It's good to talk: European animation industry faces fear over AI

It was close to 40 degrees inside the tent, and the heatwave outside was the worst France had experienced in years. Animators, producers and the executives who finance and sell their films had crowded in anyway, to talk about the thing reshaping their industry faster than anything in a generation: artificial intelligence. Every June, this lakeside town of Annecy in the French Alps is the focus of the animation world. This year, the record temperatures were not the only thing people came away talking about. AI was everywhere, and almost nowhere on the record. On stage: the optimists' case The panel had a hopeful title, "Animation: More Human than Ever," and it was moderated by Mark Flanagan, a veteran computer-graphics educator and founder of the training platform VFX Jam. Around him sat Henry Daubrez, a filmmaker-in-residence at Google Labs; Jade Hautin, a producer at the Paris company Frogbox; the American technologist and filmmaker Benjamin Michel; and the producer Leo Neumann. The question under the title was the one everyone had come for: how human can animation remain when the tools that make it are increasingly automated? Daubrez made the case for access: AI, he argued, could finally put a camera in the hands of creators in countries that never had studios or the software. He was careful about the limits, too. Used lazily, he said, the tools pull everything back toward "the average or the mean"; the trick is to bring a point of view to the machine rather than hoping to find one inside it. What works, in his experience, is what he called "hybrid production", letting AI handle the rendering while humans keep control of the movement and the design. Michel talked economics. He sees a future of small, $5 million studios turning out films where one $50 million production used to stand, with the big houses forced to trim what he called their "padding". And he offered the line the room kept returning to. Once the technology takes over the technical craft, he said, "what's left is you", your taste, your eye. The conversation circled back, again and again, to authorship. Control, as someone on the panel put it, is creation. Flanagan named the awkward part out loud. Established filmmakers are drawn to AI because it might finally let them make the passion project no one would fund; the younger artists in the audience are wondering how they will ever get a first job. Hautin, whose collective has spent two years running the tools through real productions, caught the ambivalence in the room: "Part of you wants it to work," she said, "and part of you doesn't." Neumann was blunter about the efficiencies everyone kept invoking; for a small team, he said, they would have been faster without AI. The panellists ran through their best cases and their worst, and agreed on the one thing nobody could argue with: no one could say where any of this would be in three years. Off stage: the taboo Step outside the tent, and the same conversation went quiet. AI is animation's open secret. It is in almost everything now, but saying so has become a matter of nerves. Everyone wants to be the first to do something startling with it, and almost no one wants to admit they are using it at all, because of what happens when you do. The industry had just watched what happened. A few weeks before the festival, Amazon MGM Studios and Amazon Web Services launched a fund to bankroll AI-made shows and green-lit three of them for Prime Video. One was Punky Duck, from Jorge R. Gutiérrez, the Mexican director of The Book of Life and Maya and the Three. The reaction was brutal, and not only over the AI. Gutiérrez had spent years as one of the loudest voices for animators; as recently as 2024 he had warned that leaning on the technology would knock away the ladder junior artists climb, leaving, in his words, a whole generation of creators unable to make hits. Within two days, after a wave of abuse he said included threats to his family, Gutiérrez decided to drop out of the AI program at Amazon. "Actions speak louder than words," he wrote, apologising to anyone he had let down. Efficiency that wasn't Few people had tested the promises as directly as Leo Neumann, who runs a studio with around 30 people in Germany. In his feature The Amazing Kitsuverse, he tried AI for jobs like lip-sync and licensed voice work, and came out the other side wishing he hadn't. For a small team that wants to keep its hands on the film, the effort of testing the tools and bolting them into the pipeline ate more time than it saved. His rule for using AI ethically is short: don't give up creative control, and don't infringe anyone's copyright. The deeper objection is about ownership. Typing a prompt, he says, is like hiring a stranger online; whatever comes back, it isn't really yours. He learned the price of honesty the hard way. When his studio listed every tool it had used in the credits, an Annecy test screening turned on the film the moment AI came up, while studios that kept quiet carried on untroubled until someone found them out. He reaches for music to explain it: a piece stops being worth much the moment you discover that a machine, not a person, was playing. The missing first rung For the people still trying to get in, the worry is simpler. The Mexican animator Quique Gasca left animation school not long ago, and the thing that keeps him up is a mechanism. AI is coming first for the in-between frames, the drudge work that has always been how a junior learns the job and how older animators pass down what they know. Take away the bottom rung, and there is no ladder left to climb. It gets worse, he says. A model that has swallowed everything already "has all the voices", so the one thing a newcomer needs most, a sound of their own, becomes the hardest to find. His response, and that of a lot of his junior colleagues, is to run at the things a machine cannot do. He talks about stop-motion coming back, about the way real materials and real mistakes build into something no model can copy. What frightens him is that the handmade route, lovely as it is, stays a niche, while cheap AI "fast food" becomes what the next generation feeds on. The conversation comes apart Jade Hautin sat on the same panel, but watches all this from another seat. Frogbox, where she produces, doesn't use generative AI, and she says plenty of French studios don't either. She is also an ambassador for Creative Machines?, a French-speaking collective whose question mark is the point: it exists to question the technology, not to sell it. What began in late 2023 as a few people trading links is now a chorus of more than 1,100, running sprints where members test the tools on real production work and watch the marketing promises fall apart, alongside days of talks with sociologists, lawyers and economists. What strikes her most is the fierce polarisation in the AI conversations. Two camps have hardened: believers who use AI every day and want the industry to get on with it, and people for whom even discussing it is a betrayal. Her collective tries to stand in the middle and gets it from both directions, too cautious for one side, a shill for the other. And the tools keep improving. In April 2024, they couldn't get an AI character to blink; by April 2026, she says, the results were stunning. That fear is why the talk goes underground, she argues. During the festival, her collective ran an international think tank of between 40 and 60 people, and several told her afterwards it was the first place they had felt safe discussing AI at all. The real problem, she says, is not the assistive tools that have sat in technical pipelines for years, but generative AI built on scraped data, with an environmental bill she calls monstrous. "Especially with this heatwave." What are we even talking about? If the week settled anything, it was that the industry cannot argue well about a word it hasn't defined. Too much gets crammed under "AI", Hautin says. Generative tools buried deep in a specialist pipeline are not the same animal as the ones anyone can call up in a browser, and the first kind has been part of animation for years. The fight is really about the second; models trained on work their authors never agreed to hand over. Name the thing precisely, she suggests, and the industry can finally argue honestly. Outside, the heat kept doing its damage. In one corner of the festival, a group of Spanish and Italian creatives were talking about exactly that: the environmental cost of the technology everyone else was fighting over. They love the work, they said; it's their life. But if the only way to keep making it in the future runs through an environmental disaster, then it isn't worth it. On that, at least, they agreed.