No more artistic disagreements. No more demands for multimillion-dollar contracts or fights over top billing. The movie star of the 21st century will be a perfectly obedient computer program, predicts an executive at Walt Disney.

America's scientific community have just been given a sneak preview of this future in the shape of an innocuous-looking cyber-geek named Monty, which can move its cartoon character lips in anatomically correct synchronisation as it voices sentences typed live into a laptop computer.

So far the voice still sounds a little synthesised. But Eric Haseltine, senior vice-president for research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering, said computer images like Monty promised to take the movie industry into whole new dimensions.

"Simulation is allowing us to replace the real world and improve the real world," he told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Anaheim.