Gen Z and AI in VFX: Between Realism and Resistance

The first time I watched Disney’s The Lion King (2019) remake, I was amazed, but I also felt something was missing. The movie looked incredible; every strand of fur and every sunset savannah vista was rendered with photorealistic detail. It was a showcase for cutting-edge visual effects, even using machine learning to animate animals more naturally. The production team famously trained an AI program on a hand-animated “limping” lion so it could apply that motion to new scenes autonomously (Disney News, 2019). In short, the film’s creators used powerful AI-driven tools to make virtual lions behave like real ones. Yet as a Gen Z viewer, I left the theater feeling oddly hollow. The characters on screen moved exactly like real animals—but real lions don’t show emotion the way cartoon ones do, and that emotional spark didn’t carry over. One reviewer summed it up: “Where Spider-Verse had heart and emotion, The Lion King was more like a nature documentary” (James, 2019). That 2019 experience crystallized a tension I feel to this day; I love innovation in film, but I need stories that feel real.

Fast-forward to 2025, the conversation around AI in storytelling has only grown. This time, it wasn’t lions, but actors’ voices. The Brutalist, a prestige historical drama, used AI to clone and enhance accents in post-production (Disotto, 2025). A TikTok user called it “a shortcut pretending to be art.” According to the Stanford Entertainment Lab survey, 85.5% of Gen Z respondents want AI usage in films to be clearly disclosed, and one-third admitted their view of a film worsened after learning AI had been used without transparency.

That same survey reveals the paradox at the heart of Gen Z’s relationship with AI: we’re excited about it, but wary. 71% of us use generative AI daily. 59% can’t imagine life without it, and 78% say AI is a tool or collaborator, not cheating. Yet 81% feel confident spotting AI-generated content today, while only 10% think they’ll still be able to in five years. We’re comfortable using AI, but not comfortable being fooled by it.

Source: Stanford E-Lab x USC Art.Ificial Survey

Mufasa: The Lion King (2025) may offer a path forward. As a prequel to the 2019 film, it responds directly to earlier critiques because the lions are still photoreal, but this time, neural rendering and Unreal Engine help generate emotionally expressive animal faces (Befores & Afters, 2025). Early reactions have been enthusiastic. On TikTok, one fan wrote, “The lions finally have a soul!” On LinkedIn, a VFX supervisor called it “AI power meeting artistic control” (CreativeBloq, 2025). And that balance is key. In our survey, 71.2% of Gen Z respondents said they prefer to creatively control AI rather than have AI control the output. Mufasa gets this. It uses AI in service of storytelling, but not to replace it.

Still, our trust has boundaries. When asked if they would change a film rating based on AI usage, only 26.1% would still give a 5/5 if the script was AI-generated. For AI-enhanced visual effects, that number jumped to 55%. And when it came to editing or marketing, over 57% kept their ratings unchanged. Even more telling is that 70% said they’d be less likely to watch a movie if they knew the script was AI-generated, while AI in editing or VFX had almost no effect on their willingness to watch.

Source: Stanford E-Lab x USC Art.Ificial Survey

So why are we more forgiving of AI in visuals than in story? I think it’s about emotional distance. Visuals feel technical. They’re meant to impress. Story, dialogue, and character arc, that’s where the emotion lives. That’s what makes us cry, laugh, or remember a film years later. For Gen Z, who grew up consuming emotionally authentic YouTube vlogs and TikTok confessionals, that difference matters. One of our survey respondents wrote, “AI can light the background or smooth a cut. But I want the story to come from someone who’s lived something, not just scraped it off the internet.”

We also value creative novelty. 61% of Gen Z say AI makes them more creative, and we’re often intrigued by the new possibilities it brings. For instance, when asked how AI improves their own creative work, the majority rated it a 3 or 4 out of 5—suggesting cautious optimism. But we’re also aware of the limits. When asked how important human-made music was to them, over 80% rated it a 4 or 5, with 52% selecting 5 (extremely important). And only 10.7% felt very comfortable with the idea of AI recreating their favorite singer’s voice—even with permission.

AI was used in the production of “Mufasa: The Lion King” for realistic character animations and light simulations. Source: Los Angeles Times

That tension explains a lot. We don’t want to reject AI outright. We want to shape it. We want to know when it’s involved. And most of all, we want it to enhance the human touch in storytelling. That’s what went wrong with The Brutalist. Not the quality. The secrecy. It’s also what went wrong with The Lion King: dazzling tech, but no soul. And it’s why Mufasa and future films like it give me hope. It shows that AI and emotion don’t have to be opposites.

Looking ahead, I believe transparency must become standard. AI use should be disclosed—just like CGI once was. End-credit notes. Streaming tags. Behind-the-scenes clips. Gen Z won’t turn away from a movie just because AI was involved. We’ll turn away if we’re kept in the dark. We’ll embrace spectacle—but not at the cost of soul.