6.5-minute animated short in hedgehog-in-the-fog style

I asked Claude Opus 5.5 to make an animated short that felt like Hedgehog in the Fog. I didn’t want to copy Yuri Norstein’s film, so we went with a new story. I'll show this to my daughter. It runs for 6.5 minutes. All 9363 frames are drawn by JavaScript code written by Opus. No video or image generation models, just canvas. It follows a little mouse in a red scarf. Her grandfather, an old mole, is out fishing when fog rolls over the lake. She goes looking for him with a walnut-shell lantern and a sleeping firefly inside. They have a secret knock to help them find each other: short, short, long. It means "I’m here". Norstein used paper cutouts on layers of glass, filmed frame by frame. I wanted some of that paper texture to come through in code. So the scenes use different styles: torn-paper collage, chalk on black paper, tissue paper underwater. There’s even sand on a light table and a pop-up book. Opus wrote the music too. It found Steinway piano samples in my Logic library and used Python to compose the score around the rhythm of that knock. The first version looked bad. Stiff movement, a raster pattern that hurt my eyes. I said so, and Opus reworked almost everything. The video is the result of those revisions. Watch with sound 🔊

— Alexey Fateev (@superalesha) Sep 24, 2026