Claude x MetAI ShortAnime: Make a Short Anime in 15 Minutes!
Using MetAI’s ShortAnime and the AI agent Claude, we started a series of 15-second short anime called “Konekone Friends”: five clay animals who solve a small problem together in every episode.
Using ShortAnime, an app we are developing at MetAI, we started making a series of 15-second short anime together with the AI agent Claude.
The series is called “Konekone Friends” (konekone is the sound of kneading clay). Five clay animals solve a small “uh-oh!” together in every episode.
What is ShortAnime?
ShortAnime is an app that turns a written story into a vertical (9:16) short video, ready to post on TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.
- Write what happens in each scene and the narration
- Choose the art style (clay, anime and more), the narrator’s voice and the music
- Press “Generate”
That’s all: video, narration, music and sound effects are created together, in one go. No editing afterwards to sync the audio.
Highlights
- ✅ Runs on your own PC (local generation: your video is never uploaded to an outside service)
- ✅ Character designs stay consistent across cuts
- ✅ Japanese narration (pronunciation can be set with furigana or romaji)
- ✅ A 15-second video is ready in about 15 minutes
What did Claude do?
This time we let Claude, an AI agent, operate ShortAnime from start to finish. All the human did was ask: “Make a 15-second story with five animals: problem → action → solution → ‘See you next time, bye-bye!’”
What Claude did:
| Step | What it did |
|---|---|
| ① Planning | Created five characters with clearly different colours and shapes, and a shared world for the series |
| ② Script | Split the 15 seconds into five scenes and wrote the visual directions (in English) and the narration (hiragana + romaji) |
| ③ Generation | Ran the same job as ShortAnime’s “Generate” button through the API on the PC |
| ④ Checking | Checked a frame every second for the number of characters and glitches, and transcribed the audio to make sure the lines were clear |
| ⑤ Retakes | When something was wrong, fixed the script and generated again |
| ⑥ Series | Saved the characters, world and settings as “Konekone Friends” so new episodes can be made right away |
Along the way it also found that the high-quality mode was not working, tracked down the cause (a missing component) and fixed it.
The characters
| Name | Animal | Personality | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐰 | Mimi | Rabbit | Cheerful and a bit of a crybaby. The main character |
| 🐻 | Pon | Bear | The biggest and strongest. Kind |
| 🐱 | Mikan | Cat | Clever and curious. The one with the ideas |
| 🐷 | Bubu | Pig | Loves food and is funny |
| 🐸 | Kero | Frog | A jumping champion. A little impatient |
Episode 1: “Can we get the balloon?”
The wind blew Mimi’s balloon into a tree!
Everyone builds an “animal tower”… and Kero jumps!
Episode 2: “Can we reach the big apple?”
A big apple on a very high branch. Nobody can reach it…!
Mikan has an idea: they pull the branch down… and Pon catches it! Everyone shares.
Things to keep in mind
As with any tool, don’t expect a perfect result on the first try. There may be mistakes, or some characters or content may appear twice.
That’s why it is important to check the prompt and any settings you change inside the ShortAnime app. And, as always, the work should be reviewed by people who know what they are creating. AI is like any other tool: without a professional behind it, you won’t get quality results.
- The more characters in one scene, the more likely mistakes are.
That is exactly why it matters that an AI agent can handle the generate → check → retake loop.
What’s next
We plan to release new “Konekone Friends” episodes little by little, every day. Follow #こねこねフレンズ on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook!
For questions about ShortAnime, contact MetAI.
See you next time, bye-bye! 👋