Kiri no Hashi 霧の橋

Bridge in the Mist. One famous first-season battle, retold as an original fan-made anime short: Naruto and Sasuke trapped in Haku's Demonic Ice Mirrors on the unfinished bridge. Japanese voices, English subtitles, 88 seconds. The same film is rendered in three visual styles; pick one below and the playhead stays where it is.

The story

The Land of Waves, a bridge no one has finished. Haku raises the Makyo Hyosho, twenty-three mirrors of ice, and is in every one of them at once. Senbon rain. Sasuke's eyes turn red for the first time and his body moves on its own. Then the silence, the heartbeat, and the chakra that comes up out of Naruto like a fire that was never his. The mirrors break. The mask falls. Those eyes. We met once, in the forest.

How it was made

Engine

A Canvas 2D engine where every frame is a pure function of time: camera, mist, the mirror dome, needles, chakra particles, shards, the fox spirit and three vector-rigged characters solved with two-bone IK. Frames are rendered through headless Chrome on a plain Linux server (no GPU) and muxed with ffmpeg, 1920×1080 at 24 fps.

Voices

Eighteen original Japanese lines, written for this short, spoken by Microsoft neural voices (Keita and Nanami via edge-tts) with per-character pitch and rate: a deeper narrator, a boyish Naruto, a low Sasuke, a soft Haku. English subtitles are burned in; the .vtt file is here too.

Sound and music

No samples. Every effect is synthesized from the cue sheet with numpy: senbon whooshes, the ice forming, the heartbeat, the chakra rumble and roar, the shatter of a few hundred glass tinks. The score is a drone, a shakuhachi-like breath lead, a plucked koto ostinato (Karplus-Strong) and taiko that cut dead at the punch.

Styles

One choreography, three renderers. A style changes palette, line weight, shading, frame cadence and the final grade, nothing in the story or the audio. All three are live; the switcher above keeps the playhead, and Sumi-e maps every frame through an ink lookup that keeps one red.

One frame, three styles

The same instant, 63 seconds in, as the chakra comes up: warm cel, theatrical sakuga, ink on paper. Click a frame to watch the film in that style.

Frame at 63 s in the Classic Cel style — **Classic Cel** warm palette, flat shadow tone, grain

Frame at 63 s in the Modern Sakuga style — **Modern Sakuga** ink pressure, rim light, teal against orange, 2.39:1

Frame at 63 s in the Sumi-e style — **Sumi-e** five washes, one vermilion, washi fibres, the seal

Credits

Story, direction, animation: An original screenplay for this short, after the Land of Waves arc. Written, storyboarded, animated and built by an AI agent (Claude) for the demo shelf at demo.grn.dk, November 2026. Eighteen Japanese lines, eleven shots, 88 seconds.
Voices: Narrator and Naruto: Keita (ja-JP-KeitaNeural, two settings). Sasuke: Keita, lowered and slowed. Haku: Nanami (ja-JP-NanamiNeural). Microsoft neural voices through edge-tts, pitch and rate per character.
Sound and music: Synthesized from the cue sheet with numpy: no samples. Drone, breath lead, koto ostinato (Karplus-Strong), taiko, and every effect from the senbon to the shatter.
Subtitles: English, written with the script, burned in with libass; the same cues as a WebVTT file.
Styles: One choreography, three renderers. Style 1 Classic Cel (on twos, grain), style 2 Modern Sakuga (24 fps, ink pressure, impact frames), style 3 Sumi-e (on threes, ink lookup, washi). A style is one file; the engine, script and audio are shared.
Tooling: Canvas 2D engine in plain JavaScript, headless Chrome through puppeteer-core, ffmpeg 8 with libx264, Python 3 with numpy and edge-tts, ImageMagick for the strip. Rendered on a Linux server with no GPU, six browser tabs in parallel.
Fonts: Yuji Syuku (brush titles), Zen Antique, Dela Gothic One, Noto Sans CJK JP and Noto Sans, all under the SIL Open Font License.
Fan tribute: Naruto and its characters belong to Masashi Kishimoto, Shueisha and Studio Pierrot. This is non-commercial fan art with nothing taken from the series: no footage, artwork, music or dialogue.

A fan tribute. Naruto and its characters are the work of Masashi Kishimoto (Shueisha, Studio Pierrot). This short is original, non-commercial fan art: no footage, artwork, music or dialogue from the series is used; every frame, every voice line and every sound here was generated for this page.