Annecy Audience Award Winner Director’s Thoughts On CGI and AI In Animation

The 60th Annecy Animation Film Festival closed with the 2023 Audience Award winner, director Benoît Chieux’s, traditional 2D feature of celebrating the old-school craft of hand-drawn cartoons and hand-crafted animations. The film, Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air, won Chieux this year’s Audience Award, which was his solo feature, as he co-directed 2013’s Aunt Hilda! with Jacques-Rémy Girerd.

The movie was hand-drawn with some scene transitions done on the computer. Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air is a children’s film that’s about two young sisters who get sucked into the pages of a children’s book. They enter a wondrous Kingdom of the Winds ruled by a Sirocco, a wizard who appears to embody the form of the wind itself. The film is produced by Sacrebleu Productions, Take Five, and Ciel de Pairs. Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air is being shown in France by Haut et Court and will be sold by Kinology worldwide.

Hollywood Reporter spoke with Chieux about bringing Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air to the screen, inquiring about how his film is stripped down and not crowded like CGI-animated films today.

Chieux responded, “I wanted to reduce this one down to simple expressions, to reduce the technical challenge and make things as visually simple as possible. So, for example, there are no cast shadows in the animation, the characters are drawn as simply as possible, as are the backgrounds. All the characters, and almost all the objects, are drawn with curved lines.”

Chieux continued, “To explain why I wanted to do this I need to go back a bit into the history of art. What I see right now with animation in the world of A.I. looks to me like what happened with painting when photography arrived. Classical painting evoking photorealism basically stopped, because it was so close to photography. I think it might be the same with A.I., we might see the same impact on 3D and CGI images. Because when you look back to the 19th century, you realize the painting that has lasted, that we still appreciate today, is impressionism, which wasn’t trying to replicate reality, wasn’t trying to be perfectly photorealistic, to reflect reality, but give an impression of reality. I think it may be the same with animation.”