CapCut and Massive Studios are making three AI holiday shorts

Massive Studios is making three animated Christmas shorts in partnership with CapCut, using a pipeline that starts with hand-drawn art and actor performances and finishes with AI animation. The project was announced at a Toronto International Film Festival panel by the people making it: Massive Studios co-founder Reza Sixo Safai, The Garfield Movie screenwriters Paul A. Kaplan and Mark Torgove, and the veteran producer Todd Garner.

The Hollywood Reporter reported that the shorts are being developed simultaneously with CapCut's Video Studio and ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 video model. Safai will direct from scripts by Kaplan and Torgove, with Garner producing.

The timeline is fixed. A trailer debuts over Thanksgiving weekend in November, and the finished films will be free to watch on Christmas Eve. No distribution or streaming partner has been named, and titles, voice cast and further collaborators are still to be announced.

The collaborators describe a deliberately non-prompt-first process. Character designs were drawn by artists first, then combined with actor performances to set each character's "proportions, expressions, costumes, textures and personalities before the technology is used to help bring them into motion". The team is expected to include character artists, animators, editors, composers, sound designers and colorists.

Garner said the format was the point. "I grew up with Christmas specials, and I miss that tradition," he said, describing a wish to make something families return to each year.

Safai framed the craft claim carefully. "For me, handcrafted doesn't mean pretending technology wasn't involved," he said. "It means you can still feel the human decisions in the work."

Safai also made the budget argument that has become the standard pitch for AI-assisted animation, saying the interesting part is not speed but "what becomes creatively and economically possible". Both he and Garner described the production as an ordinary film job at its core: an idea, the right people, and the audience's response.

Nothing is available to watch yet. The trailer is the first release, and it arrives in November.

A streaming or distribution partner for the three shorts has not been announced.