Journal / 09.11.2026 / Film & Motion

Here we go. It’s Christmas

Mariah Carey has announced it, so that’s that: Christmas is here. And this year, one fairly clear trend is emerging from brand campaigns: handmade work. Traditional drawing, clay, felt, embroidery, puppets and miniature sets… After several years spent producing images that were increasingly smooth, fast and perfect, everyone suddenly seems to be rediscovering fingerprints.

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Mariah Carey — “IT’S TIME!!!!” (2026) ↗

A HANDMADE CHRISTMAS

To put the message crudely: AI is crap; we have hands, time and craft. That is obviously a bit of a caricature, but strategically it makes sense. When an almost perfect image can be generated in a few seconds, perfection is no longer enough to express value. It even becomes slightly suspicious. What is becoming rare again is the time spent making something, mastery of a technique and the visible presence of people behind the images.

Luxury has understood this very well and is quite logically claiming the idea of handmade work for itself. It allows brands to associate their campaigns with the same values they use to sell their products: patience, precision, craftsmanship, heritage and savoir-faire. Prada is not merely showing a bag, but also the drawings made by real animators. Guerlain has its miniature Paris embroidered, Strathberry builds landscapes out of felt, Levi’s recreates its clothes at puppet scale and Aardman even leaves the animators’ fingerprints visible on its characters. The image is supposed to prove the value of the object.

That does not mean these films are entirely analogue. There are still digital cameras, compositing, retouching, sometimes 3D and visual effects. The real question is where the creative decisions are being made, who is actually creating the images and whether the brand is honest about how the film was produced.

THE LITTLE DIOR CONTROVERSY

After Intermarché’s wolf last year, Dior’s Christmas film has now sparked its own little controversy. The film, directed by Sylvain Chomet, is presented as hand-drawn, so the internet promptly began looking for extra fingers, wandering eyes and dubious transitions to prove that it had been made with AI.

Personally, I watched a video accusing the director of cheating and, at first glance, it mostly looked to me like some rotoscoping, interpolation or a similar effect that had been handled a little awkwardly in a few shots. Since then, Sylvain Chomet and his producer have explained that no generative AI was used to create the images. They do, however, acknowledge using an automated interpolation system on a very small part of the film. It may not all have been made entirely frame by frame, but it was not generated by typing three sentences into a machine either.

What this story mainly shows is that the production process has now become part of the work. When a brand sells something as “handmade”, the audience wants to see the hands. Credits, artists and behind-the-scenes films are becoming almost as important as the film itself, and I find that development quite interesting. The online tribunal inspecting every knuckle to catch someone cheating, slightly less so. Everything seems to become an excuse for a fairly pointless controversy these days: we no longer really watch the films; we immediately start trying to work out who cheated. And honestly, who cares?