While premiering the film at Lucca Comics and Games, Europe’s biggest gaming and comic book festival, Matthew Walker, the co-director of Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, spoke with the local Italian press about the film. There, he spoke at length with Variety about how he, as a filmmaker who works in the tactile, hands-on medium of stop-motion animation, feels about the rise of AI in filmmaking. Here’s a portion of what Walker had to say:
“Something I love about stop-motion is the tactile physicality of it, and I think that’s what appeals to audiences. You obviously want to tell a funny, emotional story with these characters. But on top of that, I think that just the technique of it, the stop-motion technique, has a lot of appeal in the knowledge that these are real models, all built with incredible detail by the artists.”
“People really respond to seeing these huge, detailed sets with these little puppets, which is obviously something AI can’t replicate,” Walker also stated.
When asked if he thinks that audiences will be able to tell when a piece of media is AI-generated, Walker answered with a resounding “Yes,” before saying that “…I know AI is advancing all the time, and we might get to a point where it’s really difficult to tell the difference. But I think at the moment, even when they might not be able to identify what’s not right, I think the audience can kind of tell when something is made with AI because there’s something a little bit uncanny.”
Walker also provided in the interview an in-depth explanation of why he thinks animation is more immune to AI than live-action, saying:
“…With live action, by using AI, it’s easier to replicate human activity because there’s a vast wealth of footage that AI is fed with. But in animation, there isn’t that wealth of footage to work with, because the animation process starts entirely from scratch. If you take a ball or a lamp and give it life, that’s not based on anything. It’s just based on an understanding of what a human can connect with.”
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