Sylvain Chomet denies generative AI made Dior film’s artwork, explains limited automation

Dior presented its holiday animated short as a celebration of traditional craftsmanship. After viewers accused it of using generative AI, director Sylvain Chomet and producer Aton Soumache offered a more specific account: artists drew the artwork, while automation supplied some frames between poses. In a November 7 Variety interview, they denied generative AI created the film’s artwork.

The six-minute film, “Christian Dior’s Night in Color,” is narrated by Robert Pattinson. Some online viewers pointed to apparent visual glitches, including a character who seemed to have six fingers, as evidence of AI-generated animation. The accusation challenged the campaign’s premise: Dior had drawn a parallel between Chomet’s animation and the painstaking work of its couture workshops.

Drawings first, automated frames between them

Chomet and Soumache described a production built around traditional 2D animation. Artists drew the characters, backgrounds and key poses. An automated interpolation system then generated some intermediate frames—the images between poses that help movement appear fluid. Soumache said that system handled a very small part of the process, rather than creating the film’s artwork.

“It’s a way of automating the repetitive, mechanical part of animation, not the creative work,” Chomet told Variety. His explanation separates two tasks that the accusations had bundled together: making the drawings and filling out the movement between them. The pair acknowledged the latter use of automation while rejecting the claim that generative AI supplied the art.

Soumache also disputed suggestions that Chomet had been brought in just two weeks earlier and that no drawings existed. Production took seven months, he said, and employed roughly 20 people, including six animators. The team also included storyboard artists, designers, background artists, compositors and editors.

Drawing digitally did not change that authorship, Chomet argued. The production used graphic tablets, but he described the character designs, storyboards, backgrounds and colors as following the same creative process he had used throughout his career. He said he found tablets frustrating and planned to return to pencil and paper because he liked having original drawings.

The extra fingers, in Chomet’s account

Chomet’s explanation for the apparent extra fingers was movement, not an AI error. He described a hand spreading like a fan, with six or seven fingers visible in a drawing intended to convey motion. That is his account of the disputed imagery, rather than an acknowledgment that a generated hand had slipped into the finished film.

The director also pushed back on the idea that visual inconsistencies necessarily identify a production method. He recalled seeing a character’s nose change shape across five frames in traditional animation. Chomet, whose films include “The Triplets of Belleville” and “The Illusionist,” framed his position as continued loyalty to drawing without refusing the tools technology offers.

The drawings also became physical objects

The collaboration extended beyond the screen. Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson originated the idea, and Chomet developed the screenplay with Martin Latham before presenting story, storyboard and character ideas. The film imagines Marlene Dietrich needing a colorful Dior gown after a Hollywood director abruptly switches a production from black-and-white to color.

Soumache said Dior needed the designs early because it was developing Christmas window displays and physical objects at the same time. Chomet’s illustrations inspired the house’s holiday collections and boutique windows worldwide. Many windows, Soumache said, used physical versions of characters and objects from the film, based directly on the director’s drawings.