Nine Lives to Ruin a Kingdom — Intro Animation

A — INSPIRATION

Berserk set this off — resisting a fate already decided. That led to The War of Deification: the fallen are enrolled as gods, from a list written before the war began.

It opens with a proud king insulting the goddess of creation. His kingdom falls.

Storyboards for the rhythm, a script for the tone — no visual style yet, no technical direction, just looking for a way to tell it. A dynasty falls because of two lines the king writes on the goddess’s wall:

Within the golden chambers shines a beauty rare,
If she were mine, what joy beyond compare.

B — 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.

C — 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.

_{Flames turning into a fox, hand-drawn frame by frame — then Midjourney → Photoshop → After Effects.}

D — FILM STILLS

The opening holds still — stable composition, symbolic figures. After the king’s poem it goes abstract: Nüwa’s anger as flat geometry, cosmic order coming apart. The last thirty seconds turn realistic, with pseudo-3D depth built in After Effects.

The final explosion takes the shape of a fox.

E — THE FILM