The holiday ad season is under way and luxury houses have published festive campaigns: both Prada and Christian Dior enlisted established hand-drawn animation figures. Although both projects aimed to celebrate traditional craftsmanship, public responses diverged sharply.
Prada: transparent process and John Pomeroy
Prada released its campaign, titled “Drawing Prada: Animated by Hand,” on October 27. The short features actors including Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Chen Haoyu, Luther Ford and Kelvin Harrison Jr., but the project’s highlight is the involvement of 75-year-old animation veteran John Pomeroy. Pomeroy’s credits include leading animation roles on Disney classics such as The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and Pocahontas.
Prada also published a longer behind-the-scenes video in which Pomeroy shows original drawings and explains how the hand-drawn storyboard was assembled.
Dior: star-studded short and AI accusations
Christian Dior published “Christian Dior’s Night in Color” on November 4. The film was directed and animated by Sylvain Chomet — an Oscar-nominated, BAFTA- and César-winning filmmaker known for Belleville Rendez-vous and The Illusionist — with a small team of graphic collaborators. The story, set in winter 1949 Paris, centers on Christian Dior and Marlene Dietrich.
The short includes prominent contributors: Robert Pattinson narrates, Rihanna voices the star atop the Christmas tree, Camille Cottin provides Marlene Dietrich’s voice, and Josh O’Connor voices a talking chair. Rihanna’s line in the film directly evokes her song “Diamonds” with the phrase “Shine bright like the stars.”
Although both Prada’s and Dior’s campaigns were presented as hand-drawn animation, Dior’s short provoked rapid online claims that parts of the film were produced with artificial intelligence. Viewers pointed to issues such as stuttering motion, text that appears to blur on a dog’s collar, small glitches, odd facial expressions, unnaturally rendered bees, and instances where hands appear to have six fingers.
Filmmakers’ response and production details
Sylvain Chomet and producer Aton Soumache responded to the accusations in an interview with Variety. Soumache said the film “was worked on for seven months, and was entirely drawn by artists.” He added that roughly twenty people contributed to the production, including six animators, storyboard artists, designers, background artists and editors.
The producer acknowledged that “we used an automated in-between frame generation system for a very small part of the workflow,” but emphasized that the film itself was made with traditional two-dimensional animation and was not created by generative AI. Variety used the term “interpolation” to describe the automated generation of frames between key animation drawings.
Chomet addressed the six-finger observations by saying that these images were not errors but the result of a conventional drawing technique used to suggest motion: a hand fanning open can be depicted with extra finger-like shapes to convey movement. He said he has remained committed to hand-drawn animation throughout his career while also being prepared to use technological tools where appropriate.
Questions around transparency
Cartoon Brew noted that Dior’s initial messaging presented the film as fully hand-drawn. Jonathan Anderson, Dior’s creative director, had told WWD that the film made for Dior was “entirely hand-drawn, using techniques that go back to the 1940s.” The later admission that some automated in-between generation was used was not mentioned in the original announcement, and the creators have not named the specific software or detailed how the method worked.
Cartoon Brew emphasized that automated in-between generation is not necessarily the same as generative AI: the term can cover a range of technologies, from simple automation to MI-based systems capable of producing new frames.
A broader trend: craftsmanship as a luxury signifier
The Prada and Dior cases fit a wider fashion-industry trend in which slow, hand-crafted processes are being framed as signs of luxury in an age of fast fashion and rapid content consumption. Spanish brand Loewe is collaborating with Tim Burton and Disney on a Nightmare Before Christmas–inspired collection arriving November 12, and Anthropologie has prepared a stop-motion short built around hand-made figurines.
Other labels — including Bottega Veneta, Rimowa, Farm Rio, Barbour and e.l.f. Cosmetics — have likewise launched campaigns incorporating hand-drawn or craft elements. Impact, an Instagram account covering social issues and pop culture, writes that hand-drawn, human-made ads have become “the new status symbol.”
Why this matters: communication and expectations
The dispute around the Dior short is sensitive because the campaign was presented as a tribute to traditional craftsmanship and was intended to draw parallels between Chomet’s hand-drawn animation and Dior haute couture, which emphasizes bespoke, largely hand-made work. Given those claims, later acknowledgements that an automated process was used in part of production unsettled some viewers.
Cartoon Brew’s author argued that, considering Dior’s position in fashion and the film’s framing as a celebration of craft, greater transparency about the production process would have helped clear up questions.
Conclusion
The controversy over Dior’s holiday short highlights how new technologies and audience expectations are reshaping perceptions of traditional craft. The filmmakers say the work was fundamentally hand-drawn and that automation was used only to streamline repetitive tasks; nonetheless, the campaign’s initial messaging and the limited disclosure about the tools used left room for debate about transparency and the meaning of craft in the luxury sector.
