Star Catcher: an old fishing mech saves a fallen sky-beast

Create a 2D anime short. It must look completely like real Japanese anime, as if it were taken directly from a finished theatrical anime film. This is traditional-looking, hand-drawn 2D anime, not a 3D animation, a moving illustration, or a stylized web graphic.

Build everything in Blender from Python, render it in Eevee, then ink and paint every frame in a second pass. Deliver one 1920x1080, 24 fps MP4 with a synthesized soundtrack. Use any tools, libraries, references, guides, literally anything, as long as the final result looks 100% like hand-drawn 2D anime.

Use theatrical anime as the art style reference for the design, line work, painted backgrounds, color and atmosphere. The film is 90 seconds long, in 44 shots. Its characters are an old fishing mech, a baby sky-beast and its mother. No people appear in the film.

HERO
Setevik, an old 60 m fishing mech: sea-green paint with chips and rust, a diving-helmet head with brass portholes and two eye lamps, a barred cage on the chest holding the lantern that is its heart, a winch on its back wound with glowing rope, big four-finger hands. It moves on twos, slow and heavy.

WORLD
An archipelago of stone pillars in a shallow turquoise sea at night, real scale in metres: houses on ledges, rope bridges strung with hundreds of paper lanterns, wind chimes, piers and moored boats, a sea cave, and the tallest signal pillar with a brazier on top.

BEASTS
A baby sky-beast, an 8 m manta of star plasma with huge anime eyes, and its mother, 1600 m wide, a night-indigo back of stars and a belly map of constellations.

STORY
Sunset: lanterns ignite in a chain. In a sea cave the mech wakes, its chest lantern lights, it wades out and casts its net of light. A starfall; one odd star wobbles and falls into the sea, and the ring wave rocks the boats. The mech nets the sinking star: the baby. It cries, the chimes answer, the mech holds it in its palms. The stars go out: the mother comes down. Her cry blows out every lantern, her wingbeat throws the sea at the village, her eyes fire beams. The mech shields the baby, runs, climbs the signal pillar, slips, hauls itself up. On top the baby is too weak to fly. The mech opens its chest cage and gives it its heart. The baby flares and rises to its mother; the mech goes dark and kneels. The stars come back, the lanterns relight at dawn, and a star drops into the empty cage.

LIGHT
Anime night, never gloomy: a cobalt sky, a huge cream moon, warm orange lanterns, turquoise plankton. When the mother comes the moon is eclipsed and the light comes from her constellations, the beams, the baby and the chest lantern. Light only changes with a cause you can see. Cel light with hard lavender-blue shadows, gouache skies, ink on the cels, effects drawn on twos: water as inked sheets, never particle mush.

SOUND
A small synthesized orchestra in F major and D minor at 72 BPM: strings, harp, celesta, a music box, a choir, horns and taiko. Three themes: the lantern motif, one rising harp note per lantern that lights; the baby's lullaby on a music box; the main theme on horns. Silence when the hand slips, tutti for the flare, the lantern motif in full at dawn. Every hit lands on the picture.

FORMAT
Write the film as a Python story clock: one state per frame for every pose, camera, effect and sound cue.

CHECKS
Before the final render a script tests every frame on the real meshes: the mech, the net, both beasts, the boats and the camera never go through rock, wood, water or each other, and every subject stays in frame.