Evidence up to November 30, 2025 lines up well with Sacks’s two-part claim.

1. Hobbyists/amateurs generating reasonably good-looking animated movies from a script (near term)

• By 2024–2025, multiple consumer-accessible tools let individuals turn scripts or text prompts into multi‑scene animated videos:
  • LTX Studio (released Feb 2024) explicitly markets itself as an AI “movie maker” that turns scripts or text prompts into characters, scenes, storyboards and video sequences, effectively automating much of the pipeline an amateur would need to create a short film. (en.wikipedia.org)
  • Research systems such as MovieFactory (2023) and AniMaker (2025) demonstrate end‑to‑end automatic movie/animation generation from text, including story expansion, shot planning, video clips and audio/voiceover, specifically aiming at "fully automated" movie creation from natural‑language input. (arxiv.org)
  • Mass‑market text‑to‑video models — Runway’s Gen series, Luma’s Dream Machine, Google’s Veo 2, and OpenAI’s Sora (wider release Dec 2024) — all allow non‑experts to produce visually impressive clips from text with no traditional animation skills required. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Independent creators have used these tools to release AI‑animated shorts (e.g., The Lost Father, made with Runway Gen‑2 and other off‑the‑shelf tools) that are publicly showcased as “animated AI short films,” visually coherent and cinematic by hobbyist standards. (soorai.com)
  Taken together, this supports Sacks’s expectation that within a few years of April 2023, amateurs could feed in a script and get “pretty nice looking” animated movies out of AI-driven pipelines.

2. Fully AI‑generated, theatrical‑quality motion pictures taking longer than two years (i.e., not by April 2025)

• There are feature‑length works created entirely or almost entirely with generative AI within that two‑year window:
  • Window Seat and later DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict (87‑minute animated feature released on Prime Video in July 2024) were made entirely by a single filmmaker using AI for visuals, performances, sound, music and even some editing, on a ~$405 budget. (en.wikipedia.org)
  • The Death of Film (856‑hour experimental project described as “the first feature‑length film fully made from generative artificial intelligence”) likewise shows that fully AI‑generated long‑form films exist by early 2025, but it is explicitly framed as an experimental art piece, not mainstream theatrical fare. (en.wikipedia.org)
• However, these projects are micro‑budget or avant‑garde experiments, not studio‑scale, broadly marketed theatrical releases comparable in polish and resources to major animated features. They’re generally discussed as proofs of concept and milestones, not as replacements for big‑budget studio productions.
• By contrast, the first widely publicized studio‑backed, mostly‑AI animated feature aimed at global theaters, Critterz, is targeting a Cannes debut and theatrical rollout in 2026, and even that project is described as “mostly AI‑generated” / “AI‑assisted,” still relying on human writers, voice actors and artist sketches rather than being a fully automated pipeline. (theverge.com)
• The fact that the flagship industry example of an AI‑driven theatrical animated feature is scheduled after 2025, and is still human‑assisted rather than purely AI‑generated, indicates that a generally accepted, fully AI‑produced, big‑studio‑quality theatrical movie had not arrived by April 2025. The state of the art in mid‑2025 is short, high‑fidelity clips and indie/experimental features, not full Pixar‑ or Disney‑level films created end‑to‑end by AI.

Why classify this as “right” rather than “ambiguous”?

• Sacks’s key distinction was between:
  1. Hobbyist‑grade “pretty nice looking” animations from a script – which clearly exist by 2024–2025 via tools like LTX Studio, Sora, Dream Machine, Runway, etc., plus numerous AI‑animated shorts. (en.wikipedia.org)
  2. “Altogether replacing” traditional production with fully AI‑generated, theatrical‑quality films in under two years – which, judging by industry behavior and the 2026 timetable for the first high‑profile AI‑heavy animated feature, has not happened. (theverge.com)
• While some fully AI features did appear earlier than many expected, they are low‑budget/experimental and not yet what the industry or audiences would generally label “theatrical‑quality” replacements for studio animation.

Given those facts, the spirit of Sacks’s prediction — rapid empowerment of amateurs, but a significantly slower path to mainstream, fully AI‑generated theatrical films — is borne out by events through April 2025 and beyond. Hence the verdict: right.