Copán: La Leyenda

Copán: La Leyenda (English: Copán: The Legend) is a 74-minute Honduran animated feature directed by Ricardo Morales and produced by Level 7 Studios. Wikipedia describes it as AI-generated; the makers promote it as the first Honduran film to combine traditional animation with generative AI. It opened in Honduran cinemas on 7 May 2026, and its trailer is on YouTube.

Morales says the idea came from a childhood visit to the Copán ruins at the age of seven, and that the project took about 15 years. By his account about ten of those went into traditional 3D characters and environments, self-financed, until costs stalled it; generative AI video tools then let the team finish. He told La Prensa the AI tools are "herramientas que nosotros dirigimos" (tools we direct), that he wrote the script and composed the music, and that a 75-minute film in traditional animation alone would have taken about 30 years. No page names the models used. Hollywood Reporter en Español and Wikipedia's account of critics point to part of a Gemini watermark visible in promotional material.

Level 7 Studios is a Tegucigalpa studio founded by Morales. La Prensa reports a team of family members and long-time collaborators, some with the studio for 18 to 19 years, and Morales has said the team plans another film or a sequel. A columnist for Tunota says the project was backed by the Honduran Institute of Tourism and the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History and criticises the absence of Honduran voice actors. Expreso describes mixed capital, with the tourism institute and the brands Kia and Banco Atlántida.

The film opened through Metrocinemas on 7 May 2026, with tourism minister Andrés Ehrler at the launch, according to Wikipedia. The record's counts, read on the day shown, are 40,373 views for the YouTube upload (2 October 2026) and 132,200 for the trailer clip on Level 7's TikTok (6 October 2026). The Level 7 trailer on YouTube had 770,973 views on 6 October 2026. No page gives box office or audience figures.

Reception was largely negative. Infobae reported that reactions on social media were mostly negative, citing the review site Cinemafilia, which called the scenery uncreative and the edit "espeluznante", and said the characters could not convey a single realistic emotion; some viewers did praise its interest in pre-Hispanic civilisations. Critics cited a lead whose face shifts between shots, unreadable background text, product placement for Banco Atlántida notebooks and an optician, and lines close to flat-earth and moon-landing conspiracy ideas, with some calling it a long advertisement. Cartoon Brew called the response overwhelmingly negative. Multiple outlets report that some schools required pupils to attend, which critics read as an attempt to lift attendance, and Wikipedia says Level 7 deleted or blocked critical comments. Videos about the film by YouTubers have drawn hundreds of thousands of views.

Why it matters: Cartoon Brew notes the creators presented it as "a new path forward for filmmaking" in a country with almost no feature-animation industry, and Morales argues a project of this scale was financially impossible in Honduras before AI tools. Infobae places the reaction in a wider divide over generative AI in animation, over cost and speed against data scraping, intellectual property and artists' jobs.