‘What’s left is you’: AI is the elephant in the room of Europe’s biggest animation festival
‘What’s left is you’: AI is the elephant in the room of Europe’s biggest animation festival
Publish Date: 2026-07-12 01:47:00
Source Domain: www.euronews.com
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.
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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…
