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Beyond Access: Unboxed and Asians in Animation’s Investment in Authors, Leaders and Original Work9/20/2026  The release of Unboxed, AIA’s second completed Immersive Lab short, reflects a broader evolution in the organization’s work: from expanding access to building the conditions in which Asian creatives can develop original ideas, assume creative responsibility, lead teams, complete ambitious work and move that work toward audiences.
PRODUCTION AS A SITE OF TALENT DEVELOPMENT The Immersive Lab is structured around animation production itself. Participants specialize in individual crew positions while working within a larger pipeline that includes story rooms, dailies, edit sessions, art and animation reviews, music and sound spotting, production meetings and cross-department creative decision-making. Crew Leads begin three weeks before the full production period for additional preparation in leadership, creative direction and production communication, including the development of look-of-picture materials and department shipping packets. The objective is not to reproduce production through classroom exercises. Participants develop craft, production judgment and leadership capacity by contributing directly to a finished work and assuming responsibility within the systems required to make it. For Unboxed, that process brought together more than one hundred artists, production personnel and creative leads around a single original film. The film was directed by Jiyoung Choi, Pam Thanatrakolsri, Marci Wilson, Brian Tran, Chloe Chan and Sizhe “Arie” Guo. Story was developed by Pam Thanatrakolsri, Chloe Chan, Sizhe “Arie” Guo, Dahae Lee, Jiyoung Choi, Marci Wilson and Brian Tran. The screenplay was written by Pam Thanatrakolsri and Brian Tran. Jiyoung Choi served as Production Designer, So Youn Rebecca Jeon and Dahae Lee as Editors, and Brian Tran as Producer. AN INDUSTRY MENTOR NETWORK EMBEDDED IN THE WORK AIA’s mentor network is one of the central components of the Immersive Lab model. Its significance lies not only in the caliber of the professionals involved, but in the depth and immediacy of their participation. The 14 mentors supporting Unboxed represent current leadership and practice across feature animation, television, independent filmmaking, VFX, story, animation, production design, visual development, character design, editorial, music and production leadership. Collectively, they bring experience shaped across major studios, independent productions and international pipelines, including Disney, DreamWorks, Sony, Netflix, Pixar, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Lucasfilm, Illumination, Blue Sky, Skydance and others. Their involvement is not ceremonial. These are working artists and leaders with substantial creative authority in the field: professionals who have designed major animated features, led story departments, supervised visual effects, directed animation, developed intellectual property, shaped editorial pipelines, composed award-winning scores and built careers across some of the industry’s most demanding production environments. That knowledge enters the production while the work is being made. Mentors review material, participate in discipline-specific conversations, advise department leads, help teams identify and solve creative problems and support emerging leaders as they make decisions with real consequences for a finished film. The result is not simply exposure to experienced professionals. It is a transfer of accumulated professional judgment into active creative teams. Participants are not standing outside the work listening to people describe how animation is made. They are responsible for the work themselves while being challenged and supported by practitioners who have spent years or decades making, supervising and leading it. For AIA, this distinction is fundamental. Mentorship is not an adjacent educational offering. It is part of the production infrastructure: a mechanism through which professional knowledge, creative standards and leadership practice can move into new authors, new teams and successive generations of work. Mingjue Helen Chen — Production Design Mentor Chen served as Production Designer on KPop Demon Hunters and has worked across Disney, Sony, Netflix, Warner Bros. and Paramount. Her feature work includes Frankenweenie, Paperman, Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6 and Raya and the Last Dragon. Her participation brings feature-scale worldbuilding, visual language and look-of-picture experience directly into an emerging production environment. Joy Ngiaw — Composing Mentor Ngiaw is the 2026 Children’s & Family Emmy-winning composer of WondLa, a BAFTA Breakthrough USA honoree and Annie-nominated composer. She also composed the Skydance Animation studio logo. Her work represents the level of musical storytelling and emotional worldbuilding that AIA seeks to place within reach of developing creative teams. Raymond S. Persi — Story Mentor Persi is an Emmy-winning director, animator, story artist and voice actor whose credits include Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Feast and Zootopia. His experience across story, directing, animation, performance and comedy brings an unusually broad feature-animation perspective into the production process. Calvin Tsang — Story Mentor Tsang is a writer-director and story artist with more than 18 years of experience across feature and television animation. His credits include Star Wars Rebels, Nimona and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and he most recently served as Head of Story on Kung Fu Panda 4. His mentorship brings senior feature-story leadership shaped across multiple studio pipelines. Pramita Mukherjee — Executive Producer and Leadership Mentor Mukherjee is an 18-year animation and VFX professional at DreamWorks Animation whose credits include Kung Fu Panda 4, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and The Croods: A New Age. She previously mentored AIA’s inaugural Immersive Lab and returned for Unboxed as Executive Producer and Leadership Mentor. She also serves on AIA’s Board. Her relationship with AIA illustrates an important aspect of the organization’s development: industry participation can deepen over time, moving from mentorship into production leadership, institutional stewardship and governance. Kalos Chu — Story Development Mentor Chu is a DreamWorks Animation professional and 2026 CAPE New Writers Fellow. His television project Imposter entered development at HBO in 2026 with The Penguin creator and showrunner Lauren LeFranc attached as executive producer. His work reflects the movement between professional animation practice and original creator development that AIA seeks to foster more broadly. Clara Chan — Story Development Mentor Chan is a Sony Pictures Imageworks VFX Supervisor with more than two decades of experience in animation and visual effects, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Animation Branch, and an independent filmmaker whose short Have I Swallowed Your Dreams has screened at multiple Oscar-qualifying festivals. Her perspective bridges senior studio leadership with independent authorship and filmmaking. Crystal Kung — Character Design Mentor Kung is a character designer and visual-development artist whose experience includes Pixar and Blue Sky, with credits including Inside Out 2 and Nimona. Her work brings feature-level character design practice into a setting where developing artists are learning how design supports behaviour, personality and story. Erin Shin — Visual Development Mentor Shin is a Visual Development Artist at Netflix Animation with previous experience across Disney Animation, Cartoon Network Studios and Taiko Studios. Her mentorship brings current production-facing expertise in worldbuilding, environment design and visual development into the cohort. Randeep Katari — Story Development Mentor Katari has worked across Netflix, Nickelodeon, Disney and Blue Sky. His experience includes serving as Head of Story on Scrooge and as a former Creative Manager at Netflix overseeing animated content and story and script development. He brings both hands-on story leadership and the perspective of developing animation and intellectual property at platform scale. Vincent Chansard — Animation Mentor Chansard is a Gobelins-trained animator and storyboard artist whose credits include Primal, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, Wakfu and One Piece. He also mentored AIA’s inaugural Immersive Lab before returning for Unboxed. His return is particularly meaningful within AIA’s model. It demonstrates continuity between successive productions and the willingness of established practitioners to continue investing their time and expertise as the institution develops. Ruby Wang — Visual Development Mentor Wang is an art director and concept artist whose work spans Flight School Studio, Tonko House, Erick Oh’s Opera and immersive and VR productions. Her experience expands the mentor network beyond conventional feature pipelines into independent, experiential and emerging forms of animated storytelling. Huy Luong — Editorial Mentor Luong is an editorial and post-production veteran at Disney Television Animation whose credits include Gravity Falls and Big City Greens. His mentorship brings the practical editorial and post-production knowledge required to bring large volumes of creative material into a coherent finished work. Ye Aung — Animation Mentor Aung is an animation director, animator, story artist, storyboard artist and animation technical director whose practice spans multiple stages of the animation production process. His cross-disciplinary experience gives participants insight into the relationship between story, performance, animation and production execution. Several of these professionals have returned across multiple AIA programs. That continuity allows knowledge, relationships and production experience to accumulate rather than reset with each cohort. As mentors return in increasingly substantive roles, successive productions are able to build on the creative and institutional knowledge developed through earlier work. The relationship therefore becomes regenerative: working professionals contribute experience to emerging teams; participants gain responsibility and production judgment; leaders become more capable; and the institution carries that knowledge forward into the next project. FROM LITTLE PERSIMMON TO UNBOXED Unboxed follows several earlier experiments in production-based talent development at AIA. In 2024, AIA’s inaugural Immersive Lab produced bé hồng / Little Persimmon through an intensive nine-day production involving more than 40 artists and 14 industry mentors. The completed film later received festival recognition, multiple awards and production coverage from Animation World Network and Toon Boom. AIA subsequently expanded the approach into long-form television pre-production with Tea Leaves Last, a 44-minute pilot animatic developed by a 107-person crew over eight months. AIA production records document more than 15,141 working hours, 338 assets across 1,401 versions and 4,334 storyboard panels in the final cut. With Unboxed, the Immersive Lab expanded from a nine-day production model to a longer program involving 104 crew members. At the same time, original projects developed through AIA’s Development Lab have begun moving into dedicated 2D short, CG short and feature-animatic production tracks. These projects are not isolated programs. Together, they are forming a connected pathway through which original ideas can be developed, creative teams assembled, emerging leaders given responsibility, professional knowledge transferred, finished work created and projects moved toward audiences. The through-line is compounding capacity: stronger artists, more experienced leaders, more developed ideas, deeper professional relationships and an institution increasingly capable of supporting more ambitious work. BUILDING CREATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE AIA began as a community focused on expanding access and connection for Asian animation talent. Its work has increasingly moved toward a broader question: what happens after access has been created? Access to an industry does not by itself create authorship, leadership or ownership. Talented people also need opportunities to originate ideas, exercise judgment, lead other people, make consequential creative decisions, complete work and build the experience required to do those things at a higher level the next time. AIA’s current model therefore connects community, education, development, production and industry participation. Emerging creatives are given responsibility within real teams. Original ideas are developed rather than remaining hypothetical exercises. Working professionals transfer current production knowledge into active projects. Participants gain experience making creative decisions, leading departments, working across disciplines and completing ambitious collaborative work. This reflects a broader understanding of representation. Representation concerns not only who appears on screen, but also who develops the idea, who leads the team, who gains production experience, whose work receives serious development, who is trusted with creative authority and who has the opportunity to build intellectual property over time. For AIA, productions such as Unboxed are therefore not separate from talent development. They are one of the primary mechanisms through which that development occurs. AN EXPANDING DEVELOPMENT-TO-PRODUCTION ECOSYSTEM Asians in Animation is a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit and creative platform with a worldwide network of more than 6,000 members. Its current production ecosystem includes two completed Immersive Lab animated shorts; a long-form television pilot animatic developed through an eight-month production; original projects moving from the Development Lab into 2D, CG and feature-animatic production tracks; a growing network of working animation professionals participating as mentors, advisors and production leaders; and an expanding body of original work moving toward festivals, distribution and public audiences. The through-line is not a single film or program. It is the accumulation of creative capacity. People become more experienced collaborators and leaders. Ideas move further through development. Professional knowledge remains within the institution rather than disappearing at the end of a workshop. Relationships deepen. Alumni, mentors and practitioners return. Each completed project gives AIA a stronger base from which to build the next one. AIA began by opening doors. Its larger ambition now is to help build what exists on the other side of them: an environment in which excellent Asian creatives can develop ideas, assume responsibility, lead teams, make ambitious work and participate meaningfully in shaping the future of animation. Unboxed is the latest completed work within that progression and is now available to watch publicly. Watch the full film: https://youtu.be/dOveycYHMIc?si=HvXHwP99uvuOQSAU Learn more about Asians in Animation, its programs and productions: https://www.asiansinanimation.org/ MEDIA AND PARTNERSHIP INQUIRIES Shelby Lee Head of Distribution Asians in Animation [email protected]
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