AI didn’t ruin these films. It made them possible.

At an AI film festival in Tokyo last month, an 11-minute short from a child's perspective won the audience's heart, while the festival's winner was an animated tale about a man with a facial disfigurement in Paris, and the crowd-pleaser 'The Postman' imagined a robot longing for human connection. The festival showcased that AI can enable films with deep humanity, contrary to expectations of low-quality output.

I went into an AI film festival in Tokyo last month expecting slop, and left surprised by how much humanity emanated from the screen. My favorite was an 11-minute short from the point of view of a child with a camcorder spending a magical summer with his grandparents. He records his cereal, mermaid sightings and fleeting, sun-drenched images of youth. The winner was an animated story about a man in Paris with a facial disfigurement. He hides behind masks but dreams of finding a dance partner. The biggest crowd-pleaser, “The Postman,” imagined a future in which a trash-sorting robot longs for the human connection it once found delivering handwritten letters as a postal worker.