Claude Fable 5.1 made me a nice animated pelican

59 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by elsewhen
(simonwillison.net)

17 Comments

chrononaut

9 hours ago

> The wheels in the video are rotating in the wrong direction

I thought they were going in the correct direction until you mentioned that. Perhaps you / it created an unintended bistable illusion :)

batperson

2 hours ago

The video compression created the illusion, it removed enough frames to where you can't tell the motion of the spokes since every frame refresh they moved enough distance to be "valid" for both forward and backward motion.

emmelaich

9 hours ago

Are the wheels rotating in the wrong direction? I stared at it they seemed to reverse. Perhaps a bit of a optical illusion.

Looking at the SVG, the direction is missing but the default is clockwise. So I'd say it's good!

0dayz

9 hours ago

Even if it is training on the Pelican bike test by now it's impressive and most importantly helps (at least I hope) svg animations and creations as those are pia to do.

andai

9 hours ago

That's pretty nice. Here's Gemini 3.7 for reference:

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/13/llm-gemini/

I found Gemini's one much more impressive initially, but on closer inspection it's got a whole bunch of issues. Missing leg, objects overlapping etc.

(We might say the seat looks "uncomfortable" xD)

mc32

8 hours ago

It’s a bit like a naive “writing”/drawing of ideographic characters by someone who never wrote them. Things (lines and shapes) are there but just not quite right.

GiffertonThe3rd

an hour ago

Dear lord, the poor fish! It's still alive, flapping in the basket under the hot sun. Won't someone[Claude] think of the fish?

catlifeonmars

9 hours ago

How do you determine the “best” pelican? I couldn’t see much of a difference between extra high and max.

simonw

8 hours ago

To me, the biggest difference is the beak: I like the max one much more than the xhigh one.

Max also made a nicer background.

setr

9 hours ago

Ignoring aesthetics, there’s simply significantly more detail produced by max

jerf

8 hours ago

And it's correct detail. Earlier models had things like detached hats, or lighthouses floating above or below the level they should be at, etc. Everything is where it should be, the fish is clearly in the basket and not clipping through it, the animation has cartoon-correct parallax which is fairly impressive. By "cartoon-correct" I mean that if that was a real photo with real physics, that would be way too much motion for the boat and clouds, but for a cartoon, that is completely acceptable.

simonw

8 hours ago

The animation isn't down to max though - I took the SVG created by max and piped it back into high and asked that to animate it.

jerf

7 hours ago

Thank you for the clarification. I'm just impressed by the whole thing in general.

magarnicle

8 hours ago

It didn't get real wings until the Extra High version.