Chomet and producer Aton Soumache frame the project as a triumph of traditional craftsmanship, claiming the film took seven months to make and involved a team of 20 artists who drew every character and background by hand.
Viewers aren't buying the 'hand-drawn' defense. The internet latched onto visual glitches—specifically a character with six fingers—as proof that Generative AI did the heavy lifting, contradicting Dior's marketing campaign which touted the film as a homage to couture ateliers.
1. Chomet confirms the use of an 'automated interpolation system' for intermediate frames. 2. The film features a star-studded voice cast including Rihanna as Dior's lucky star and Josh O'Connor as a talking chair. 3. Chomet cites his 2003 'Triplets of Belleville' era resistance to CGI after 'Toy Story' as proof of his traditionalist bona fides.
Chomet is right that he didn't prompt the images, but if your 'hand-drawn' animation has six-fingered glitches, don't blame the audience for spotting the machine in the loop.
The internet sleuths have declared war on Dior’s holiday campaign, and Sylvain Chomet is not here for the slander. The four-time Oscar nominee, famous for the hand-drawn whimsy of “The Triplets of Belleville,” is firing back at accusations that his latest animated short, “Christian Dior’s Night in Color,” was generated by AI. The backlash exploded after viewers spotted glaring visual errors, including a character sporting six fingers, leading to widespread speculation that the French luxury house had cut corners on its star-studded project.
But Chomet, alongside producer Aton Soumache, insists the film was a labor of love, not a labor of large language models. In an exclusive statement to Variety, Chomet dismantled the rumor that Generative AI created the artwork from scratch. He explained that the production employed roughly 20 people, including six dedicated animators, storyboard artists, and designers.
The process took seven months, during which every character, background, and key pose was drawn by human hands. "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," Soumache clarified. The confusion, they argue, stems from the use of an "automated interpolation system" used solely to generate intermediate frames for fluid movement, a technical tool rather than a creative generator.
The cast list for this six-minute short is undeniably A-list, featuring Robert Pattinson as the narrator, Rihanna as Dior’s lucky star, Josh O’Connor as a talking chair, and LaKeith Stanfield as a Hollywood director. Louis Garrel voices Christian Dior himself, while Camille Cottin plays Marlene Dietrich. The story imagines Dietrich in Los Angeles during the transition from black-and-white to Technicolor, requiring an urgent rush order for a colorful gown from Paris.
Chomet drew inspiration from Dior’s history and Jonathan Anderson’s Cruise 2027 collection, aiming to capture the poetry of classic Disney animation like “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” which he calls his "madeleine de Proust." Chomet’s defense is rooted in his career-long battle against the CGI tsunami that followed “Toy Story.” He recalls Disney declaring 2D animation dead, yet he remained faithful to drawing, using digital tablets only as a modern canvas.
"It’s a way of automating the repetitive, mechanical part of animation, not the creative work," Chomet said of the interpolation tool. He dismissed the six-finger controversy as a standard animation artifact, noting, "In that kind of drawing, you might see six or seven fingers because you’re trying to convey movement. I’ve seen a character turn his head and suddenly his nose changes shape completely over five frames. These things happen." While he admits to using technology, he insists the soul of the film remains hand-drawn, even as he plans to return to pencil and paper for future projects because he loves the authenticity of original drawings.
