Artist Profile: Ruth Lingford on AI and the Future of Animation

Ruth Lingford is a Senior Lecturer in Harvard’s department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and an animator with an impressive repertoire of films. Her first film titled “Baggage” was released in 1992, just as computer animation was gaining traction. Now in 2026, she is making films at the dawn of the new age of artificial intelligence.

Succeeding a career as an occupational therapist and mother of two children, Lingford resumed the art school education that she had originally begun after high school. It was there that she found animation.

“While I was at art school, I discovered animation by accident and realized it was what I wanted to do when I grew up — and I was already in my mid-thirties,” Lingford said in an interview with The Crimson.

She quickly found her niche within the industry.

“When I started animating, I would go and watch animation and I could sort of see a hole where my films could be,” she said.

She is known for her “feelbad films,” which often explore uncomfortable topics. For example, through her animation, she explores themes of death, war, desire, and politics.

Thereafter, Lingford established herself amid the changing technologies of the animation world, as techniques were shifting from laboriously hand-painting individual acetate cells to new computer technologies.

“I was at the vanguard of drawn computer animation, in a sort of low-tech way,” Lingford said. “I wasn’t doing my own programming or anything like that — serious computer animators were programming their own stuff. But I was just drawing using these simple tools and finding a way of making it work.”

This technological transition created doubt and opportunity in animation, somewhat similar to the shift AI has created today. Like many shifts to new technologies, both computers and AI have incited concern over the purity of craft and art. Each development has substantially changed how animation is created and how it is viewed by the general public.

Lingford has already seen a change in the behaviors of her undergraduate animation students in response to the prevalence of AI.

“The effect that’s had is that it has made students recoil from the sort of digital 3D stuff that they used to want to make. So anything that looks sort of shiny and glossy and three-dimensional on the computer is now read now as AI. People unfortunately take that as AI,” Lingford said. “So, students are recoiling from that and turning to very hands-on, very analog ways of working. I’ve never seen so much puppet animation being made — people are moving sand around, working with clay, working in ways that are very, kind of, messy and visibly handmade.”

Since Lingford has experienced both the anxieties and upsides of computer animation, she has a mixed yet optimistic view on the effects AI will have on the industry.

“I think it makes me maybe less panicky than other people are,” she said.

With computer animation, people did lose their jobs, and the nature and quantity of films being made at the time certainly changed drastically. Now, the same might occur with AI. Yet, in some ways, it forces artists to refine their craft in light of new tools and decide for themselves what is important in their artistry.

“What I do think will happen will be that there’ll be less respect for animators because we’ve always had this cachet that everyone knows it’s really difficult to do and we work really hard at this,” Lingford said. “And if that’s no longer the case, we may have to actually justify what we’re doing by how well it works and how well it communicates. So maybe it would be good for our self-discipline and filmmaking. Maybe it’s no longer enough to sort of fetishistically dwell on the hard-won image and how difficult it is to make. Maybe we just have to be much smarter about what we’re making, what the ideas are.”

As animation evolves alongside new technologies, Lingford believes the core skill of storytelling becomes more important.

“I think ideas — having good ideas is always going to be useful,” Lingford said. “Having a sort of individual voice in this medium is always going to be worth something.”

She thinks that “the mess of the human touch” will become increasingly valuable in art. Nevertheless, Lingford describes AI as a “seductive” tool and expressed concern about its environmental impact.

“The thing that people don’t seem to want to talk about, about AI, is that ridiculously huge ecological cost of it,” she said. “It’s such a seductive tool — people who love using it will find ways of making that not matter. They will tie themselves in knots to explain why, actually, it doesn’t matter that you’re using the power of a large city to make your film.”

Still, when asked if she could see a future for animation that incorporates AI while retaining the human core of the art, Lingford said, “Absolutely, yes.”

Lingford contrasts this with the more difficult nature of real art.

“Art is more of a challenge,” she said. “It has to convince you that maybe this is what you want to look at, even if it’s not immediately beautiful or seductive.”

Drawing from her own experiences of navigating the rise of computer animation, Lingford approaches AI with both caution and optimism. However, for many artists and animators, AI still represents an unknown future.

“I don’t know,” Lingford said. “But it’s a good time to be old, I tell you.”