Premiering at SIGGRAPH 2026, the new 15-minute animated short, a historical drama rooted in Central Asian folklore, was created by a team of 12 in 2 weeks on the Higgsfield platform powered by NVIDIA.
At SIGGRAPH 2026, AI video platform Higgsfield just premiered Kök Börü, its first 15-minute animated film, presenting the short alongside a walkthrough of the hybrid human-AI pipeline used to produce it.
Set in 15th-century Central Asia, Kök Börü is a historical drama rooted in Central Asian nomadic life and folklore. The film pairs generative AI with hand-drawn digital animation to tell a story from an underrepresented culture that might not easily attract larger budget financing, especially for a short film.
“As artists from Central Asia, this is the kind of story we grew up with but almost never see on screen,” director Shakhnazar Borboev said. “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 title refers to the traditional Central Asian horseback game known as kök börü, or kokpar, in which mounted teams score points by dragging an animal carcass across a goal line. The game was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017. While the game traditionally uses a goat or sheep, the film reimagines the story with a wolf at its center.
In Kök Börü, a young nomadic mother, Ana, is forced to choose which of her two children to save from a wolf pack during a blizzard, losing her little daughter to the steppe. Years later, her village rides out to kill a “demon” child running with wolves, forcing Ana to find the feral daughter she lost and decide whether to bring her home or set her free.
Enjoy the trailer:
Kök Börü is co-directed by Borboev, from Kyrgyzstan, and Amina Ömirjan and Stepan Abramov, from Kazakhstan. Borboev and Ömirjan are animation directors and visual artists whose work spans 2D and 3D animation, storytelling, traditional painting and digital art, often drawing on nomadic culture, its aesthetics, symbolism and the relationship between people and nature.
The production team consisted of 12 people: five animators, two screenwriters, three sound producers, a color artist and a sound supervisor. Native Kazakh actors voiced the animated characters.
The production workflow combined generative AI and hand-drawn artistry. Character sheets, locations and full environments were first generated in Higgsfield’s Soul Cartoon, trained on the NVIDIA B300 cluster with NVLink support, then enhanced by artists drawing on Wacom tablets in a traditional animation-style process.
The team also shot live acting scenes and used Higgsfield’s Motion Control to map the performances onto animated characters, allowing the characters to inherit the timing, weight and emotion of live human performance without suits, markers or a greenscreen.
Full animation was produced in Higgsfield Cinema Studio and Supercomputer, an AI agent that orchestrates a range of models. The tools supported in-betweening, staging, environment building, character performance, action-scene motion, emotional dialogue, and iteration on lighting and atmosphere. The pipeline runs end to end on NVIDIA GPUs and draws on the NVIDIA animation stack.
Higgsfield said the hybrid approach allowed the team to complete the film in two weeks, compared with an estimated one to two years and a $1 million to $2 million budget for a traditional production.
At SIGGRAPH 2026, the company presented the finished film and a step-by-step account of how the team used the AI-assisted workflow. “Showcasing this film and the pipeline behind it will demonstrate what’s already possible today,” said Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO of Higgsfield. “The goal was never to replace artists, but to give more of them the means to tell stories at this level,”
Higgsfield described Kök Börü as a demonstration of human-conditioned production, with hand-drawn character designs, props and painted textures defining the look, performance and emotional intent of each shot before conditioning the AI output. The company said the pipeline is designed to extend an artist-led foundation to a scale and finish that a small team could not traditionally reach in the same timeframe.
Higgsfield is an AI video platform for professional production, used by marketing teams, Fortune 500 brands, studios and filmmakers to create cinematic-quality content at scale. The company was co-founded by Mashrabov, previously co-founder of AI Factory, whose computer vision technology powered Snapchat’s Cameos and Face Filters after Snap acquired the company in 2020.
Source: Higgsfield
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
