Hello back again with another update since I have encountered people either denying the legitimacy of the leaks or stating that "those are just explorations, not necessarily the final designs."
Anyway both are wrong. Lemme explain:
Regarding the legitimacy, I have a friend in the animation industry who confirmed not only that the leaks were legit, but also that it happened to other studios and projects.
Basically a lot of animation studios use an online storage service that went through a leak issue and a lot of projects and studio work got in the hands of people who sold them on telegram groups for a price.
The Winx Leaks, for what someone else told me, not only got that basic treatment of being auctioned like the rest, but also people with ill intent decided to pick "the worst" concepts of the show and spread them in an attempt to create bad advertisement of the show ( the same person told me the leakers were MLB fans because apparently there's beef between the Winx and MLB fandom since Thomas Asstruck twitted some shitty comments about Winx) .
Anyway, my friend in the industry confirmed that they saw the Winx leaks alongside other companies' works and that they were legitimate. Being directly affected, people in the industry were the first ones to find out about the leaks.
What about the designs shown being explorations?
Well, the Rainbow teaser lowkey debunked that by showcasing some models that resemble a lot the leaked concepts.
AI usage has been especially obvious with secondary and background characters. They are v small and the camera movement and blur effect makes it kinda hard to see, but there are 2 of the background witches leaked. The color schemes and silhouettes seems to be the same.
Again it's hard to see because of the fast movement, but you can see the specialists' outfits seem to match the ones in the AI generated concepts. Riven even has the ugly sideways hairstyle.
With Faragonda's design, the giveaway for me in the concept were her shoes, but they didn't show in the trailer. She has like 2 scenes of half a second. I managed to take this ss where you can see her hairstyle and clothes are the same as in the concept. I have no issue with the clothing since I'm sure that's someone's overpaint, tho. The rest I'm not so sure...