# Making an 11-Minute AI-Animated Don Quixote Short Exposed the Limits — and Necessities — of Human Craft

_General · published 2026-09-29_

Directors Guillermo Miranda and Javier de la Chica premiered La Triste Figura, an 11-minute animated short adapting Don Quixote's windmill episode, in Madrid on 23 September. Made with a team of roughly a dozen people using AI tools including Seedance 2.5 and Seedream 5 Pro — and co-produced by Magnific — the film leaned heavily on traditional pre-production discipline: hand-drawn storyboards by Víctor Ponce, character turnarounds, expression sheets, and costume tests before a single AI shot was generated. The result, by the directors' account, was warmer and more emotionally resonant than many AI-produced animations.

The production surfaced lessons about where human oversight is non-negotiable. The team found that comedy, dialogue, and storytelling were the hardest things to delegate to AI, while confident action and stylized imagery came more easily. Miranda and de la Chica, both rooted in traditional animation pipelines, are explicitly trying to reshape AI filmmaking as a "multiplayer" discipline rather than a solo-operator workflow — expanding creative roles for writers, storyboard artists, voice actors, and composers alongside the generative tools.

## Sources
- [creativebloq.com](https://www.creativebloq.com/ai/two-animators-reveal-the-roles-risks-and-limits-of-making-don-quixote-with-ai)
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