The Triplets of Belleville director made Dior's holiday film; the internet says it's AI

Dior premiered its 2026 holiday film on November 3: Christian Dior's Night in Color, a six-minute animated short directed by Sylvain Chomet with creative direction by Jonathan Anderson. Robert Pattinson narrates, Louis Garrel voices Dior, Camille Cottin plays Marlene Dietrich — who wakes the couturier in the night of 1949 needing a dress for her first color film — and Rihanna voices a lucky star.

On paper this is the most anti-AI commission in fashion. Chomet is the man behind The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, one of the last living masters of hand-drawn animation, and his producer Aton Soumache put the pitch plainly:

"Sylvain draws everything — that's what's so extraordinary. No one works like that in animation anymore."

— Aton Soumache, producer of the film

The comments did not take Dior's word for it:

"Transitions are A.I., lots of details are slopped: Hands, fingers, numbers, leaves. It's a damn shame. Would've been a real nice treat."

— a commenter on r/Fauxmoi

The Prada comparison Dior walked into

What gives the suspicion legs is the brand's silence next to its rival's labeling. Another commenter checked the receipts across platforms:

"i just checked the comments on their IG and youtube - there's some speculation that it was used bc of the amount of fingers certain characters have at certain points and dior hasn't addressed it (they released the ad yesterday) unlike prada, who made it a point to say 'hand-drawn' in pretty much every post of their holiday ad"

— a commenter on r/Fauxmoi

Prada's campaign, Drawing Prada, is built entirely around that proof-of-humanity: Disney-golden-age veteran John Pomeroy leads a team of traditional animators, and the marketing leans on pencil, paper, and the hours. Dior commissioned arguably the greater artist and let the work speak for itself — and in 2026, work that speaks for itself gets cross-examined.

Chomet spent months drawing the film by hand, reviving 1940s cut-out techniques. The comments needed one evening to put the fingers on trial.

The presumption of innocence is gone

Whether a single AI-assisted transition touched this film, I can't prove, and neither can the people screenshotting leaves. That's exactly the point: hand-drawn animation has lost the presumption of being hand-drawn. If a Chomet film under a luxury budget gets the finger-count treatment, no cartoon gets waved through on reputation again.

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The fix is depressingly clerical. Prada understood that craft now needs a certificate of origin stapled to every post; Dior assumed the signature was the certificate. Every studio releasing animation from now on — including the ones with nothing to hide — will be writing "hand-drawn" into the caption like an ingredients label.

Previously we wrote: 'An AI scam masquerading as a real movie': what happened to Return of the Living Dead