At a screening of an AI-generated music video, there are blank faces in the audience. Moments later, boos fill the hall. It is the first sign of discontent at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. About 16,000 people from 102 countries have gathered for the flagship event of the animation industry, which is projected to grow by €200bn in the next decade. Despite these positive numbers, mass layoffs at major studios and the arrival of generative AI have left animators fearing that human artistry could soon be left behind. But Monocle finds a wave of artists who are redrawing the industry by blending traditional craft with new technology.

“I love the artistic possibilities of animation and the breadth of trades that you encounter on set,” says Argentinian director Rosario Carlino, who has come to pitch her film Karetabla as part of Women in Animation, a programme promoting animators from the Global South. There’s a growing confidence among artists who are embracing their heritage through animation, not least thanks to the booming export of Japanese anime to the rest of the world. “With streaming, animation has become a more global movement,” says Mitchel Berger, the senior vice-president of global commerce at Crunchyroll, who is credited with distributing almost half of the top-grossing anime films in North America. “What people once thought of as uniquely Japanese now has an audience everywhere.”

Among those present is Pakistan-based Mano Animation Studios, which entered The Glassworker, its first hand-drawn feature. “In the beginning, people said that we were crazy,” says film director Uzman Riaz. “Why would you do animation by hand when you can do it with the click of a mouse?”

However, this mouse-clicking mentality misses the point of what inspires many animators. “We put in all of this work out of our love for the art form and the audience can feel that,” says Canadian filmmaker Denver Jackson, who wrote, directed and painstakingly animated his new film, The Worlds Divide, by himself. “I won’t deny that some audiences will watch AI content,” says the film’s producer, Nicole Sorochan. “But is this algorithmic ‘more of more’ approach really what we need to be focusing on?”

Investing in craft in an industry fast becoming automated might not be as naive as it seems. “Because of AI, things that are handmade are more appreciated,” says Australian stop-motion director Adam Elliot, this year’s Annecy Cristal prize winner for best film, with Memoir of a Snail. “Films that used to be niche are reaching more people through digital technologies such as streaming.” Swiss director, producer and writer Claude Barras also believes that digital advances have benefited the creative process of stop-motion filmmaking, including his award- winning film My Life as a Courgette. “I think that 3D printing and digital cameras have removed a lot of barriers by making the process more affordable and fluid,” he says.

It’s a paradoxical claim often repeated at the festival: technological advances are allowing independent artists to preserve traditional animation approaches long abandoned by legacy studios. Smaller studios are now on track to snatch about half of the market from industry giants in the next few years. The success of these outsiders should be a reminder that, in this medium, the people who are doing the drawing are often the ones drawing in the audiences.