Nine Lives to Ruin a Kingdom — Intro Animation

A — INSPIRATION

Berserk set this off — the way people resist a fate that has already been decided. I took that to The War of Deification, a Taoist myth where the fallen are enrolled as gods at the end of the Shang dynasty. The irony is that the list was written before the war began.

I never finished the novel. I watched the animation as a child and kept only the feeling of that world. This is its opening: a proud king insults the goddess of creation, and his kingdom falls.

B — EARLY CONCEPT AND STORY DEVELOPMENT

A few storyboard sketches to find the rhythm, and a rough script to fix the tone. I was lost at this point — no visual style, no technical direction, following impulse and trying to find a way to tell it.

C — AI PROTOTYPE ITERATION

A test video in Sora AI, to check whether the story logic and the camera language worked. I was working around what AI video was bad at then — characters that drift, transitions that make no sense, no emotional register. Rough, but it confirmed the structure held.

D — VISUAL STYLE AND TECHNICAL REFINEMENT

The Secret of Kells, Dunhuang murals and Madoka Magica pushed it to 2D flat animation with collage composition — surreal, symbolic, fragmented, which gives the myth somewhere to sit inside a flat space.

Script and scene design were revised to match. Base visuals generated in Midjourney, then repainted and reconstructed in Photoshop and Procreate, animated in After Effects. Some shots — the flames turning into a fox — are hand-drawn frame by frame.

E — FILM STILLS

Every visual decision has to serve the story.

The opening holds still: stable composition, symbolic figures, the setting established. From the king’s blasphemous poem the animation goes abstract — Nüwa’s silent anger as flat geometry, cosmic order coming apart.

The last thirty seconds return to something realistic, moving from the palace interior out to the city. A pseudo-3D depth built in After Effects gives the flat animation space and tension. The final explosion takes the shape of a fox — the protagonist of the game.

F — FINAL PRODUCTION AND REFLECTION

Three months, one minute twenty. This moved me from a graphic-design head to an animation director’s — storytelling, timing and visual rhythm as things you organise rather than feel your way through.

What went wrong: project management, rough transitions, thin sound design. What I got: how to hold visual consistency, technical execution and narrative rhythm at once, and where the control sits between inspiration and production.