ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview · The Pelican Test: 116 seconds through 20 art styles

About this work

Work published by Baidu on the ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview release page. The model wrote a 116-second 2D animated short from scratch in Python inside an agent harness, driven by more than 10,000 lines of code. A white pelican rides a bicycle from Saharan rock art of 4000 BCE to a code editor in the age of large language models, turning into a Han dynasty stone rubbing, a Javanese shadow puppet, an oscilloscope trace and 8-bit pixel art on the way, and arriving at the Pelican #21 Launch Event. Each frame is vector-drawn with Pycairo and post-processed with NumPy and Pillow. The soundtrack uses 22 recordings cut to the scene changes by an editing script the model wrote. For three scenes the model called an image generation tool for static backgrounds, then animated figures, petals and water over them in code. Concept design by Bilibili creator @近步抱告_. The archive retains the 720p full video and audio posted on X by a Baidu staff account. The official original file address is recorded.