As Disney confirmed on Monday, Moana 2 is a huge success. The film's staggering $389 million holiday-weekend gross marks the highest global opening of any animated film ever.

Considering this sequel followed such animated juggernauts as The Wild Robot, Despicable Me 4, and Inside Out 2 into box office Valhalla this year, members of the animation industry should probably be thrilled right now. Instead, as much as Moana 2's success underlines the vast public thirst for family-friendly theatrical releases, it also puts a spotlight on one of the critical issues U.S. animators are currently grappling with: outsourcing.

As The Hollywood Reporter noted earlier this year, the top threats to animation's future are a new problem and a rather old one. First and foremost, the burgeoning field of AI tools, such as OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora, have incited panic. They can cough up footage in an instant that might take animators hours or even days to create.

A January study surveying 300 entertainment industry leaders estimated that nearly 204,000 positions could be adversely affected by AI over the next three years, including many in animation. But while the Animation Guild recently reached a tentative deal with studios to put some guardrails around AI -- two days before the November 27 release of Moana 2 -- the deal reportedly offers no protections against the other major problem, outsourcing, which has long been chipping away at animators' job security.