Le Drip is a painterly existential animated French short. In 2026 it took Best Animated Film, Best Use of AI and Best Director at the AI International Film Festival in Los Angeles, the same jury handing it both the craft prize and the technology prize. It went on to Best Animated Film in Amsterdam, Best Animation in Berlin, Best Animated Film in Atlanta, and the Golden Storytellers Award in Sydney, plus official selections in Bordeaux, Moscow and Los Angeles.

Alex Naghavi, who directed it with Ezra Li and also produced, art-directed and titled it, made the argument explicit in the film’s own description: "While this is an AI-generated film, every creative decision was made by artists." The credits back that up: story, screenplay, performance, editing, sound design, foley, color and art direction each have a person’s name next to them.

Every creative decision was made by artists

Alex is a creative director in Los Angeles with a background in digital product, branding and venturing. She and Ezra Li are both Runway Gen:48 winners, and they met at the inaugural Google Flow Sessions residency in late 2025. The story wasn’t theirs: screenwriter Jessie Hughes wrote it during the pandemic, and it sat until two filmmakers with a way to make it turned up.

The film is style the whole way down. There is no plot machinery to hide behind if the images drift, and nothing forgives a shot that looks like a different film than the one before it. Consistency across shots is the hardest thing to buy from a generative model and the only thing this particular film could not do without.

Sick of crafting the perfect prompt

In 2025 Alex built her own AI mockup tool, Seamless Studio, and said why: "I genuinely made this for myself… I was sick of having to open Photoshop to edit a template, purchasing the same mockups as everyone else, and trying to craft the ‘perfect’ prompt — only to be disappointed with the results." That loop is fine for a single image and useless for a film, where the unit of work is a sequence that has to hold together.

The spine, not the whole animal

Two things made FLORA the place the film got built.

The first is that it held structure rather than output. In Alex’s own account: "Le Drip was made primarily in Flora — a node-based platform where we built the shot-by-shot workflows and prompting structure." What lived in FLORA was the method: a shot-by-shot apparatus reusable across the film, which is how frame 400 belongs to the same movie as frame 40.

The second is that FLORA didn’t try to be the film. Inside it, Nano Banana, Claude and Seedance ran side by side. Outside it, the credits name Runway for storyboarding and video, Adobe for video and sound, Leonardo for additional video, ElevenLabs for voice transformation and effects, and a custom end-credits tool the team built in Google AI Studio. Six other tools in the pipeline, and FLORA listed first among them.

The credits are the argument

Alex has been answering the question of who decides for a while, in public: building her own tools when the existing ones bored her, and shipping them.

The credits read: Sound Design by Laurent Delforge. Foley by Olivier Thys. Color by James Foundoulis. Le Fish voiced by Ezra Li.