Ryu: a mountain wakes as a dragon and carries a shrine

Create a 2D anime short for the web. 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 it in three.js, render every frame in code and synthesize every sound. No video models, no image models, no stock art, no audio samples. Deliver one 1920x1080, 24 fps MP4 and a single self-contained HTML file that plays the film offline. Use any tools, libraries, references, guides, literally anything, as long as the final result looks 100% like hand-drawn 2D anime.

Use bright summer blockbuster anime and classic Japanese fantasy films as the art style reference for the design, line work, painted backgrounds, color and scale. The film is 76 seconds long, in 30 shots, with no dialogue. Its heroes are a tiny shrine keeper called Clawd and a dragon the size of a mountain. No people appear in the film.

HEROES

Clawd: a small terracotta vinyl-toy creature. One wide rounded block is his head and body, with a flat face, two big glossy black eyes, a small mouth, two round side nubs for arms and four short stubby legs. He holds a bamboo broom firmly in one nub. All his acting is in the face and the squash of his body.

The dragon: about 1.5 km long, a serpent made of the island itself. Overlapping rock scales in grey-violet and ochre with strata and moss, a cedar forest growing along its spine like fur and bending with the motion, waterfalls pouring from its jaw like a mane, a moss beard, two antlers of weathered stone wrapped in a thick shimenawa rope with white paper shide, huge amber eyes with slit pupils and four clawed legs with boulders in the claws. Trees, rocks and water fall off it as it moves. Real sculpted volume, never a tube with a texture.

WORLD

A small green island in a bright sea. On its peak a tiny weathered wooden shrine, stone steps, a vermilion torii, a stone lantern and an old bronze bell on a frame with a thick striped rope. The shrine stands on the dragon's brow, between its horns. Terraced rice fields on the mainland, a seaside town with tile roofs, wires, laundry and a calico cat, towering white cumulus with lavender shadow sides, a wall of indigo storm.

STORY

A blazing summer day. On the peak of the island, little Clawd sweeps the stone steps, proud of a neat pile of leaves. One leaf drifts down and lands on the clean step. His eye twitches. He hurries after it, trips on the striped rope of the bell, and the bell swings: DONG. A drawn ring of sound rolls out over the island. Birds burst from the forest. Then the whole forest ripples down the mountain like fur.

A huge amber eye opens in the rock face, trees sliding off the lid. Clawd slowly looks over the edge. The slopes crack, coils pull out of the earth and the head lifts with the shrine between its horns, waterfalls pouring off. From the fields it is a colossal shape against the sun, raining rocks. Clawd dangles from the bell rope, flattened by the wind, the broom still in his nub.

The dragon dives off the island, its body whipping after it. It skims the rice fields, a V of wind flattening the paddies, then screams low over the tile roofs, ripping away laundry and snapping wires, the cat's fur blown flat. Clawd screams on the horn. Out over the sea the tail tears up a wall of spray, and ahead stands the storm. The dragon goes straight in.

Rain, walls of cloud, lightning branching around the coils. A bolt strikes the head and it thrashes, out of control. Clawd crawls along the brow in the rain and scratches behind the eye with his broom. The slit pupil widens and the great eye softens. The dragon bursts up through the storm top into a blinding sea of sunlit cloud, and Clawd stands on the horn with his nubs up and the broom raised, overjoyed.

At dusk it glides home, gold on every scale, coils back into the island and closes its eye. The forest settles. Covered in leaves, Clawd sweeps the steps again. One leaf falls. He sighs, smiles and sweeps it. End card: "Fable 5.5" in brush lettering, a red seal, the title RYŪ 龍.

LIGHT

A bright, high-key summer: deep-blue sky, emerald hills, a cobalt-to-turquoise sea. Drama comes from scale and speed, never from murk. The storm is indigo and violet and still readable, with lightning that ramps over a few frames. The ending is a warm, colorful dusk. Cel shading with two hard tones and a crisp highlight, cool lavender shadows, confident ink lines with pressure variation, gouache painted backgrounds, effects drawn like hand-painted effect cels. Characters on twos, effects on threes, camera on ones.

SOUND

An original score on one theme: a flute melody over a koto ostinato and cicadas in summer. The bell is a deep temple strike that cuts the music and the cicadas dead. Taiko, low brass and a huge rock crack as the dragon rises. A full fanfare at takeoff with the theme on every flight beat, storm drums and thunder, the theme with a choir at the breakout, a dusk flute on the way home, a soft bell on the final note and a solo koto on the end card. The leaf's tiny tick, the trip, wings, forest rustle, waterfalls, wind, spray, rain and a small sigh, all timed to the picture.

IT MUST NOT LOOK LIKE

- 3D: no plastic materials, CGI shading or game-engine lighting.
- Boxes: no tube dragon with a texture, no plain blocks for the shrine or the town.
- Vector art: no flat fills without paint, ink and volume.
- Murk: no muddy storm, no bloom haze over everything, no face lost in the glow.
- Web animation: no floating, sliding, smooth software easing or 60 fps floaty motion.
- Particle mush for rain, spray, rocks or lightning.

CHECKS

Every frame is a pure function of film time. Before the final render, test every frame: nothing passes through anything, including the broom shaft, the bristles, the bell rope, Clawd's nubs and his legs. The broom stays in his nub, the shrine rides between the horns, Clawd stays terracotta in every light and his face stays readable at the brightest moment. Render above final resolution and downsample, so no outline has a jagged or dotted edge.

The result should feel enormous and very small at once: a whole mountain takes flight, and it all ends with one leaf. Before finishing, inspect random frames as still images. If any frame does not look completely like real 2D anime, keep improving it. Do not stop until every frame could pass as a still from a theatrical anime film.