Sylvain Chomet says his Dior film was drawn by hand, but software made some of its frames

Dior sold Chomet's short as all drawn by hand; his producer now says an automated tool made some in between frames. Neither has named the software or said how many frames it touched.

Dior launched Sylvain Chomet's new animated short as all drawn by hand, and now Chomet's own producer says software made some of its frames. When a label like that turns out to need a footnote, people stop trusting what they are told about how anything was made.

Christian Dior's Night in Color is a six minute holiday film narrated by Robert Pattinson. Dior's creative director Jonathan Anderson told WWD it was "all hand-drawn using techniques that go back to the 1940s." Animators online soon posted frames with a six fingered hand and other glitches they read as signs of generative AI, and Cartoon Brew removed "hand-drawn" from its headline and apologized for not watching more carefully.

Chomet and producer Aton Soumache told Variety the film took seven months and about 20 people, six of them animators, drawing on tablets. Soumache added: "We used an automated interpolation system for a very small part of the process." Interpolation means software filling in the frames between an animator's key drawings. Chomet says the fingers are an old animation trick, a hand fanned out in motion.

Neither man has named the tool, said whether it uses machine learning, or said how many frames it touched. Older in-between software only blends the drawings it is given, while some newer tools use AI to invent the missing frames, so that detail decides what "drawn by hand" means here.

Our take: drawn by hand is now a claim a brand has to show, not just say. Naming the in-between software would settle this faster than any interview.

Source: Variety, Nov 7, 2026; Cartoon Brew, Nov 6 and 7, 2026.