Le Lion et le Rat
La Fontaine's fable of the lion and the rat, engraved in ink and read aloud. Not a game this time: a little animation, and my first AI-generated voice.
2 min 34 s 23 September 2026
Sound on: the story is told out loud. On a phone, it is bigger with the phone turned sideways.
This time it is not a game. Nothing to win, nothing to lose: you watch, you listen, and you let yourself be told a fable every French child learns at school. The story is told in French, with La Fontaine’s own words on screen.
It is an experiment, and it pulled me out of my habits in two ways.
A change of pace. Until now I made little games here where you tap, jump and dodge. This was the opposite idea: slow down. A camera gliding gently over the savannah, long enough to see the lion breathe in his sleep and the rat climb out of the ground, a little dazed.
A voice. The first time I used an AI-generated voice. I wanted a male storyteller, deep and warm, like the ones on the fairy-tale records of my childhood. I found him on ElevenLabs, on the free plan: about 800 credits for ten short clips.
The prompt
It all started with a slightly hesitant sentence one evening (typed in French, translated here):
“Could we make a nice animation based on Jean de La Fontaine’s fable, the Lion and the Rat? On the web, but with care for detail and slow scrolling so you can really see the animals. Well, it’s an idea. A plan?”
Claude suggested splitting it into scenes, and three art directions: watercolour, paper cut-outs or engraving. I picked engraving, like an old book: sepia ink, hatching, laid paper.
The iterations
About ten rounds, and every one of them was about what I saw, never about the code (all typed in French, translated here):
- “On my phone it stops moving after 1 min 19.” The forest scene, too heavy to draw on a phone. Fixed.
- “Can the lion’s head be prettier? The rat’s too? The net doesn’t cover the whole lion.” The lion had a dog’s head and a porcupine’s mane. He now has a real mane falling in locks.
- “When the lion walks, he doesn’t touch the ground.” He now puts each paw down, one after the other.
- “The night isn’t dark enough, you can see the trees appear.” The night became a true black, with a moon and stars.
- “The page gives too much room to the technology.” Everything went, except a thin progress bar in a black frame.
Then the voice, clip by clip: ten blocks of text to paste into ElevenLabs, with pauses and a spelling trick so the narrator would say La Fontaine’s rets (nets) the right way. One line, a question, came out flat; a second take with a more expressive setting fixed it. The long sentences were cut so the words land on the picture: the net falls just as you hear it.
What I learned
The crickets, the wind, the birds and the rat’s squeaks and nibbling are all made inside the page, with no sound file. The roar would not be faked: it is a real one, given away under a free licence. And the moral has not aged a day: patience and time do more than strength or rage.
Text: Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, book II, fable XI (1668). Voice: Paul K. (Deep French Narrator), generated with ElevenLabs. Roar: LilMati, freesound.org, CC0 licence. Ambience and sound effects: synthesised in the page.