The hopeful
The Hamster
Small, round, and dressed for the occasion in a teal hoodie and white sneakers. He wants in, he gets turned away, and he has a plan. The plan is a moustache.
Hamster Non Grata · 3D animated short · 26 s · Portrait
3TOON Studio · 2026
Where it comes from
A feed with no camera in it
Gimica is a German publisher of casual games, based near Munich, with more than fifty million downloads across Android and iOS. Its next project is a short-form video app in the spirit of TikTok or Reels, with one difference: every clip in the feed will be generated with AI. The brief for creators is simple. Fifteen-second clips people genuinely enjoy watching, funny, relaxing, oddly satisfying, heartwarming or visually impressive, for a broad American audience aged 25 to 40, in enough variety to feed a recommendation engine, starting with about a thousand of them.
Hamster Non Grata is our test piece for that feed. Not a demonstration of a tool: a short, in the register of a big-studio 3D comedy, with a cast you recognise in a single frame and a gag that lands in twenty-six seconds. A small hamster wants into The Wheel, the hottest club in town. The bouncer says no. A fake moustache and a pair of sunglasses say otherwise, for a while.
The test answers the question a feed like this will ask a thousand times: can AI deliver characters with charm, comic timing and a clean punchline, at short-form speed? The two hamsters were locked on character sheets, the club was built inside and out before the first shot, and the iris in and out is a nod to the cartoons that invented the format. Nothing was filmed, and nothing looks like it was generated.
Create videos people genuinely enjoy watching.
The brief, in one line
The two leads
A hamster and a wall
The wall
The Bouncer
Twice the size, black suit, black tie, and one expression. He has seen every trick, and he collects the evidence. Nobody gets past him, for very long.
Before the first shot
Two characters, locked on paper
Front, side, back and expressions for each of them, a third sheet for the disguise, and a size chart so that the bouncer towers over the hero in every shot. Everything the short shows refers back to these four images.
The set
The Wheel, outside and in
A club named after the one thing every hamster runs on. Both sets were designed as still images first, so that every shot returns to the same door and the same dance floor.
The short, frame by frame
From the rope to the dance floor
00:01
The rope
One hamster, one bouncer, one velvet rope.
00:03
The plea
Arms crossed. The answer is no.
00:08
The plan
Back home, a moustache goes on.
00:10
The disguise
Sunglasses on. Unrecognisable, surely.
00:13
The sweat
Under inspection. Hold it together.
00:21
The verdict
Exhibit A.
00:23
The dance
In, at last. For about four seconds.
00:25
The end
Behind you. Iris out.
The craft
A cartoon, at feed speed
The whole short was designed before it was generated: two character sheets, a disguise sheet, a size chart, and the club inside and out. Each shot was then generated from those references in portrait format, several takes per shot, and the best takes were cut to the beat of a score generated for the film. The iris in and out, the sound design and the final mix were finished by hand. Twenty-seven years of animation craft behind every frame.
- MiniMax H3
- After Effects
- Vegas Pro