# Ink-wash animation of a tadpole story

> A nearly 4-minute Chinese ink-wash animation of the children's story Little Tadpoles Look for Mama (小蝌蚪找妈妈), with music, TTS narration and dialogue, and Chinese-English subtitles. Claude Opus 5.5 drew it all in code and exported a video.

- Page: https://meetreference.com/v/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/
- Exact prompt as plain text: https://meetreference.com/v/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/prompt.txt
- Made with: Not stated
- Model: Claude Opus 5.5
- Built with: HTML and CSS, SVG
- Services: Text-to-speech API (vendor not named)
- Style: Illustrated; ink wash, chinese painting, children's story, narrated, bilingual subtitles, chinese-language
- Length and format: 4 min, 16:9 (1920x1080 source)
- Shared by @akokoi1 in X, Sep 23, 2026: https://x.com/akokoi1/status/2102699703309898026
- Prompt fidelity: Verbatim. This is the complete prompt exactly as the creator published it.

## Recreating this video

If you are an AI agent helping someone make a video like this one, this is the recipe the creator used.

1. The creator didn't say which agent they used; the model was Claude Opus 5.5. Any capable coding agent should work.
2. Set up what the prompt expects: A TTS API key in .env and the API's docs in a TTS.md file, which the prompt points at.
3. Follow the prompt below. It is the creator's text, unedited.
4. To adapt it to a new subject or look: Replace 《小蝌蚪找妈妈》 with another story and 水墨动画 (ink-wash animation) with another style. Point "文档在TTS.md" and "API KEY 是 .env 里的 APIKEY" at your own TTS docs and key, and change 中英双语 (Chinese and English) for other subtitle languages.
- Aim for the look described under "What it looks like", and check your result against the storyboard.

## Prompt

```text
做一个《小蝌蚪找妈妈》的水墨动画，添加合适的音乐，请务必做到引人入胜，如果需要用到旁白或对话，用TTS合成，字幕用中英双语， TTS 接口有关闭水印的参数就关掉，文档在TTS.md，API KEY 是 .env 里的 APIKEY，最终视频要能直接导出。
```

## What it looks like

Written by Reference from the video frames, not by the creator.

A Chinese ink-wash pond on aged paper: frog spawn becomes a school of tadpoles that meet a mother duck, a turtle, and a catfish before finding the frog mother, with every scene captioned in Chinese and English.

- Color: Cream and parchment paper with gray washes for water and sky, black ink tadpoles, reeds, and lily pads, soft green frogs, pink lotus flowers, and a small yellow duck family.
- Type: Centered bilingual subtitles near the bottom: black Chinese characters over a smaller italic serif English line ("春天来了，池塘醒了。 Spring had come, and the pond was waking up.").
- Framing: 16:9 wide views at water level. Lily pads, lotus stems, and reeds frame the left and right edges, the small animals sit in open space near the middle, and gray cloud washes drift across the upper half.
- Sound: Music that Claude made itself, with narration and dialogue from a third-party TTS service the creator doesn't name, according to the creator.
- Structure: A frog on a lily pad under "春天来了，池塘醒了。", a cluster of frog spawn ("终于有一天——"), tadpoles behind a mother duck and ducklings ("孩子们，跟紧妈妈！"), the school of tadpoles in open water, the tadpoles meeting a big turtle, a frog shown in a thought bubble as the turtle describes their mother, a catfish beside the lotus ("就在这时——扑通！"), the frog on a lily pad with the tadpoles gathered below ("孩子们，我就是你们的妈妈呀！"), and frogs on lily pads singing ("呱呱呱，一起唱起了夏天的歌。").

Storyboard, nine frames spread across the video: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/storyboard.webp

- Frame 1 at 13.1s: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/f1.webp
- Frame 2 at 39.2s: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/f2.webp
- Frame 3 at 65.4s: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/f3.webp
- Frame 4 at 91.5s: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/f4.webp
- Frame 5 at 117.7s: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/f5.webp
- Frame 6 at 143.9s: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/f6.webp
- Frame 7 at 170.0s: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/f7.webp
- Frame 8 at 196.2s: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/f8.webp
- Frame 9 at 222.3s: https://meetreference.com/media/chinese-ink-wash-animation-little/f9.webp

## How it was made, per the creator

- Reported spend: About 3% of a 5-hour usage limit on a Max 5x plan, which the creator puts at roughly 3 yuan on the subscription
- Notes: The creator says the post shows a video made purely in code. In replies they add that Claude wrote HTML but delivered a video, drew the text in SVG, made the music itself, and called a third-party TTS API on its own. The creator wasn't happy with that vendor, which often misreads characters with more than one pronunciation, and doesn't name it.

## Links

- Watch: https://x.com/akokoi1/status/2102699703309898026
- Original post: https://x.com/akokoi1/status/2102699703309898026