Cheehoo Brings AI to Animation

New AI-powered animation company Cheehoo has brought together a team of top entertainment industry names and Silicon Valley data scientists to revolutionize the minutiae of making 3D-animated projects.

The Big Picture: Making movies is expensive, and making high-quality animated movies is typically very expensive. That usually means that these movies need to make a lot of money to recoup their investment — something even Disney has struggled with in recent years. Finding a way to bring down costs, while also empowering human artists, may seem like an attractive option.

Behind the Scenes: Cheehoo — named after a Pacific Island exclamation of excitement — is making waves right out of the gate.

• Its founding team includes Netflix film chief Dan Lin, former president of DreamWorks Animation Chris DeFaria, former Apple scientists and AI/machine learning experts Dr. Hubert Tsai and Dr. Wei-Cheng Kuo, and Rideback co-CEOs Michael LoFaso and Jonathan Eirich.
• The company, which currently has a production pipeline in beta, has reportedly raised tens of millions of dollars from investors like Greycroft and Point72 Ventures.
• Cheehoo is already being used to work on several projects, which will be announced at a later date.

Final Render: So, what does Cheehoo do? It helps build proprietary LLMs for studios and streamers, so they can use generative AI to optimize workflows — whether that’s creating assets with a “unique artistic style and consistent identity,” streamlining asset compatibility across formats like animation and gaming, or ensuring copyright protection. That’s a lot of nuts and bolts, but it’s the type of stuff that takes a lot of billable hours.

If the platform helps get the same number of animators working on more projects, it could be a tool artists will embrace as much as producers.