle: to show that we’re all human.” The underlying theme is perhaps best illustrated by a giant sculpture of a sun hanging over the lobby, which is here to suggest that we all live under the same sun. The galleries showcase personal histories of identity and migration from around the world: a Chinese talisman from a queer man who fled his native China for the Netherlands, and a life-size MTA bus with various characters made of wood. One exhibition makes the argument that we are all one big family of migrants. Another lets you journey through a labyrinth of 2,000 suitcases collected from across the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada. [Photo: Iwan Baan] A metaphor for migration In the atrium, Yansong has articulated his own interpretation of migration in the form of a loopy, sinuous stairway that has been dubbed Tornado. This star attraction is actually two staircases that meet at two separate junctions before ushering visitors onto the roof. For Yansong, these junctions are symbolic of the journey a migrant takes. “You have to choose,” he says. In pure Rotterdam style, the stairs were craned into place after being transported by barge. The structure is clad in 297 highly polished, stainless steel panelseach a different size and made in Groningen, in northern Netherlands. The steps themselves are made of a Norwegian wood called Kebony, which develops a natural silver-gray patina over time and resembles the wood on a ship deck. On the roof, when you lean over the balustrade, you can almost feel the flurry of emotions that emigrants must have felt when waving to their loved ones, themselves standing on the nearby “pier of tears.” (A pill-shaped elevator encased in a glass cylinder provides an accessible route and culminates to a similar experience when you emerge onto the roof.) Sometimes, architects designing art museums choose to scale back the architecture in order to let the art speak for itself. Here, Yansong opted for a design that bolsters it. Some will inevitably find the steel too impersonal in a museum that is filled with such intimate, vulnerable stories. But as visitors walk around the atrium and climb up the steps, they willsee one another reflected in the mirrored surface, whichsmudges be damnedis designed to reinforce the shared experience of the moment. [Photo: Iwan Baan] Designing with emotion MAD is no stranger to cultural buildings, among them the Harbin Opera House in the province of Heilongjiang and the China Philharmonic Concert Hall in Beijing. But Fenix is the studio’s first cultural project in Europe, and the first European museum designed by a Chinese firman achievement that Yansong has long yearned for. “I always wanted this opportunity,” he says of the chance to design a museum in Europe. “It’s a journey for me, you know, to understand other people. I think that’s the most exciting part, for I go to a different place and try to understand.” Yansong grew up in Beijing, in the traditional hutong alleyways that would later be demolished as part of the country’s rush to modernize. During his early 20s, he studied at Yale, then worked in London (under Zaha Hadid) before returning to his native country. Since then, Yansong has become part of the second generation of Chinese architects revolutionizing architecture after the country opened up to private practice in the 1990s. In 2012, he gained international fame with his curvaceous “Marilyn Monroe Towers” in Mississauga, Canada, which led to other international commissions like an apartment complex in Paris, or most recently the One River North apartment block in Denver. But his Chinese background never seems to stray too far. “I think the fundamental difference between China and the Western world is the Chinese use more emotion,” he told me. In Fenix, like with every building, Yansong began with a hand sketch. “You capture an emotion at one moment,” he says, “and I try to keep that until the endnot to change it or make it perfect.” To him, the museum is a poetic interpretation of the migration that his own people have experienced”the Chinese go everywhere,” he saysbut also of migration as a whole. “Movement is universal.”
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E-Commerce
A century ago, Guccio Gucci opened a boutique in Florence, Italy, that sold high-end leather luggage to well-heeled travelers. He infused his brand with all kinds of unique design elements that would become iconic, including the double-G insignia and bamboo handles. Guccio’s oldest son, Aldo, would go on to transform the label into one of the best-known luxury brands in the world, alongside Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Prada. Aldo’s granddaughter, Alexandra Gucci Zarini, heard a lot about the origins of her family’s business around the dining table when she was growing up. She wanted to follow in her great-grandfather’s footsteps by becoming a fashion designer. But by the time she was in design school, the Guccis no longer controlled their namesake brand. In 1993, the family sold its stake to a Bahrain-based company that took it public. By 1999, the French luxury conglomerate Kering (formerly Pinault-Printemps-Redoute) had acquired a controlling 42% stake in Gucci for $3 billion. Within five years, that stake grew to 99.4%. “I wanted to be just like my grandfather,” Zarini says. “I wanted to create something long-lasting and meaningful. But my family wasn’t involved in the company anymore and so I went on with my life.” [Photo: courtesy AGCF] Zarini went on to do other things, including working at a family office and an art gallery, before becoming a stay-at-home mother. But two years ago, Zarini decided it was finally time for her to rekindle her dream: She cofounded her own handbag brand, called AGCF (which stands for Alexandra Gucci Creative Framework) with her husband, Josef Zarini. It produces luxury handbags priced between $1,000 and $3,000, along with small leather goods and jewelry. She launched her newest handbag collection, which features structured silhouettes that are subtly reminiscent of her great-grandfather’s original designs, earlier this spring. [Photo: courtesy AGCF] In many ways, the past two years have been a chance for Zarini and her husband to test the waters with their nascent brandand now they’re ready to scale. They’re beginning to explore partnerships with department stores and other retailers around the world. Zarini’s goal is to appeal to a new kind of luxury customer, one who prefers quiet luxury to big brands. But there are also some customers who long for the old Gucci and are drawn to AGCF’s design language. “There’s a little hint of Gucci there, but it’s also a distinctly different brand,” Zarini says. “It’s a brand reimagined for today.” And indeed, AGCF provides luxury shoppers an alternative to Gucci, which is currently on a downward spiral. Last year, Gucci revenue declined by 23% from the year before to $8.6 billion. This weakened Kering’s earnings, which were down 12% to $17.8 billion. This year, Gucci’s first-quarter sales continued to tumble by 25%. In March, Gucci announced that it had appointed Demna, the creative director of Balenciaga for the past 10 years, to become its new artistic director, starting in July 2025. Given that Demna is known for pursuing the avant-garde, rather than the traditional, AGCF may offer a compelling option to fans of old-school Gucci. [Photo: courtesy AGCF] A 21st-Century Label Over the decades, there were others in the Gucci family who launched their own fashion lines, including two of Aldo’s sons, Giorgio and Paolo, in the 1960s and 1970s. (Those brands were ultimately absorbed into the Gucci Group and acquired by Kering.) But Zarini’s vision for her brand is different from those of her uncles. Zarini realized she had the opportunity to think about what would be different if Guccio Gucci had founded his brand today, and recognizes that the 21st-century consumer expects different things from luxury brands. For one thing, the planet wasn’t in crisis a century ago, so Gucci wasn’t built on sustainable principles. Conversely, Zarini has built AGCF with a focus on more eco-friendly materials and manufacturing processes. The brand sources its leather from a tannery in Florence that is audited by the Leather Working Group, and its small jewelry collection is made using recycled metals and lab-grown diamonds. [Photo: courtesy AGCF] We also live in an era of fast fashion, where trends shift quickly, creating a culture of overconsumption that is bad for he environment. Even luxury brands are guilty of cultivating trends to encourage people to buy more and more. Zarini has focused on designing bags that are minimal and classic, so they don’t go out of style. “Even the colors are going to stay the same,” she says. “Our goal is to create products that could have been worn 30 years ago and youll still wear 30 years from now.” More importantly, Zarini wants her brand to be associated with a social cause. She has spent her life focused on fighting against the exploitation of children. Zarini herself is a survivor. In 2020, she brought a lawsuit against three of her family members, describing years of sexual abuse perpetrated by her former stepfather, Joseph Ruffal, and complicity from her mother and grandmother. Zarini wants to use AGCF as a platform for raising awareness about child abuse. AGCF was founded as a B Corporation, and it donates 20% of its profits to support grassroots charitable organizations that are committed to advocating for children. She believes a fashion brand is a particularly good vehicle for telling this story because it’s also part of an industry that exploits children. “We know that the fashion industry relies on child labor,” she says. “And young models are taken advantage of.” [Photo: courtesy AGCF] Paying Homage to Aldo Gucci Zarini is building a luxury brand for the 21st century. Even so, she’s still deeply inspired by her great-grandfather’s work, and her products have silhouettes and motifs that are distantly related to the Gucci archives. AGCF seems designed to appeal to Gucci fans who are more drawn to the brand’s heritage than to what it has become in recent years. “There’s a subtle hint of heritage there,” Zarini says. “It ties back to my grandfather.” [Photo: courtesy AGCF] Zarini has created simple, structured silhouettes for her bags, some of which are reminiscent of classic Gucci pieces. The rounded shape of the Ascot bag, for instance, is similar to Gucci’s bamboo handle bag that was launched in 1947. The Chelsea crossbody bag has a trapezoid shape that is similar to the Gucci horsebit bag that came out in 1955. “If you look from afar, you might see the Gucci vibe,” she says. “But I’m interested in bringing in that heritage without too closely mimicking it, because I don’t want to ride the coattails of the Gucci name.” [Photo: courtesy AGCF] AGCF launched quietly two years ago. It sells its products online and from a storefront on Rodeo Drive. This is also a tribute to her grandfather, who first opened a store there in 1968. This was an important step for Gucci because it introduced Hollywood stars to the label, helping turn the brand into a global sensation. “Aldo Gucci was one of the first to open a store on Rodeo Drive, and turn the street into what it is today,” says Josef Zarini. “I think it’s important to remember him because he is a Gucci that the world doesn’t know very well.”
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E-Commerce
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