Ali Bali is the co-founder of 3TOON, the independent studio he has been running since 1999. He has directed and produced more than 500 films across every visual style, building long-term relationships with major brands and institutions — from EDF, La Poste, Air France and Sanofi to the European Union and the French Ministry of Health — alongside startups and small businesses.
A pioneer of storytelling on the web, he co-created and directed Hypnosis (1998), the first interactive film released on the Internet, and directed the first animated series to write the viewer’s own avatar into its story (Bruneau, season 3, 2008).
AI-Integrated Production Pipeline (since 2024)
Over the past two years, Ali has fully migrated 3TOON to an AI-integrated production pipeline, combining best-in-class generative tools with traditional craftsmanship. The studio now handles the full production cycle in-house — script, storyboard, character and environment design, animation, voice, music, mix and finishing — with delivery timelines that were unthinkable five years ago:
- Image & character design: Midjourney, Nano Banana, ChatGPT Images, Grok Imagine, Krea
- Motion & cinematic generation: Runway, Seedance 2.5, MiniMax H3, Kling, PixVerse, Wan
- Voice & multilingual dialogue: ElevenLabs
- Original music & sound design: Suno, Udio, Mureka, YuE2
- Finishing & post-production: After Effects, Premiere Pro, Vegas Pro, DaVinci Resolve
Selected Recent Works (2025 – 2026)
01 · Pitch Trailer
Cleopatra — The Hidden
Cinematic AI-generated pitch trailer for an upcoming prestige mini-series centred on Cleopatra and Julius Caesar — also serving as the flagship piece of Ali’s new Fiverr Pro gig in cinematic AI Videography.
02 · Music Video
Fiesta, fiesta — Laurent Wolf
AI-directed music video for Fiesta, fiesta by Laurent Wolf — French DJ and producer, internationally known for his hit No Stress.
The viewer joins the cast: Bruneau, season 3 (2008)
Director · The first animated series to write the viewer’s avatar into the story
The season 3 visual: “The first web series where the viewer is invited to play… among the characters! Including me, Yannick Noah!”
From 2005 to 2009, the office-supplies company JM Bruneau ran one of the most ambitious experiments in branded animation in France: three seasons, 27 episodes, dedicated websites, games and e-cards, all produced by 3TOON. For the third season, 1 minute de pause (2008), Ali took personalisation one step further than the animated e-cards of the time: viewers created their own cartoon avatar on the series’ website, and that avatar was written into the episodes, playing alongside the regular characters.
Fourteen episodes plus a trailer, a message for the environment that earned the series the support of the WWF, and a guest star: the tennis champion and singer Yannick Noah, in his very first acting role. Until the end of the Flash plugin, the whole series could be experienced with one’s own avatar on stage. The episodes are still online on the season’s page.
Les Webproducteurs (2000 – 2002)
Founding Member & Board Member · Paris
Ali Bali (left) and Chérif Mellouki (nocopy) representing the association at the Francia 2001 exhibition, World Trade Center, Mexico City — May 2001. Photo: francia.org.mx
In the autumn of 2000, during MIPCOM in Cannes, Ali took part in founding Les Webproducteurs, a trade association bringing together most of the French studios producing animated and interactive content for the web — 28 companies at launch, more than fifty a year later, from small independent studios to established animation houses such as Xilam, Millimages and Alphanim.
For two years he served on its board, representing the profession with public bodies such as the CNC (France’s national film and moving image agency), and organising events, conferences and screenings to give a very young industry a voice among broadcasters, advertisers and institutions: members’ evenings in Paris, a stand at the first iContenus trade show, an Advertainment conference, a showcase at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles — and a mission to Mexico City, where Ali represented the association at the Francia 2001 exhibition.
The association wound down after the dot-com crash, which took a large share of its members with it. Its history, member list and a few press cuttings are preserved on an archived page of this site (in French).
3TOON Studio (since 1999)
In 1999, Ali co-founded 3TOON with Violaine Meunier.
Drawing on his years inside advertising agencies, he set out to serve the studio’s clients with the same care he had seen given to top-tier productions. The combination of artistic mastery and a sharp understanding of communication objectives allowed 3TOON to attract major accounts usually out of reach for a small structure — including EDF, La Poste, Air France and Sanofi-Aventis.
The habit of dialogue with the communication and marketing leaders of these large organisations — and close attention to their actual needs — is perhaps the most valuable skill Ali has developed over his years at the helm of 3TOON.
Ali Bali adding his own touch to the choreography of the « Office Stars » greeting card, produced for Bruneau.
My Interactive TV (1997 – 1998)
Co-creator, co-writer and director · The first interactive film online
The “braided” structure of Hypnose: three crossroads, three choices at each, and paths that meet again. Ten sequences, three endings.
In 1997, Ali and Violaine Meunier designed My Interactive TV, a format of interactive fiction for two media that were just arriving, digital television and the DVD. The idea was simple to state and hard to write: at three crossroads in the story, the viewer chooses one of three options, and the paths meet again at the next crossroads, a “braid” rather than a tree. To prove it could be done, they wrote and produced a pilot, Hypnose, which Ali directed.
The film was demonstrated to the two French satellite bouquets in December 1997, on synchronised video recorders, since DVD players did not yet exist. On 28 December 1998, it went online instead, streamed with the very first generation of video codecs: Hypnose is recognised as the first interactive film released on the Internet. It was screened at the Centre Pompidou and in several festivals, covered by Le Monde, and has since been cited as the pioneer of the genre in several academic studies, from France to Brazil. Almost thirty years on, it is still playable, in French and in English, at my-interactive.tv.
“ A true interactive fiction film, in three questions and ten sequences. ”
Yves Eudes, Le Monde
The poster of Hypnosis (1998), produced by Violaine Meunier and directed by Ali Bali, with an original score by Yannick Paget.
Early Career (1984 – 1999)
Before founding 3TOON, Ali spent about fifteen years working in Paris advertising agencies in a variety of roles — layout artist, rough artist, and then studio supervisor — and as an assistant director on television commercials. He also worked as a proofreader in publishing. Most of his hands-on craft was built on set, through direct experience. In parallel, he wrote and directed several short films.
“ I was 19 and I had the good fortune to start out in commercial filmmaking at a time when nothing was too lavish to make the best possible film.
I still remember the first shoot I ever worked on, at the Boulogne studios in Paris. I was an assistant on a 20-second commercial for a Christmas chocolate brand. Two full days of shooting had been scheduled inside a vast studio, where a building façade had been reconstructed, along with the heroine’s bedroom — the room where she would discover her safe broken into by Arsène Lupin.
I worked alongside Claude Chabrol, who directed the film, and Henri Alekan, whose cinematography on Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast — and later on Wenders’ Wings of Desire — I had admired for so long.
During lunch breaks, I would sneak into the neighbouring stage where Luc Besson was shooting Subway with Christophe Lambert and Isabelle Adjani.
Then, in post-production, I met composer Philippe Sarde, whose score for Polanski’s Tess I had been a long-time fan of…
In short, back then, a brand wouldn’t spare any expense for a commercial. It could bring in a top-tier film crew for two fifteen-hour days in a major Paris studio — all for twenty seconds of finished film.
For me, it was the dream training. ”
Ali Bali
Training
Ali studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré in Paris, specialising in graphic arts. The school’s academic curriculum gave him a broad artistic foundation — art history, anatomy, sculpture, painting, geometry, sequential art and animation fundamentals.
Two drawings from the Duperré years
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alibali
