French supermarket's Christmas advert is worldwide hit (without AI) [video]
youtube.com499 points by georgesbgt 4 months ago
499 points by georgesbgt 4 months ago
OP is the original upload, but the agency reposted it with English subs after it got popular outside of France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLERt5ZkpQ4
You can tell it's great visual storytelling because you don't even need to know the words.
I guess the McDonald's ad didn't need words either, but it was just depressing and awful.
It’s probably a mistake to read too much into it but I can’t help but notice the McDonald’s ad is kind of a mirror held up to all the things that American culture has been progressing into: cynical, mean, isolated, artificial... whatever the opposite of “wholesome” is. Totally off-key for what Christmas is supposed to stand for. Christmas (at least the secular holiday) is supposed to be about kindness, putting differences aside, enjoying people and family, and the commercial was pretty much the opposite of that.
Here in the UK, Tesco is running a pretty similar campaign to the McDonald's one (without the AI): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=711Cq8_E0oI
I think Brits tend to be more cynical than Americans, though, so it kinda tracks.
That ad is brutal. I feel sorry for people who experience Christmas like this.
That montage version is actually quite uplifting compared to the longer version of each individual segment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMUWrBKHoKc
I mean, that's just depressing to watch :(
I'd like to know what Monopoly knock-off is partly in the shot here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebA8X4HChJM
PSA: if you have family meltdowns playing Monopoly, try following the rules and allowing auctions of un-bought property. At least the game may eventually end then. Or just don't play games intended to be teachable "well isn't this shit" moments.
Misery loves company. Some people just want other people to be as unhappy as they are.
Seemed pretty realistic to me!
One exception: with the stamp cost rise, I think this might be the year even the staunchest card senders may be reconsidering!
I remember my mum sending out 20 or 30 cards all with first class stamps. I don't see many millennials and down doing it. "Not in this economy"!
It was generated by McDonald’s Netherlands who said the ad was about Christmas mishaps in the Netherlands.
There is no agreed on meaning of secular Christmas. It might converge on one some day, but secular culture is literally dying so it has only about 100 years to come up with one.
Merry Christmas!
> secular culture is literally dying
Can you elaborate on this? It doesn't match my experience at all.
> It’s probably a mistake to read too much into it
I disagree; art both reflects and influences culture. If we don't discuss and explore the subtext of things, we're impacted without understanding, and that's never a good position to be in.
I don't think a commercial for a fast food joint can reflect an entire nation let alone the other 174 it has restaurants in.
What was the McDonald's ad? Could you drop a link, perhaps?
Here's a guardian link that tells the story and includes the ad: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/11/mcdonalds-r...
> “However, we notice – based on the social comments and international media coverage – that for many guests this period is ‘the most wonderful time of the year’.”
How to make your corporate response sound even more AI than the actual AI...
> "And here’s the part people don’t see: the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time.”
If it didn't even save time, then what was the point?
Thank you! Goodness, that ad made me want to barf
Both because of the content, and because of the odd perspective shifts in the AI-generated footage. It made me feel like I was drunk.
That ad looks like a concatenation of Tiktok shorts.
That's what happens when you just concatenate the output of an AI trained in Tiktok shorts …
(Which is a shame, as IA video generation can do much better if the author cares a bit about what they're doing).
Looking at it I see familiar elements, which are used by an artist going by the name Gossip Goblin to draw apocalyptic visions of a humanity far in the future that, for the N-th time, almost wiped itself out via increasingly invasive body modifications.
I liked the McDonald's ad quite a bit because it encapsulated how I feel about this time of year - although I've never in my life eaten in a McDonald's and don't intend to start.
I thought the McD add was hilarious - I would have preferred it not be AI.
The ad felt like a family guy skit. And animated about as well as modern FG animation.
I guess that will speak to if you will find the ad funny or just depressing. I don't think the Ai helped either way.
Yes, it was brilliant! As for AI, who cares? It's a commercial. Laugh, and move on.
I thought the McDonalds one was good and what does it matter it was AI ; mcdonalds makes artificial food and everything about the place is artificial so why not artificial ads?
I'm pro-AI but I thought the Coca-Cola and McDonald's ads were shit. The Coke one was especially egregious because if the creators hadn't been lazy they could have made it look half-decent. Instead it's janky and inconsistent and ugly.
The worst part about the Coke ad is the fake "making of" video they released to show how much manual work went into their ads. The "pencil sketches" ostensibly made by humans in the making of were also AI-generated.
>artificial food
As if people are not "cooking" the exact same food bought from these supermarkets.
I don't usually make salads with 750 calories and an entire day's worth of sodium when I cook.
You probably do, but you don't count the calories, and instead of everything being in the salad, you have a few ingredients outside (bread, nuts, cheese, whatever).
Salads being a healthy, low-calorie thing is an idiocy; it's only possible if you don't use any dressing, and at this point you are only eating crunchy water. Otherwise, the oil in the dressing is over 800 kcal per 100g. Most people will put the equivalent of 50-70g of bread just as dressing in their salad. It's mostly fat and not filing.
In other words, it's extremely dumb to think salads are healthy; only fat women believe that shit and this is exactly why they end up like this.
First Americans invented how to ruin salads with dressings, now they are complaining that dressings make salads less healthy. Whew, how ironic.
I'm not American; I'm French. We invented the vinaigrette, and I have worked at quite premium restaurants. You are just clueless, and it's not even worth explaining.
Salad is a stupid meal for rich people to feel superior. It's wasteful and plain stupid. And if you are actually a worker (or someone who needs to be physical), you are ingesting the wrong type of calories. But that's the whole point. It's not sustainable for a worker; thus it is a class signifier.
Buddy, 100g of olive oil is like 7 tablespoons. Not even Americans put that much on one salad.
I have premium French dressing in my fridge. It's 483 kcal/100g. The recommended serving size is 2 tablespoons, but most people actually put in at least 3. That's about 20-30 g of vinaigrette. In other words, it's about 150 kcal just for the vinaigrette, or about 50g of bread.
You are an idiot, I'm not your buddy, go fuck yourself.
Very cute story. It's a shame my cynic brain is telling me "but wolves can't survive off of berries and nuts". Also, I guess fish are fair game in the forest hierarchy. Should have user an omnivore.
Wolves (and all dogs) could be vegetarians as they aren't obligate omnivores - and in certain conditions where pray is sparse they do eat berries to surviven. Cats on the other hand are obligate carnivores and can't produce taurine amino acids, so they have to eat meat to survive.
We can chemically synthesize taurine just fine.
Are you a wolf (or a dog)?
I think the implications is that cats could eat veggies laced with synthetic taurine...?
I thought the implication is that people should feed themselves to cats?
Consent removes a bunch of ethical issues.
What's eating you, Earthman: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5HLy27bK-wU
I don't think it's only from a cynic point of view - the question "if meat is murder, am I a bad person if I literally can't survive without it?" is a fair and interesting one.
Of course that's not the point of the ad and I don't blame them for not making it a philosophical discussion, but it's the same approach that Madagascar uses (spoiler for a 20yo movie) to resolve their main conflict and both feel like cheating - if the penguins can think, I always thought, then so should the fishes.
> I don't think it's only from a cynic point of view - the question "if meat is murder, am I a bad person if I literally can't survive without it?" is a fair and interesting one.
I think the argument is “meat is murder because you can survive without it”. Maybe that doesn’t work for the wolf, but I mean, it’s literally a story being made up for a child, and animals in those are allegories for humans.
I can choose to not eat meat and live healthily, but I’m not going to feed only vegetables to a pet cat, who needs something different. To each what they need, as ethically as possible. When you can minimise harm, do.
> not eat meat and live healthily
Extremely debatable and seems very dependent on your personal genetics/ethnicity. Just because you don't drop dead doesn't mean it's ideal; people can live underground too…
You can survive without a lot of things. Some people survived eating dead bodies on a mountain in the Andes. When people reference life quality they generally don't talk in terms of "survival."
Cats doesn't need more beef kibbles than vegan kebbles! It's a common fallacy but cats do thrive with vegetables if selected and cooked right! Sure they're meat eater in the wild but if we accept modern (ultra processed) meat keebles as suitable for a cat, the vegan options definitely also check the healthy and nutricious points.
Now we can debate if it's "natural" but that would open the horizon to other aspects of cat's modern live.
no, they can't. please stop spreading this misinformation.
What parts of my message you think is misinformation? Beside multiple anecdotal evidence, heres a paper on the subject:
> No differences in reported lifespan were detected between diet types. Fewer cats fed plant-based diets reported to have gastrointestinal and hepatic disorders. Cats fed plant-based diets were reported to have more ideal body condition scores than cats fed a meat-based diet.
> Cat owner perception of the health and wellness of cats does not appear to be adversely affected by being fed a plant-based diet. Contrary to expectations, owners perceived no body system or disorder to be at particular risk when feeding a plant-based diet to cats.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
That's interesting but it's questionaire based so I would not trust it much. There are many levels of bias here.
It's obviously vegan propaganda, but of course it corresponds perfectly to the type of people working those fields.
It's absurd to make kids believe a wolf can stop eating animals and become nice and friendly.
Stop reading into things what isn't there. The wolf is still eating fish, did you even watch it?
He is eating fish because Intermarché has a fishing business. Yes, I watched it, and I'm not reading into things. This is just the popular ideology at the moment. For now, fish is ok, but for how long?
I like the ad (it's really cute) and I'm a big fan of the old Claude Francois song used (Le Mal aimé) but...
There's nothing cynic about it: he who spares the wolf sacrifices the sheep. My kid loves plushies: but when she's playing with a white tiger I'm reminding her that in real-life the tiger would shred her to tear and eat her without any afterthought.
Plushies of dangerous animals, just like that ad, are a way to cope with the brutality of nature, not a way to make nature not brutal.
May be this one inspired the video :)
https://www.nbcnews.com/video/video-shows-wolf-appearing-to-...
> Also, I guess fish are fair game in the forest hierarchy
Fish don't appear to have the ability to speak or engage in social relationship with other animals in the story, so it makes sense to eat them. Like vegan find it OK eating mushrooms even though they are closer to us than they are to plants.
> Like vegan find it OK eating mushrooms even though they are closer to us than they are to plants.
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungus. Complaining about eating those is akin to complaining about eating apples; you’re not harming the tree.
So, although it's difficult to generalize because exactly where the line is drawn varies from one vegan to another, it's generally not enough that the animal wasn't directly harmed.
For example the honey bees make honey for a reason, just as apple trees make apples for a reason and maple trees make a sugary sap for a reason. "So that humans can eat it" isn't the reason in either case. The apples and maple syrup are categorised differently by vegans because the trees aren't animals. That's still an arbitrary line, but so are most things.
> bees make honey for a reason
For themselves. To eat. So it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey, which is the result of their labour.
But surely there’s nuance there. I don’t doubt there are ethical growers who provide bees with an extra nice and controlled environment, plus care for them and help them fight pests, and thus feel like taking a share of the produced honey is a fair trade. The bees might agree.
> "So that humans can eat it" isn't the reason in either case.
But it is. In the case of many fruits, the goal is for an animal (humans included) to eat them, seeds and all, then poop them out (bonus fertiliser) somewhere else.
> That's still an arbitrary line, but so are most things.
No disagreement there, but I don’t see how any of that is relevant to my comment. I was correcting a misconception about mushrooms, not debating the nuances of vegan opinions. I don’t care for the label and don’t think it’s helpful to fight about what it means. It’s much more important to strive to be progressively better than to aim for perfection and fail.
Essentially all modern honey farming is what you're calling "ethical". It's too expensive to replace the colony each year now that we have an alternative, and a winter - even a relatively mild winter in most parts of the world - will kill the bees if you've stolen all their food.
Unlike the maple tree, we do know how to substitute the valuable honey for nutritionally similar but cheaper alternatives - you can buy suitable food commercially because this is a whole industry, nevertheless, vegans object to our intervention, the bees didn't make nutritionally equivalent bee food, they made honey. Even farmers who choose to calibrate and remove only some honey, judging what will be enough for their colony to survive, are considered not to meet vegan requirements for the same reason.
To the extent there's a shared definition it really is as simple as originally explained, animal: not OK, non-animal: fine.
One of my professors (who is now vegan) had an ethical rule prohibiting eating things which, like him, had backbones. Same idea, it's more similar to me, therefore don't eat it. All such lines in the sand are somewhat arbitrary.
> vegans object to our intervention
Many might, but many don’t. This is a prime example of why fighting over the label is counterproductive. You’re putting a bunch of different people in the same sack and criticising them for something which the group is not consensual on.
Again, I have no desire to nitpick over what makes one a vegan or not. That’s a waste of everyone’s time and only generates unnecessary conflict. It is not only detrimental but unbearably boring.
> For themselves. To eat. So it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey, which is the result of their labour.
On the other hand the bee social structure (not sure what the right word to use here) is so brutal that taking their honey seems to be just keeping pace. :)
> it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey
Do you think no physical arm is done to an Apple tree for it to give fruits? You should read about fruit tree pruning then…
> But it is. In the case of many fruits, the goal is for an animal (humans included) to eat them, seeds and all, then poop them out (bonus fertiliser) somewhere else.
Which we don't. So we're doing exactly the same thing to tree as we are doing to cow: abusing a natural process that's designed to help their babies.
> I was correcting a misconception about mushrooms, not debating the nuances of vegan opinions.
There's no misconception about mushrooms.
> It’s much more important to strive to be progressively better than to aim for perfection and fail.
The problem is that there isn't an objective definition of “better”. As heterotrophs we can only survive by destroying other living thing. This is a curse we must live with.
Which living thing is fair game is fundamentally an arbitrary position driven by our subjective moral values. You have to draw a line, but there's no valid reason to say that the line must be drawn at the Animalia border rather than at the Tetrapod (which means fish are OK to eat). Most of the arguments that apply to the whole order of animals also apply to most multicellular beings anyway (including the existence of a pain-like mechanism).
You are free to have stronger emotional bonds with a fish or a bee than with a mushroom or a plant, but it's in no way more rational or objectively better than when most people refuse to eat dogs and horses but are fine with cows.
Well the reason apple trees make apples is actually that someone can eat them, and then ideally poop out the seeds so that a new tree can grow. But that is literally their purpose.
> Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungus. Complaining about eating those is akin to complaining about eating apples; you’re not harming the tree.
Why are eggs a problem for vegans then? They are quite literally the “fruit body” of birds. Milk and honey should be even less problematic, as it's not even made of parts of cow or bees.
Each have his own reason, but I refer you to the definition of veganism by the Vegan Society (whose founder "invented" the world vegan):
> [...] exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, [..]
While ecology and health are cited by some vegans, many (if not most) of them are interested in avoiding unnecessary cruelty. That's why there's a discussion where some people define themselves as vegan but do eat musles and other "nerveless" animals they don't considered sentient. On the other hand bees, cows and chicken are sentient and most of they don't have a lot of fun at the farm.
[1] https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
Intermarche have done some other great Christmas ads on a simialr theme of eating better. Their 2019 ad had a kid realizing that Santa was too rotund to fit down their chimney, so the kid spent the season visiting him at the store and handing him lettuce, homemade vegetable preserves etc. https://youtu.be/DeSG2-FuQhE?si=YvCMY4fR-7K5R8Ke
Is this newsworthy entirely because it was made without AI? It seems like a perfectly fine ad. I just don't understand why this is significant. If people just like this ad enough to vote for it, fine. But I feel like I'm missing something.
McDonalds were recently criticised for an AI-generated Christmas advert:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/11/mcdonalds-r...
It seems like an excellent advert because it got everybody talking about McDonalds. Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title. The people who came up with the McDonalds ad were wildly successful in what they set out to do; they even have all the people who hate AI talking about their new ad, even when attempting to showcase somebody else’s ad.
> Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title.
The name of the supermarket is mentioned in the title when the audience is likely to know it, e.g. on French websites. I don’t blame any American who does not know Intermarché, as they are very unlikely to come across one. I am not going to link them because that’s a bit pointless and the URLs are terrible, but a quick googling of "publicité Intermarché" should give plenty of examples.
We have come a long way down from ads like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VM2eLhvsSM
It isn’t named in the title because it doesn’t have the same brand recognition as mcdonalds.
I think it's debatable whether the principle that "any press is good press" is actually true. Especially for a brand that is already a household name. People will talk about you, yes. But is it a good thing that they're gonna be talking, and reinforcing the association in the minds of your customers, that you're putting out lazy, soulless slop? Of course, that's de facto what McDonald's is, but it's not like they don't benefit from at the very least an illusion that this isn't the case.
We're at that point, where we are literally celebrating something made by humans, not machines. Wild timeline. It will get rarer and rarer as AI becomes quicker, easier, higher-quality and cheaper than it is today.
(Also I think the ad is really nice)
I disagree, people are just happy to see coca cola fail, which's fair enough.
The ad company that made this supermarket's piece capitalised on that, and now we have ... an ad on the front page, with people commenting on its storytelling.
Celebrating an advertisement video is absolutely bizarre.
The AI ad required orders of magnitude more humans to make. Those that know, know.
I don't know about the AI thing or newsworthiness. The reason I upvoted the submission is this (not my comment, but someone else put it into words better than I could think of): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231908
> Very cute, and full of humorous touches. Worth sharing, for a change (when compared to the vast majority of ads).
It's not strictly within HN's scope of "what hackers find interesting" though. This'll have to be December's exception upvote
It's remarkable that an animated video of this high quality for a French tv commercial is immediately disregarded. Animation has come so far!
I remember a time when using computer was not well seen when creating art.
Wasn't it even Tron who didn't qualify for the special effects oscar because they "used computers"?
It's interesting that it's no longer "computer bad", now it's "AI bad".
I lived through the end of the beginning of computer becoming a primary tool for art, both in building DeviantART and also I was in the second cohort of the first ever digital imaging and technology program in Canada. It was super interesting, during college was the release of the Canon 300D, things moved really quickly after, my graduating year the pro film makers associations introduced a ban on digital work within the associations "club activities" (that lasted about 16 months) - it was funny tho you would see people judging professional salons (contests) zooming in to 30000% looking for signs of digital editing - I was ~20 and it was all very amusing to me, like why did all these old people hate digital art do much? We persisted, bunch of us graduated and started a studio, one day Canon called us, I was one of the first people in the world to use a Canon 5D Mk2 months before it was released, my ads ended up on TV, we won three technical emmy awards, made lots of money, had a great time etc. All the people I know who rode the wave had fantastic careers and worked on interesting stuff, made money etc.(and btw, the last ones standing after all was said and done in the "fuck digital camp"? curmudgeons!)
fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists, I am a business/technology person who happens to be decent at story telling and naturally not awful at picture making - I would have gotten crushed by what the technologies enabled as the abstractions and programatic features opened up film making to people who didn't want to or couldn't naturally grasp the physics/controls. I'm grateful past me was able to think about this clearly because it lead me to meeting Ben and Moisey and joining them to go on and build DigitalOcean, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
>fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists
I'm not sure if that bet really paid off. I feel like the number or both "skilled artist" and "skilled storyteller" didn't really move. It just feels higher because the barrier to entry and validation is "how well can I market myself on social media?" Not "can I get into/create my own studio?" or any other metric a craftsman would use. I don't necessarily callel this a bad thing, and I'd even argue that it only magnified existing issues instead of creating new new ones. but it has obvious down sides.
Deviant art played a part in that, so kudos. Or perhaps, you've doomed us all? Hard to say, I always had a strange relationship with DeviantArt.
I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated content is or not.
Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling.
In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?
Part of watching films and animations was that seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself. When all they did was enter a prompt that takes some of the magic away.
If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.
I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models)
Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved.
[EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality.
Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap.
Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.)
But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all.
The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good.
And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative.
Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real)
Fury Road is pure wall to wall CGI. People keep pointing to it as some example of doing things with live action when the entire movie is soaked with CG and compositing.
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/a-graphic-tale-the-visual...
It's a lot of CGI, but done in realistic ways. A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
There's a good chunk of modern blockbusters that will CGI everything in a scene except the lead actor's face - and sometimes that too.
> paint-outs
Predates computers, they used to paint out wires and whatnot by hand and it usually looked just as good.
> Compositing
Predates computers. They've been doing it since forever with miniature overlays, matte paintings, chromakey, double exposures, and cutting up film negatives with exacto blades.
> color grading
Literal cancer which ruins movies every goddamn time. The fact that they shoot movies with this kind of manipulation in mind changes how they use lighting and makes everything flat with no shadows, no depth, everything now gets shot like a soap opera. This also applies to heavy use of compositing too. To make it cheaper to abuse compositing, mostly so the producers can "design by committee" the movie after all the filming is done, they've destroyed how they light and shoot scenes. Everything is close up on actors, blurred backgrounds, flat lighting, fast cuts to hide the lazy work. Cancer.
I'm talking about Fury Road too BTW. It's crap. Watch the original Mad Max, not Road Warrior, then watch Fury Road. The first is a real movie with heart and soul, the world it depicts feels real. The latter feels like a video game, except it somehow comes out looking even less inspired and creative than the actual mad max video game that came out at the same time.
But yeah, they made some real weird cars for the movie. That's fine I guess. The first movie didn't need weird cars, it had this thing called characters. Characters who felt like real people, not freaks from a comic book.
Exactly - they've been doing paint outs and composite shots forever! It doesn't feel fundamentally different to do it "on a computer," to me. They aren't using it to show off, just to make the scene look how you'd expect it to.
They've also been doing color grading forever - digital just makes it way cheaper and easier. Before, you'd have to do photochemical tricks to the film, and you would use different film for different vibes.
I'd argue that the ease of digital manipulation has led some studios to do what you say - postpone creativity until after the movie is mostly shot, which leads to that design-by-committee feeling. That sense of 'don't worry, we'll fix the lighting it the editing room' is the same sloppiness as 'and then the big gorilla will use his magic attack and it will look really cool,' without any thought given to it's actually going to look like. But that's not really a failure of CGI itself - that's a failure of vision, right? If you procrastinate making artistic decisioms for long enough, there's not actually going to be any art in the movie once it's done.
I have watched the original Mad Max, and it was pretty alright. If I had watched it at the right age, I probably would have imprinted on it.