Developer builds pixel‑art kākāpō party with Claude Opus 5.5
Simon Willison fed the model three parrot photos, then used Claude Code and Playwright to record video of the animation for a conference keynote.
Simon Willison used Claude Opus 5.5 to generate a pixel-art animation of dancing kākāpō parrots. He built it for the closing slide of his WeAreDevelopers World Congress keynote, according to his blog post.
Willison gave the model three photos of the flightless parrots. He asked for "at least 20" of them "jumping up and down having a party with confetti" in animated pixel art on an HTML5 canvas, he said. Claude built the animation in one pass.
To capture video for his slide, Willison told Claude Code to write a Playwright script. The script loaded the page in Chromium, clicked the canvas ten times to trigger confetti, and recorded 15 seconds of footage, he wrote. The tool is published at tools.simonwillison.net.
Willison said he had seen "buzz" online about how good Claude Opus 5.5 was at pixel art before trying the prompt himself. He credited Claude for the artwork and code, and Playwright for the recording. Together they produced a keynote closing moment in a few minutes of work.