Abstract: In various examples, techniques are described for animating characters by decoupling portions of a face from other portions of the face. Systems and methods are disclosed that use one or more neural networks to generate high-fidelity facial animation using inputted audio data. In order to generate the high-fidelity facial animations, the systems and methods may decouple effects of implicit emotional states from effects of audio on the facial animations during training of the neural network(s). For instance, the training may cause the audio to drive the lower face animations while the implicit emotional states drive the upper face animations. In some examples, in order to encourage more expressive expressions, adversarial training is further used to learn a discriminator that predicts if generated emotional states are from real distribution.