Walt Disney Imagineering Partners With Adobe to Use AI in Park Design

Jun 16, 2026 in "Walt Disney Imagineering"

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Posted: Tuesday June 16, 2026 12:30pm ET by WDWMAGIC Staff

Walt Disney Imagineering has announced a new collaboration with Adobe that brings AI-powered tools into the design and pre-production process for Disney Parks and Experiences.

The partnership centers on Adobe Firefly Foundry, a platform that lets businesses build custom generative AI models trained on their own assets.

Unlike general-purpose AI tools trained on scraped internet data, the models built for Imagineering will draw directly from Disney's own design catalog — giving Imagineers AI that understands the precise visual language of specific franchises.

Walt Disney Imagineering headquarters

What Adobe Firefly Foundry Brings to Imagineering

The collaboration introduces three initial workflows for Walt Disney Imagineering teams:

Sketch-to-image: Transforms rough hand-drawn concepts into fully rendered 2D concept art, letting designers iterate rapidly and explore multiple creative directions.
Custom image generation: Produces on-brand, franchise-accurate assets across properties including Mickey & Friends, Frozen, Moana, Lilo & Stitch, and Cars — speeding up the concept and design phase for future attractions.
3D modeling: Converts 2D renderings and design concepts into detailed 3D prototypes, helping teams plan builds, estimate materials, and coordinate with engineering long before construction begins.

Brand consistency is non-negotiable for DIsney. Every character, color, and creative decision connects to decades of storytelling. Models trained on Imagineering's own proprietary and licensed assets — rather than generic internet data — offer a level of IP fidelity and brand accuracy that off-the-shelf AI tools can't match.

"At Imagineering, we've always believed technology and human creativity can work together responsibly," said Kyle Laughlin, SVP of R&D, Technology and Engineering at Walt Disney Imagineering. "Our work with Adobe lets us bring Disney stories and characters to life in our Parks faster, and with the emotional quality our guests expect."

As Disney continues to expand its parks, hotels, cruise ships, and other experiences, the ability to move faster through the creative pipeline — from hand-drawn sketch to construction-quality CAD model — gives Imagineers more time to refine ideas before a single shovel hits the ground.

Adobe VP Hannah Elsakr added: "As the teams at Imagineering build new experiences for fans around the world, our tools and workflows will provide a creative foundation to explore bolder ideas and make the best ones a reality."

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Chester&Hester EnthusiastJun 19, 2026

Your understanding of the animation process is flawed. They absolutely render new assets for each Pixar film, as computer animation advances at a pace that would make reusing assets from previous films nearly impossible. The fact that they traced over cels for Robin Hood and Aristocats (among others during that period) is literally a common meme for cost and corner cutting, so I don't think it lends a lot of weight to your argument. Not to mention that they had legitimate reasons for doing so at the time. You're also continuing to ignore the fact that, even in the case of tracing over old cels and changing them for new films, artists still physically drew the frame with pencil and ink.

MisterPenguinJun 19, 2026

Just use an AI up-rezzer!!! ;)

lazyboy97oJun 19, 2026

This is something that been talked about multiple times with the various sequels. They do make new assets. The old ones are outdated. They lack the fidelity and technical advances of new assets.

MisterPenguinJun 19, 2026

It's about the use of assets already created... by artists. Your most beloved Pixar movies are full of assets made by people who aren't working on the film. Need some books on a bookshelf for a scene in a house? There are plenty of assets the film maker can use. Grab and drop. Possibly tweak the look. Do you think that for every Pixar movie that has a Pizza Planet car that they recreate the car from scratch. No. Drag and drop. And tweak. How about the cats dancing in Aristocats is from an overlay of anthropomorphic animals dancing in Disney's Robin Hood? Where is the wailing and gnashing of teeth that the artists of one film were recycling the assets of a previous film? Now, imagine a current artist having at their fingertips the entire history of all Disney assets. They don't need to go to an archive and re-use the work done to animate an elephant. AI will pull it up for them. But, they're in 2d cells. AI can translate that into a 3d model and give it a 'skeleton' for the current artist to play with and adapt. Is that cheating the artistic process? How about 15 years ago when there was no AI, but there were computer programs that can run an algorithm to create a 3d model from a 2d sketch? Was that cheating? AI is a tool. It can be for good. It can be for slop. Same for so many other artistic tools.

MisterPenguinJun 19, 2026

I never said that. You're better than that.

WorldExplorerJun 19, 2026

No, he isn't. He's the guy who said the time spent boarding Seven Dwarfs Mine Train should count as part of the ride time. I know he isn't a shill only because Disney wouldn't hire someone to make such terrible arguments.

Chester&Hester EnthusiastJun 19, 2026

Would you mind explaining, please? Because every example you gave still involved an artist creating something. Unless I'm misunderstanding how Disney plans to leverage this tool, I don't really find this to be comparable. A concept artist's entire function is to create art. Using pre-rendered assets (whether or not they were themselves at some point drawn by an artist) defeats the purpose and just feels like a precursor to cutting the actual artists out entirely at some point, and I find it concerning. Why staff them at all once this asset farm is sufficiently full of usable content? Edit: I've read your post over multiple times, and I guess I'm not understanding. You essentially brought up using reference models and footage as a "gotcha!" and it really just makes no sense? Maybe if they were using this as a reference database for their artists to consistently draw IP across multiple pieces, but that's not at all what this is.

MisterPenguinJun 19, 2026

You misunderstood my point. You're better than that.

Chester&Hester EnthusiastJun 19, 2026

I'm sorry, are you genuinely comparing hand drawn animation aided by rotoscoping to using generative AI assets to avoid having to draw part of a concept sketch? You're better than that!

WaltWiz1901Jun 18, 2026

bears noting that things have improved somewhat since the decade of "pristine" Lowry'ed DAC restorations: Snow White, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, The Sword in the Stone, and The Black Cauldron have all been restored in 4K and look pretty much exactly like how they're supposed to be. makes you wonder why they'd go to great lengths to make them look like CAPS had been around in the '40s or '50s when keeping them gorgeously filmic would've been less of a hassle... unfortunately, the recolored/overprocessed/overmatted (for the 1963-81 films) 2K masters are still the standard for the (cel-)animated classics (and SitS has never been recalled and updated with the new master on Blu-ray)

WorldExplorerJun 18, 2026

Remember when they put the AI bride art they didn't even generate themselves in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion gift shop and then when people made a stink about it an Imagineer came out to say actually you were just making too big a deal out of it for nothing and they weren't really gonna keep it there and you all jumped the gun over a placeholder they obviously weren't seriously trying to use? Yeah. Remember that? (Nevermind the fact that they shouldn't need AI placeholders to begin with.)