The 90-minute 3DCG film about a misfit team of animal athletes, created with an AI-assisted pipeline that touched every stage of the animation production, hits theaters worldwide on July 24.
India-based Digikore Studios has released the official trailer, which you can watch below, for its 90-minute 4K computer-generated animated feature, Kingdom Games, which is scheduled to open in cinemas worldwide on July 24.
The film follows a misfit team of animal athletes, coached by Ramses, a bull, that’s led by Max, an underdog bunny, alongside Rambo, a capybara, and Fredo, a donkey, as they battle through numerous obstacles to reach the finals of the “Kingdom Games.” Their nemesis: Hura, a formidable jaguar.
For Kingdom Games, the studio developed an AI-assisted production pipeline that touched every stage of the production, spanning concept design, previsualization, asset generation, motion blocking, crowd simulation, and compositing. The company noted the approach reduces production timelines, with some processes compressed from weeks to hours and rendering accelerated through neural techniques that predict final frames rather than calculating them. As imagined, such a system was used to produce large-scale environments, stadium crowd sequences, and detailed character animation at a scale typically associated with major studio productions.
“The old constraint in animation was simple — visual ambition required proportional budget,” said Abhishek More, founder and producer at Digikore Studios. “AI has broken that equation. We’ve built a film that looks and feels like a studio tentpole because our pipeline lets our artists spend their time where it matters: in the soul of the characters, in the timing of the joke, in the moment that makes a child catch their breath — not on mechanical tasks a machine can now handle.”
Also worth noting is the similarity between two of the film’s characters with Judy Hopps and Chief Bogo from Disney’s Zootopia films, an issue surely to raise eyebrows at the studio as well as within the creative community that has only begun to wrestle with growing concern for and push back against AI-assisted animation and visual development. Certainly, you can make the argument that in 3DCG, similarities in characters, from princesses to crocodiles, are almost a given; complaints that everything seems to always look the same are not new. You can also make the argument that if the sum result of new AI-enabled creative tools is something that looks strikingly similar to existing content, other than cost cutting, what was achieved?
AWN first covered Digikore back in 2003, as well as the launch of their VFX division back in 2010. The company, listed on India’s National Stock Exchange, has delivered visual effects for productions including Stranger Things, The Marvels, Wakanda Forever, and franchises such as Deadpool, Thor, and Jumanji.
The film will be released theatrically across the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, India, and Latin America, followed by distribution on OTT and satellite platforms in multiple languages.
Source: Digikore Studios
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
