Kök Börü

Kök Börü is a 15-minute animated short (14:59 on its Higgsfield page) from the AI video company Higgsfield, billed as its first animated film. Shakhnazar Borboev, from Kyrgyzstan, co-directed it with Amina Ömirjan and Stepan Abramov, both from Kazakhstan. It premiered at SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles in the week of 22 July and was posted in full on Higgsfield's own site and on YouTube on 17 August 2026.

Higgsfield describes a hybrid, "human-conditioned" pipeline in which artists set the look, performances and tone and AI scales the work up. Character sheets, locations and environments were first generated in Higgsfield's Soul Cartoon, then drawn over by artists on Wacom tablets. Live acting scenes were filmed and mapped onto the animated characters with Higgsfield Motion Control, which the company says carried timing, weight and emotion without suits, markers or a green screen. The animation was built in Higgsfield Cinema Studio and Supercomputer, an agent that orchestrates several models, on Nvidia GPUs. Native Kazakh actors voiced the characters.

Press accounts give the team as 10 people (Yahoo) or 12 (Animation World Network): animators, two screenwriters, three sound producers, a sound supervisor and a colour artist. Borboev and Ömirjan are animation directors and visual artists whose work draws on nomadic culture. Forbes Kazakhstan says Ömirjan studied animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design, worked in Los Angeles and joined Higgsfield about three and a half months earlier. Higgsfield's previous project was the fully AI-generated Hell Grind, shown at the Cannes Marché du Film in May.

Higgsfield says the film took about two weeks, against one to two years and $1 million to $2 million for a traditional production; the sources present these as the company's own estimates, not independently verified. A teaser went up on YouTube on 24 June 2026 and has about 68,000 views (read 12 October). The full film had about 108,000 views on YouTube (read 2 October) and about 70,200 on Higgsfield (read 1 October), and the Higgsfield Instagram reel of it showed about 378,000 views (read 9 October).

Coverage read was mostly Higgsfield's announcement and trade write-ups of it, with no critical review or award in the pages read. Borboev told the press that these are stories Central Asian artists grew up with but almost never see on screen. Ömirjan said AI sped the work up but all creative decisions were made by people, and Higgsfield chief executive Alex Mashrabov said the goal was never to replace artists but to give more of them the means to tell stories at this scale. The coverage places the film among a wave of studios adopting hybrid human-AI production.