Disney Jr. and French AI-driven animation company Animaj quietly released Ozzy Fox this week, a new preschool series developed jointly by the two companies. The first two episodes hit YouTube and YouTube Kids on Wednesday and are nearing 800,000 combined views after just two days.<\/p>\n
Ozzy Fox was created by Jennifer Oxley, whose credits include Peg + Cat, Wonder Pets!, and Little Bill, and developed by Pocoyo co-creator Guillermo Garc\u00eda Cars\u00ed, who joined Animaj as creative director in 2023. Chen Neeman, Kat Rende, and JP Rende wrote songs for the series.<\/p>\n
The music-driven show follows a five-year-old fox whose imagination turns ordinary childhood routines into games and adventures. Its first two installments, \u201cThe Floor Is Lava! Squeaky Clean Up Game\u201d and \u201cPotty Party Dance Break!,\u201d deal with cleaning up and toilet training.<\/p>\n
No official press release was sent out for the show, and we\u2019re told the companies want the launch to speak for itself. Instead, Animaj co-founder Sixte Vauplane took to LinkedIn to celebrate the launch.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Noteworthy here, though unsurprising, is Disney\u2019s decision to develop an original series directly with Animaj, which has made AI central to both its production model and corporate identity. The two companies already have a commercial agreement that saw Disney sign on<\/a> with Lumee, the kids-focused YouTube advertising venture formed by Animaj and Hasbro Entertainment. Lumee now represents selected ad inventory across several Disney channels, including Disney Jr., Disney Kids, Star Wars Kids, Marvel HQ, and Nat Geo Kids.<\/p>\n For its part, Animaj has promoted a proprietary pipeline using tools including AI-assisted sketch-to-pose prediction and motion in-betweening, which it says can substantially reduce production time and costs. The company is using that pipeline for major kids\u2019 properties, including Pocoyo<\/a> and\u00a0Maya the Bee<\/a>.<\/p>\n Neither company has explained what role Animaj\u2019s AI tools played in making Ozzy Fox, although that kind of disclosure feels less and less common as AI tools become more commonplace in studio pipelines. Just yesterday, Netflix revealed it has used genAI tools on nearly 300 titles this year already, but only mentioned three by name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Disney Jr. and French AI-driven animation company Animaj quietly released Ozzy Fox this week, a new preschool series…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":811961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-811960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/811961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}