What happens when centuries-old folklore meets cutting-edge AI? Higgsfield has an answer. At Siggraph 2026, the AI video platform unveiled Kök Börü, its first 15-minute animated short, using the film to showcase a hybrid production pipeline where artists stay in the driver’s seat and AI handles the heavy lifting.
Set in 15th-century Central Asia, Kök Börü is a historical drama inspired by nomadic culture and folklore, telling a deeply personal story from a region rarely seen on the global animation stage. The project combines generative AI with hand-drawn digital animation, giving a small creative team the tools to deliver a cinematic production without a blockbuster budget.
The story follows Ana, a young nomadic mother who loses her daughter to a wolf pack during a blizzard after making an impossible choice to save one of her two children. Years later, she sets out to confront the demon child raised among wolves, only to discover it is the daughter she believed she had lost.
The film takes its name from kök börü, the traditional Central Asian horseback game recognised by Unesco in 2017 as part of the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. While the real sport is played with a goat or sheep carcass, the film places a wolf at the heart of its narrative.
“As artists from Central Asia, this is the kind of story we grew up with but almost never see on screen,” said director Shakhnazar Borboev. “Films like this don’t always get the chance to be made, so being able to bring ours to the screen means everything to us.”
The film was co-directed by Borboev, Amina Ömirjan and Stepan Abramov, with a compact team of just 12 creators, including animators, writers, sound designers and colour artists. Native Kazakh actors provided the voice performances.
Rather than relying entirely on AI, the production adopted a hybrid workflow. Character designs, environments and layouts were initially generated using Higgsfield’s Soul Cartoon, before artists refined them through traditional hand-drawn animation on Wacom tablets. Live-action performances were then captured and transferred to animated characters using Higgsfield Motion Control, allowing them to inherit natural movement and emotion without motion-capture suits or green screens.
The wider production pipeline was powered by Higgsfield Cinema Studio and Supercomputer, the company’s AI orchestration system, running entirely on Nvidia GPUs. According to Higgsfield, the workflow compressed a project that would traditionally require one to two years and $1 million to $2 million into just two weeks.
Higgsfield co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov added, “Showcasing this film and the pipeline behind it will demonstrate what’s already possible today. The goal was never to replace artists, but to give more of them the means to tell stories at this level.”
Higgsfield describes the process as human-conditioned production, with artists defining the visual language, performances and emotional tone before AI scales the work into a finished production.
For Kök Börü, the message is as compelling as the technology behind it: the future of animation may not be human versus AI, but human with AI.
