TCL’s new AI short films range from bad comedy to existential horror

Earlier this year, TCL released a trailer for Next Stop Paris — an AI-animated short film that seems like a Lifetime movie on steroids. The trailer had all the hallmarks of AI: characters that don’t move their mouths when they talk, lifeless expressions, and weird animation that makes it look like scenes are constantly vibrating.

I thought this might be the extent of TCL’s experimentation with AI films, given the healthy dose of criticism it received online. But boy, was I wrong. TCL debuted five new AI-generated short films that are also destined for its TCLtv Plus free streaming platform, and after the Next Stop Paris debacle, I just had to see what else it cooked up.

Though the new films do look a little better than Next Stop Paris, they serve as yet another reminder that AI-generated videos aren’t quite there yet, something we’ve seen with many of the video generation tools cropping up, like OpenAI’s Sora. But in TCL’s case, it’s not just the AI that makes these films bad.

Here are all five of them, ranked from tolerable (5) to “I wish I could unsee this” (1).

This futuristic short film basically has the same concept as Ray Bradbury’s short story “All Summer in a Day.” It follows a young girl who lives on a planet where the sun only comes out every seven years, but just 10 people can see it at a time from the top of a building called the “Citadel.” Well, this girl wins a lottery to get a rooftop view of the sun, but two bullies lock her in a room to prevent her from getting to the Citadel.

The AI-generated sequences become pretty hard to follow as she tries to navigate her way out through the sewers beneath the school. She somehow gets in touch with her dad (telepathically?), who just so happens to be a maintenance worker who knows his way through the underground. There, she encounters purple rats on her way to some kind of elevator (?) that turns into a rocket and blasts her to a rooftop (?) where she can finally see the sun.

The voice acting in this isn’t bad, but the lack of facial expression was pretty laughable (just look at this scene).

Project Nexus is more like a five-minute trailer than a short film, and unlike TCL’s other AI movies, this one is meant to depict animated characters, rather than attempting to make them look as human as possible. It starts like this: a man finds what looks like a radioactive rock and then coordinates the arrest of a group of four teens, who then get some sort of supernatural powers after the rock explodes beneath their prison.

They use these newfound powers to escape the prison, and that’s where it ends with a “to be continued.” I thought that maybe the facial expressions would be better because the characters aren’t meant to look fully human, but that definitely wasn’t the case here. This film’s story is probably the most compelling out of the bunch — the AI-generated animation and questionable voice acting just make it hard to watch.

This is a docufiction-style short film, which has an actor playing Dr. Warren Brown use AI to retell the harrowing story of how he lost his leg after getting trapped in an avalanche atop Chile’s Cerro Castillo mountain — and it’s hard to tell which parts of the story (if any) actually happened.

Though the majority of the film is an AI flashback, showing clips of Brown and his friend traversing the snowy mountaintop, it cuts between scenes with the real, human actor who plays Brown and narrates the story. It’s basically like watching an Investigation Discovery show, but with all the “dramatic recreations” made with AI.

The story starts to lose me after it shows an AI-generated image of a severed leg, followed by a trippy sequence of Brown’s “life flashing before his eyes,” which, for some reason, includes a zebra morphing into a lion. I visibly cringed at the ending when Brown called this the “best day” of his life.

At first, The Audition didn’t seem that bad. But what I thought was a silly skit involving an actor auditioning for a role in front of a picky casting director devolved into some weird and unfunny attempts at comedy. After asking the actor to try on various accents, the casting director’s requests get more specific — he should be younger, maybe look more like Brad Pitt (with elf ears, for some reason).

Magically, with the power of AI, the actor turns into everything the casting director wants him to be and even deepfakes him into different scenes from iconic movies like Indiana Jones and E.T. Guess what? In the end, the casting director turns him away because she wants something “different.” When he walks out, clones of him practice their lines in the waiting room.

Okay, I really hate this. It’s like if Franz Kafka had access to AI and generated The Metamorphosis. The gist of it is this: a woman is suffering from a bad case of arthritis, and she tries to reach out to family members and her doctor by phone, but they don’t pick up. It doesn’t seem like she can get out of the house due to her pain, which is why she looks so longingly out the window when she places a slug outside.

Things get real weird after this. Her hands and feet become covered in slime, until her body gradually morphs into a full-on slug. Viewer discretion is advised, because it’s honestly kind of disturbing. Once the metamorphosis is complete, she inches her way out of the house in slug form, and someone finally returns her call. How tragic.