The Child of the Sea

The Child of the Sea (El niño de la mar) is a 2026 animated short of about 13 minutes, written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Ibai Abad and produced by MotionField. It was published on YouTube on 8 September 2026 under the title "The Child of the Sea | Animated Short Film | Reply AIFF 2026 – Grand Prix Special Mention". It had 99 views when read on 10 October 2026.

Abad describes the film as beginning with a group of friends experimenting with a new generation of creative tools; he says it was a story he had wanted to tell for years but could hardly produce independently. The makers say they used generative AI in the spirit of any filmmaking process (writing, designing, testing, discarding, directing, editing and refining), and that it let them reach images and a scale otherwise beyond their means. The festival's account says a hybrid workflow combining Magnific with human-led editing let AI act as a production assistant, building a large stop-motion-style world that would have been impractical with physical methods alone.

Credits on the upload name Gerard Vila as editor, Marco Ovejero for art and animation supervision and Juando Cortijos as pipeline supervisor. Reply's materials describe Abad as a Spanish stop-motion filmmaker.

It was one of ten finalists of the 2026 Reply AI Film Festival, chosen from more than 3,000 shorts submitted from 76 countries, and received a special mention at the festival's awards in Venice (6 September 2026) for its experimental use of AI. The top prize went to Robert Gaudette's A Face Only A Mother Could Love. The pages read give no independent press or reviews beyond Reply's own materials.