NBA Dunk the Halls Christmas Day Game Animates Players Alongside Disney Characters in Live Time

ESPN will present the NBA Christmas Day game between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs as the debut NB-AI event which turns players such as Jalen Brunson and Victor Wembanyama into cartoons in live time alongside the likes of Disney characters Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

The somewhat bizarre event was announced by ESPN as a collaboration between it, the NBA, and Disney, and will be the first full use of the artificial intelligence generated NB-AI which was revealed in March, coming from Sony’s Beyond Sports technology.

Dunk the Halls will be a fully animated (and optional) version of the game which transforms Madison Square Garden into Main Street, USA from Disney World and players into cartoon characters. They’ll be cheered along from the sidelines by Disney icons, while fans can watch on ESPN2, Disney+, and ESPN+.

“Each Spurs and Knicks player will appear as a motion-enabled, animated player for the special Christmas matchup,” ESPN said. “Through state-of-the-art real-time visualization technology enabled by Sony’s Beyond Sports, combined with Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations’ optical tracking, fans watching Dunk the Halls will see every three-pointer, dunk, layup, pass and more from the real-life Spurs vs. Knicks game at Madison Square Garden in New York as it happens.”

Mickey Mouse and friends will have a slam dunk contest at halftime too, while Santa’s elves operate the cameras and other Disney characters deliver pregame and halftime speeches. Fans will also find out how many churros Goofy can eat.

AI has proven a controversial topic in entertainment and the NBA has already faced criticism for using it. NBA commissioner Adam Silver debuted a trial of the technology during a tech summit at All Star Weekend in February, showing a game “as if it were a Spider-Man movie.”

The game turned into something akin to the Spider-Verse series, prompting Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse co-producer Christopher Miller to call out the technology and seemingly question if the data was harvested legally.

“I’m a big NBA fan, and I love that people are excited about Spider-Verse, but this janky-ass AI looks nothing like the hand-crafted innovative artistry of the films,” Miller said at the time. “For the record, as far as I know they never reached out to us about ‘scraping’ the films’ style.”

Elsewhere in the entertainment world, Tim Burton called AI generated art “very disturbing” in September 2023 while Wizards of the Coast was forced to issue a correction in January 2024 after claiming it didn’t use AI for some Magic: The Gathering artwork when it actually did.

Several video game voice actors have also rallied against AI, including Grand Theft Auto 5 voice actor Ned Luke who called out a chatbot which used his voice. The Witcher voice actor Doug Cockle also told IGN that AI was “inevitable” but “dangerous”, sharing in Luke’s assessment that chatbots and similar uses are “effectively robbing [voice actors] of income”.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.