Not too far, or its possible right now depending on jow you want to define “animated”. I feel like there uses to be really low-budget cartoons on air which were really just still frames with some shake added, couple soumd effects, and voice acting. A lot like SolidJJ on YouTube now. Those wouldn’t even be too hard to do, if the AI were just one tool in the set - could probably crank out a few a week, anyway.

If you’re looking for twenty minutes of animation that doesn’t shift around like a fever dream while you’re watching it, maybe six to eighteen months. I do think human voice actors would be required, but you could do the music with Suno.

Technically, it can and has been done already. The problem is that AI is very bad at creating new ideas and even worse at understanding what it has created (as is required for plots or jokes). As a result, any writting created with heavy AI influence tends to sound like a child’s stream of thought with an adult’s vocabulary, and any jokes rely purely on randomness or on repeating an existing well-known joke. Similarly with art and animation, because the AI doesn’t understand what it is creating, it struggles to keep animation of elements consistant and often can’t figure out how elements should be included in the scene. Voices are probably the strongest part, but even then, it can be buggy and won’t change correctly to match the context of what is being said.

None of this is to say AI is useless. Its very good at creating a “good enough” quick-fix, or to be used to fill unimportant or trivial work. If used to help clean up scripts or fill in backgrounds, it can speed up the process greatly at minimal cost. It’s a tool to be used by someone who knows the field, not to replace them.

You can tune in right now: Nothing, forever.

As far as I know it is possible right now. There are some really impressive video generative AIs out there. Us regular people probably cannot do it, as nobody who runs such a model would let us use their resources to that extent.

But if someone with such a model decides to go all in, they could probably do so now. However, “now” does not mean instant. They could push the button now, and then the computers start to churn, and considering the size and complexity of a full movie it’s going to take a while.

And then you have the first pass done. The first of what will probably be many. I find it hard to believe that you’d create the entire movie in one go. Because if the AI fucks up just a few details, the entire movie will be garbage. It is better to do it scene by scene, and then stitch them together afterwards. So you run multiple passes for every scene until you have what you want, you stich them together, and then do whatever else you need to do to release this end result.

I’m sure the NVIDIA and AMD CEOs are currently having wet dreams of someone deciding to do this, because it’s going to cause GPU prices to skyrocket.

A very long time hopefully.

When you say “by themselves”, you mean one person would still write the scripts manually, and AI would replace the grunt-work animation teams that shows like the Simpsons and South Park employ in East Asia?