The Triplets Of Belleville director says AI wasn't used to generate artwork for his Dior short

Defending Chomet, Soumache pointed to the roughly twenty creatives they hired for the project—animators, storyboard artists, designers, background artists, compositors, and editors—as well as the time required to produce the short. “Some people are claiming Sylvain was contacted two weeks ago and that the entire film was made with generative AI, without a single drawing,” he said. “But the reality is that this film took seven months to make and it was entirely drawn by artists.” Soumache says Night In Color, which follows the late fashion designer Christian Dior one fateful night when actor and friend Marlene Dietrich suddenly requests a new gown (making a fanciful lark out of the creation of Dior’s Junon gown in 1949), used “automated interpolation”—the process in which computer software generates movement between certain keyframes—for “a very small part of the process.” “It’s a way of automating the repetitive, mechanical part of animation, not the creative work,” Chomet said. 

Automated interpolation could explain instances in the short where characters briefly show six fingers on their mitts, though Chomet also says that artistic shorthand in traditional animation is often responsible for such visual peculiarities. “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 said. “I’ve seen a character turn his head, and his nose suddenly changes shape completely over five frames. These things happen.”

You can watch Christian Dior’s Night In Color, which features voice work by Louis Garrel, Camille Cottin, LaKeith Stanfield, Greta Lee, Rhianna, and competing Bonds Josh O’Connor and Robert Pattinson, in the video below.