I see it. You might see it. I hope you see it. The terrifying psychological sickness creeping through the corridors of the modern world, imposed on the arts. It has absolutely nothing to do with software updates, algorithms, or computers. I find it horrifying. It sometimes puts me on the edge of crashing out entirely.
A few weeks ago, at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the deeply disturbing ritual that we’ve all become all too familiar with played out. Hisko Hulsing, a legendary director whose jaw-dropping, hand-painted textures on projects like Undone have spent years anchoring the vanguard of animation craft, premiered his new independent short film, Danse Macabre. True to its name, the film is a sweeping, visceral piece of art featuring haunting, apocalyptic imagery of skeletons dancing and riding through the frame, over landscapes of war and horror.
To achieve this haunting aesthetic, Hulsing treated machine learning as a natural extension of his classic mixed-media roots. He and his team spent months hand-crafting physical oil paintings and building precise 3D animation tracks, using a local model trained entirely on his own physical artwork to seamlessly marry fluid digital motion with the tangible, textured grit of his painterly brushstrokes. Far from bypassing the craft, the technology was integrated as a hyper-sophisticated compositor to execute a vision that would have been impossible through traditional means alone. It was a flawless, highly disciplined evolution of his lifelong visual vocabulary. I applaud it.
“It was a textbook modern internet pile-on brought into the physical world; a synchronized performance of pure, unadulterated malice.”
The response from a vocal contingent of the festival crowd wasn’t up for an artistic debate. They came prepared for an ideological execution without wanting to bother to know what actually went into its creation. Before the film even projected its first frame onto the screen, a hyper-coordinated mob wearing matching “Stop Generative AI” stickers staged a mass walkout. Those who remained started loudly booing and heckling the screen, screaming that a master painter should be “ashamed” of his own labor. They weren’t the audience. They were zealots who made sure they filled the seats so they could manufacture a reaction ahead of any possible real response from a true audience.
It was a textbook modern internet pile-on brought into the physical world; a synchronized performance of pure, unadulterated malice. And when you step back to look at the big picture of what is happening across our culture right now, the common thread becomes blindingly obvious: these people are the worst of the brainwashed, completely indoctrinated to view the entire universe through the exhausting, sterile lens of a permanent power struggle.
The Entitlement of the Non-Builder
To this hyper-conformist mob, there is no such thing as an individual locking themselves in a dark room for ten hours a day out of obsessive, unadulterated love for a craft. They cannot comprehend a human being who is so passionately consumed by a creative vision that they are willing to make an extension of themselves and their relationship with the muse with whatever tool sits on their desk, be it a photocopy machine in 1993, a green screen in 2010, or a localized neural network today, just to see their dream exist in physical reality.
They cannot comprehend earned status through labor and love, because they are fundamentally lazy. The best they can do is imitate it, adding a sprinkle of hipster pretension and an unhealthy heap of power-hungry propaganda, but even then, when it works, they’ll eventually find a reason to turn on the ones who start to stand out.
Because they lack the discipline to build, their only recourse to achieving social currency and a synthetic sense of security is the exercise of raw, destructive power. They view the creative hierarchy not as something to be earned through compounding interest of labor, but as something to be taken by force, threat, and relentless public harassment. They want to sit like unelected, absolute monarchs in the comments sections and festival rows, dictating who is allowed to create and who isn’t, enforcing a supremely narrow, focus-grouped vision of the world. Their “romantic” relationships must be a hell of paranoia and ridicule. Their children must feel hopeless.
“Before the film even projected its first frame onto the screen, a hyper-coordinated mob wearing matching ‘Stop Generative AI’ stickers staged a mass walkout.”
My feelings of contempt for their limited vision and cowardice know no bounds. I wish I didn’t mean that, but it’s true.
And the ultimate irony? They carry out this mass bullying utilizing the exact platforms, networks, and computing architectures that greater minds built for them.
1960s master of the guitar Jimi Hendrix precisely diagnosed this spiritual warfare decades ago with a single, eternal truth:
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
The mob has zero interest in the power of love. They are entirely consumed by the love of power. They don’t look for nuance, they don’t look for context, and they don’t look for the human heart behind the canvas. They purposely avoid it, ducking, going around, looking the other way so they can pretend that it doesn’t exist, and only see an individual who has been freed by something like AI, stepping outside their approved matrix. They perceive that individual’s independence as a direct, lethal threat to the structural security they have encased their worthless little egos within. A sovereign creator who answers only to the muse proves that the mob’s collective rules are completely meaningless, and so they will destroy anything and everything they cannot control just to maintain the illusion that they are running the market.
The Sovereign Rejection
This power-obsessed entitlement has made Hollywood look completely irrelevant. I know I’ve said this before, but I am done. I have zero desire to join their clubs, compete with their legacy systems, or seek permission from them. True artists, from Claude Monet painting his light fields to independent directors carving out universes in their garages, succeed because they are driven by an uncompromised passion that has nothing to do with the approval of an ideological cartel.
We do not dig into these new mediums to show off technological tricks or to pick fights over software. We dig to uncover the human soul. My visual vocabulary is a weapon used to fight for the preservation of our collective relationships, to build stories that champion deep friendship, the renegotiation of broken trust, and the absolute necessity of keeping the door open for redemption. They see these things as weakness. When they boo, it’s because your value in contrast to their malevolent worthlessness offends them, and it’s easier for them to destroy you than do anything of value themselves.
The tragedy of the Annecy protest isn’t just that a crowd of useful idiots yelled at a master painter; it’s that their obsession with hating a tool—simply because they let someone else do their thinking for them (like a dictator) and that person told them to hate it—completely blinded them to the content of the film, which was an anti-war allegory warning against the rise of authoritarianism. They became the very monsters the film was warning them about, entirely unaware of their own hypocrisy.
If you are a creator standing on the modern frontier, the lesson of the Danse Macabre disruption is clear: stop walking on eggshells for a conformist mass that forgot how to build. When they stand up to demand you apologize for your tools, they aren’t trying to de-legitimize your methods, they are trying to de-legitimize you, because they are terrified of what you can accomplish without them.
Do not apologize, do not acquiesce to their brain-dead talking points and bogus concerns, and do not play their power games. Master your craft, protect your sovereignty, and let the love of your vision drown out their desperate, dying noise.dates, algorithms, or computers. I find it horrifying. It sometimes puts me on the edge of crashing out entirely.
“…stop walking on eggshells for a conformist mass…”
A few weeks ago, at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the deeply disturbing ritual that we’ve all become all too familiar with played out. Hisko Hulsing, a legendary director whose jaw-dropping, hand-painted textures on projects like Undone have spent years anchoring the vanguard of animation craft, premiered his new independent short film, Danse Macabre. True to its name, the film is a sweeping, visceral piece of art featuring haunting, apocalyptic imagery of skeletons dancing and riding through the frame, over landscapes of war and horror.
To achieve this haunting aesthetic, Hulsing treated machine learning as a natural extension of his classic mixed-media roots. He and his team spent months hand-crafting physical oil paintings and building precise 3D animation tracks, using a local model trained entirely on his own physical artwork to seamlessly marry fluid digital motion with the tangible, textured grit of his painterly brushstrokes. Far from bypassing the craft, the technology was integrated as a hyper-sophisticated compositor to execute a vision that would have been impossible through traditional means alone. It was a flawless, highly disciplined evolution of his lifelong visual vocabulary. I applaud it.
The response from a vocal contingent of the festival crowd wasn’t up for an artistic debate. They came prepared for an ideological execution without wanting to bother to know what actually went into its creation. Before the film even projected its first frame onto the screen, a hyper-coordinated mob wearing matching “Stop Generative AI” stickers staged a mass walkout. Those who remained started loudly booing and heckling the screen, screaming that a master painter should be “ashamed” of his own labor. They weren’t the audience. They were zealots who make sure they filled the seat so they could manufacture a reaction ahead of any possible real response from a true audience.
It was a textbook modern internet pile-on brought into the physical world; a synchronized performance of pure, unadulterated malice. And when you step back to look at the big picture of what is happening across our culture right now, the common thread becomes blindingly obvious: these people are the worst of the brainwashed, completely indoctrinated to view the entire universe through the exhausting, sterile lens of a permanent power struggle.
The Entitlement of the Non-Builder
To this hyper-conformist mob, there is no such thing as an individual locking themselves in a dark room for ten hours a day out of obsessive, unadulterated love for a craft. They cannot comprehend a human being who is so passionately consumed by a creative vision that they are willing to make an extension of themselves and their relationship with the muse with whatever tool sits on their desk, be it a photocopy machine in 1993, a green screen in 2010, or a localized neural network today, just to see their dream exist in physical reality.
They cannot comprehend earned status through labor and love, because they are fundamentally lazy. They are entitled brats who refuse to do the heavy, agonizing, everyday internal work required to build an infrastructure, a movie set, or a personal visual dialect from scratch. They best they can do is imitate it, adding a sprinkle of hipster pretension, and an unhealthy heap of power hungry propaganda, but even then, when it works they’ll eventually find a reason to turn on the ones who start to stand out.
“This power-obsessed entitlement has made Hollywood look completely irrelevant.”
Because they lack the discipline to build, their only recourse to achieving social currency and a synthetic sense of security is the exercise of raw, destructive power. They view the creative hierarchy not as something to be earned through compounding interest of labor, but as something to be taken by force, threat, and relentless public harassment. They want to sit like unelected, absolute monarchs in the comments sections and festival rows, dictating who is allowed to create and who isn’t, enforcing a supremely narrow, focus-focused vision of the world. Their “romantic” relationships must be a hell of paranoia and ridicule. Their children must feel hopeless.
My feelings of contempt for their limited vision and cowardice knows no bounds. I wish I didn’t mean that, but it’s true.
And the ultimate irony? They carry out this mass bullying utilizing the exact platforms, networks, and computing architectures that greater minds built for them.
1960’s mast of the guitar Jimi Hendrix precisely diagnosed this spiritual warfare decades ago with a single, eternal truth:
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
The mob has zero interest in the power of love. They are entirely consumed by the love of power. They don’t look for nuance, they don’t look for context, and they don’t look for the human heart behind the canvas. They purposely avoid it, ducking, going around, looking the other way so they can pretend that it doesn’t exist, and only see an individual who has been freed by something like AI, stepping outside their approved matrix, and they perceive that individual’s independence as a direct, lethal threat to the structural security they have encased their worthless little egos within. A sovereign creator who answers only to the muse proves that the mob’s collective rules are completely meaningless, and so will destroy anything and everything they cannot control just to maintain the illusion that they are running the market.
The Sovereign Rejection
This power-obsessed entitlement has made Hollywood look completely irrelevant. I know I’ve said this before, but I am done. I have zero desire to join their clubs, compete with their legacy systems, or seek permission from them. True artists, from Claude Monet painting his light fields to independent directors carving out universes in their garages, succeed because they are driven by an uncompromised passion that has nothing to do with the approval of an ideological cartel.
“They became the very monsters the film was warning them about, entirely unaware of their own hypocrisy.”
We do not dig into these new mediums to show off technological tricks or to pick fights over software. We dig to uncover the human soul. My visual vocabulary is a weapon used to fight for the preservation of our collective relationships, to build stories that champion deep friendship, the renegotiation of broken trust, and the absolute necessity of keeping the door open for redemption. They see these things as weakness. When they boo, it’s because your value in contrast to their malevolent worthlessness offends them, and it’s easier for them to destroy you than do anything of value themselves.
The tragedy of the Annecy protest isn’t just that a crowd of useful idiots yelled at a master painter; it’s that their obsession with hating a tool, simply because they let someone else do their thinking for them (like a dictator) and that person told them to hate it, completely blinded them to the content of the film, which was an anti-war allegory warning against the rise of authoritarianism. They became the very monsters the film was warning them about, entirely unaware of their own hypocrisy.
If you are a creator standing on the modern frontier, the lesson of the Danse Macabre disruption is clear: stop walking on eggshells for a conformist mass that forgot how to build. When they stand up to demand you apologize for your tools, they aren’t trying to de-legitimize your methods, they are trying to de-legitimize you, because they are terrified of what you can accomplish without them.
Do not apologize, do not acquiesce to their brain dead talking points and bogus concerns, and do not play their power games. Master your craft, protect your sovereignty, and let the love of your vision drown out their desperate, dying noise.
Christopher Moonlight is an animator, special effects artist, and the director of the ‘Award This’ winning movie, The Quantum Terror. His upcoming animated sci-fi adventure, Escape From Planet Omega-12, combines traditional film-making special effects with AI to create something never seen before in independent film. You can follow the behind-the-scenes, including tutorials, tips, and tricks, on his YouTube Channel, Substack, and christophermoonlight.productions website.
