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French animation filmmaker Sylvain Chomet, the four-time Oscar nominee behind “The Triplets of Belleville” and “The Illusionist,” is pushing back against accusations that generative AI was used to create his animated
short for Dior featuring a voice cast led by Robert Pattinson, Rihanna, Josh O’Connor, LaKeith Stanfield, Louis Garrel and Camille Cottin.
The whimsical six-minute film, “Christian Dior’s Night in Color,” produced by Aton Soumache (“The Little Prince”), has sparked controversy online, where some viewers have pointed to apparent visual glitches, including a character with six fingers, as evidence of AI-generated animation.
The controversy flared because Dior positioned “Night in Color” as a celebration of traditional craftsmanship to launch its 2026 holiday season, drawing parallels between Chomet’s hand-drawn animation and the meticulous work of the house’s couture ateliers.
But Chomet and Soumache tell Variety that the film was created using traditional 2D animation techniques, with the characters, backgrounds and key poses drawn by artists. While they acknowledge using automated interpolation to generate some of the intermediate frames that make movement fluid, the pair insists that generative AI was never used to create the artwork.
“Some people are claiming Sylvain was contacted two weeks ago and that the entire film was made with generative AI, without a single drawing, but the reality is that this film took seven months to make and it was entirely drawn by artists,” says Soumache, adding that film employed roughly 20 people, including six animators, alongside storyboard artists, designers, background artists, compositors and editors.
“We used an automated interpolation system for a very small part of the process, but the film itself is traditional 2D animation,” says the French producer.
Chomet, whose latest film “A Magnificent Life” world premiered at last year’s Cannes and was distributed theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics, explains that the interpolation tool was only used to help create the in-between frames on “Christian Dior’s Night in Color.” “It’s a way of automating the repetitive, mechanical part of animation, not the creative work,” he says.
The filmmaker says the accusations are particularly ironic given how committed he has been to traditional animation despite pressures to branch into CGI after the huge success of “Toy Story.”
“Before I made ‘The Triplets of Belleville,’ it was the era of ‘Toy Story.’ I remember Disney declaring that traditional 2D animation was dead and that everything would be CGI, but I decided to continue making hand-drawn films,” Chomet says. “That’s why I find it so strange that people are attacking me today. I’ve remained faithful to drawing throughout my career. At the same time, I’m going to use the tools that technology offers us.”
The film draws on several chapters of Dior’s history, including the couturier’s friendship with Marlene Dietrich, his ties to Hollywood and the creation of the iconic Junon gown in 1949. It also takes inspiration from one of the earliest ideas behind Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson’s Cruise 2027 collection: cinema’s transition from black-and-white to Technicolor.
The story imagines Dietrich in Los Angeles, preparing to shoot a movie when the director suddenly decides to film in color. An urgent call is placed to Paris requesting a colorful Dior gown for the actress, sending Christian Dior and his team of seamstresses into a race against the clock.
Pattinson narrates the film, while Garrel voices Christian Dior and Cottin plays Dietrich. O’Connor voices a talking chair, Rihanna portrays Dior’s lucky star, and Stanfield plays the Hollywood director. Nine d’Urso, Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Greta Lee voice the three bees.
Soumache, whose credits include the Cesar-winning “The Little Prince,” has spent much of his career working in CGI before returning to traditional animation with films including Joann Sfar’s “Little Vampire” and more recently “A Magnificent Life,” a biopic of late celebrated French novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol.
“Sylvain and I have been championing traditional 2D animation for such a long time, and Dior came to us because they wanted Sylvain’s very distinctive drawing style,” says the producer whose track record also includes the blockbuster French IP “Miraculous Ladybug.”
Chomet explains that the production process on the Dior short was rooted in drawing, even if artists now use digital tablets rather than paper.
“But we’re still drawing by hand, it’s just done digitally,” he said, adding that he found it frustrating to work on graphic tablets and planned to “go back to pencil and paper because (he loves) having original drawings.”
“I design the characters, we create the storyboards, the backgrounds, the colors. The entire creative process is exactly the same as when I started making animated films. What has changed is the technology,” he said.
Chomet also addresses the apparent six-fingered hands that have fueled speculation online. “It’s a movement where the hand is spread out like a fan. In that kind of drawing, you might see six or seven fingers because you’re trying to convey movement,” he says. He argues that he’s seen much worse mistakes in traditional animation. “I’ve seen a character turn his head and suddenly his nose changes shape completely over five frames. These things happen.”
The short was conceived as part of a broader collaboration with Dior, with Anderson originating the idea and Martin Latham helping develop the screenplay.
“I worked particularly closely with Martin. We developed the script together and then presented ideas for the storyboard, the story and the characters. There was a lot of back-and-forth,” Chomet says. The collaboration also extended beyond the screen, with Chomet’s illustrations inspiring Dior’s holiday collections and boutique windows around the world.
“Dior needed to see the designs quite early because they were simultaneously developing the Christmas window displays and physical objects,” says Soumache. “Many of Dior’s windows are based directly on Sylvain’s drawings. They created physical versions of the characters and objects from the film.”
Chomet describes Disney’s 1961 classic “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” as his “madeleine de Proust,” the film he keeps coming back to.
“Whenever I make a film, I ask myself whether it has that poetry, that beauty of drawing,” he says. “We can tell very different stories from the ones Disney was telling at the time, but we can still preserve that beauty. That’s what I’ve always tried to do, using technology to maintain something traditional.”
Along with showcasing France’s vibrant animation talent pool, the short film also reflects Anderson’s love for hand-drawn animation. While at Loewe, he collaborated with Japan’s Studio Ghibli on three collections.
