Sylvain Chomet Denies Using AI on His Dior Animated Short

Sylvain Chomet says generative AI played no part in making his animated short for Dior. Generative AI is software that creates images from text prompts or from existing pictures. Variety reported his denial after online critics questioned how the film was made.

The film is Christian Dior's Night in Color, a six-minute animated short. It was produced by Aton Soumache, and its voice cast is led by Robert Pattinson, who narrates. Rihanna, Josh O'Connor, LaKeith Stanfield, Louis Garrel and Camille Cottin also lend their voices.

Chomet is a four-time Oscar nominee, known for The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist. Critics online pointed to visual glitches in the short, including a character with six fingers, as what they called evidence of AI-generated animation.

Chomet and Soumache say the film uses traditional 2D animation, with characters, backgrounds and key poses drawn by artists. They acknowledge using automated interpolation for some in-between frames, a software step that fills the gaps between hand-drawn poses. They insist generative AI was never used to create the artwork.

Soumache says the film took seven months to make and was entirely drawn by artists. Roughly 20 people worked on it. Six of them were animators, and the rest included storyboard artists, designers, background artists, compositors and editors. Compositors combine the separate layers of a drawing into finished frames.

Dior has framed the short as a celebration of traditional craftsmanship, released to launch its 2026 holiday season. The fashion house credits Chomet as film director and says the voice cast is made up of Dior ambassadors and friends. Dior also describes the hand-drawn process as unfolding over months, which it links to the patience that haute couture, the made-to-measure end of fashion, demands.

In the story, Louis Garrel voices Christian Dior and Camille Cottin plays Marlene Dietrich. Josh O'Connor voices a talking chair, Rihanna plays Dior's lucky star, and LaKeith Stanfield plays a Hollywood director. The film draws on Dior's friendship with Dietrich, the house's ties to Hollywood, and the creation of the Junon gown in 1949. It also takes its cue from an idea in creative director Jonathan Anderson's Cruise 2027 collection, the move of cinema from black-and-white to Technicolor.

The row comes down to a question animation fans ask more often: where does hand work end and software begin? In this case, the makers say the answer is the in-between frames, and they say the drawings themselves are all theirs. The critics' claims about the six-fingered character and other glitches were made online, and the film's makers have answered them with the account of the process above.