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Notes -
I'd call it a failure. But that's not because of failing to understand the story or ugly visuals, but just because it's a really hard story to adapt to the screen--I'm skeptical a human could do any better (maybe what I proposed is a benchmark for ASI, not AGI).
The core difficulty is that the story is very deeply intertwined with Gummitch's internal dialog. That's hard to represent even for a human character, but for a cat, you're likely to land in ridiculous territory. The video sidesteps this by using music to narrate what's going on. But, something about it just comes off as a saccharine commercial.
That said, I appreciate the attempt!
I agree that a voiceover or some change to the lyrics would have helped a lot. I feel like this was less of an adaptation and more of a companion piece for people who are already familiar with the story. If I had to guess at the story from the video it'd be something like: a playful kitten is growing up and wants to eat with the family instead of the older cats, there's something wrong with the daughter, she tries to kill the family's new baby which the now older kitten / cat feels obligated to protect, the cat protects the baby by some sort of magical healing of the daughter(?) that robs the cat of its magic(?) and now it has to live out its life like an ordinary, older cat.
Which, while not a terrible story, strikes me as unlikely to be difficult to adapt. I'm guessing there's a lot about the magic cat and the little girl's problem that's being glossed over.
In fairness to Opus 4.5, I did tell it that I only had the money / time for a roughly 3 minute video. We still ended up going over - I would have trimmed Act 1 considerably. I think that would have helped cut the sweetness.
Opus 4.5 brought a little sugar to the party (example video generation prompt: "1960s kitchen table from low angle. Two adults pour coffee, hands and cups visible, conversation implied. Warm, hazy.") but the real Hallmark schoolmarm here was Veo. I did have to try several rounds of generations and tweak the prompts for about 10% of the shots - enough that I considered just using a black background and "[Veo refusal]" caption. It may not surprise you to learn that Google is extremely sensitive about generating clips of sad looking little girls in their bedrooms.
If anyone's interested in the process / instructions for making your own videos on topics of your choice, here's the transcript of the Opus 4.5 conversation showing how it developed the story / prompts / etc.: https://claude.ai/share/93589514-db93-4ffb-aa7d-579f28154a38
Thanks for the challenge and the feedback. It was fun.
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