A couple of weeks ago, we premiered “La Triste Figura” (The Sorrowful Figure), our short film about Don Quixote. We were prepared for the usual: the “slop” stickers, the people who show up, throw insults around, and run off. There was some of that, but much less than we expected, which came as a pleasant surprise.

What we did get, though, was a type of comment I was already expecting. “How shameless to adapt such a deeply human novel using AI.” “Keep your hands off Don Quixote.” “Sacrilege.” And, of course: “If Cervantes were to rise from his grave...”

It’s only natural. If you touch one of the most important works of world literature, and you do it using a technique that many people find questionable, if not downright demonic, those comments are going to come. But behind all of them is a question that I think deserves more than a shrug: what would Cervantes actually think?

I recognize this kind of comment. I’ve seen it before. It comes up every time someone makes AI images copying Ghibli’s style, illustrations from Tolkien’s universe, or Gorillaz fan art. Works whose creators are, or would be, absolutely opposed to this technology. In those cases, the answer is pretty clear.

With Cervantes, it’s not so clear. Many of the people throwing this accusation at me haven’t read Don Quixote. They know the abridged school version, the one about a mad knight who attacks windmills, and little else. But Don Quixote isn’t a work with a simple moral. It’s a book full of layers, unreliable narrators, and mockery that eventually turns into tenderness.

Before going any further, the obvious: it’s absurd to look for certainty about what a man from Spain’s Golden Age would think of audiovisual creation using AI. Cervantes didn’t know what animation was, or cinema, or photography. I’m not going to claim he’d be on our side. But the book offers clues, and they’re not the ones people assume.

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Don Quixote and Gunpowder

For anyone who needs a refresher: Alonso Quijano is a gentleman from La Mancha who reads so many chivalric romances that his brain dries up, and he sets off on the road to live like his heroes. Cervantes laughs at him, but he also loves him. If Don Quixote really lived in his fantasy world, he would be the noblest of all knights. In the real world, he’s exactly what the school version says: a mad old man who tries to defeat a windmill, and the windmill knocks his block off. The book mocks idealism, but with understanding and a certain romanticism.

There’s a passage that comes pretty close to Cervantes expressing an opinion about a technology that changes the profession. In Chapter XXXVIII of Part One, halfway through his discourse on arms and letters, Don Quixote turns his thoughts to gunpowder:

Blessed be those happy ages that knew nothing of the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor, I firmly believe, is receiving in hell the reward for his diabolical invention, by which he made it possible for a base and cowardly arm to take the life of a valiant knight; and for a stray bullet, fired by someone who perhaps fled in terror at the flash of his own accursed weapon, to arrive without warning, in the very midst of the courage and spirit that kindle and inspire brave hearts, and in an instant cut short the thoughts and life of one who deserved to enjoy them for many long years.

And he concludes:

I am almost tempted to say that in my heart I regret having taken up this profession of knight-errantry in an age as detestable as the one we now live in [...] But let Heaven do as it pleases, for I shall be held in all the greater esteem if I achieve what I seek, having exposed myself to greater dangers than those faced by the knights-errant of centuries past.

The man writing this was a soldier. Cervantes lost the use of his left hand to an arquebus shot at Lepanto. He lived in a world with firearms and knew that a world without them existed only in the past. The nostalgia may be genuine, but he puts the speech in the mouth of an extreme idealist. The equivalent, in his day, of someone replying “pick up a pencil.” Except that instead of a pencil, he picks up a sword.

My reading is that Cervantes is saying something like this: the age of the sword was better, the hand that wields a sword is better than the one that fires an arquebus, but in an age of arquebuses, relying solely on your sword is madness.

And that nostalgia comes from idealizing the sword as a noble object, forgetting that it’s a metal stick with a pointy end designed to pierce intestines. The same thing happens when people take it for granted that picking up a pencil is more virtuous than pressing a button (because to Twitter, that’s what AI is: a button that does everything). They forget that a huge part of animation has been made by hand for decades, by flesh-and-blood artists working on assembly lines, with stories decided according to trends and data analysis to sell toys.

But mind you, Cervantes doesn’t let the arquebus off the hook either. The bullet that kills the knight is fired by someone who “fled in terror at the flash” of his own weapon. Someone firing blindly, without knowing how or where to aim. Plenty of gunpowder, not much aim. There are no good guys and bad guys in this passage, and that’s why it interests me.

My Battle

My battle is to defend authorship: the idea that behind a film there should be someone deciding what to tell and how to tell it. And it didn’t start with AI.

I come from the animation industry. I learned my craft directing children’s series made to be watched on tablets, a world that operates on a different scale and by different rules: a lot gets produced, very quickly, guided solely by audience data. There came a point when I felt more like a factory worker than an artist, and I wanted to do something else.

Animation is so expensive that every project has to minimize risk as much as possible. So executives try to distill a formula for success from trend reports, and they take everything into account except one thing: letting creatives create. The result is products that, at best, offend no one and, at worst, exploit their audience’s reward circuitry. Very rarely do they bring anything new to the table.

Generative AI scares me because it could take that logic to its extreme: infinite content, with no author, fine-tuned down to the last detail to whatever the algorithm demands. With no one behind it anymore.

But today, AI is also the tool we can use to stand up to that algorithm. With it, a small team can make films for a fraction of the cost, without asking permission from a studio or a network. We can tell the mantras about what works and what doesn’t, according to the statistics coming out of some executive’s office, to go fuck themselves, and focus on MAKING THINGS. And, for the first time in a long time, enjoy the process and have fun creating.

It’s the same weapon. What changes is the hand holding it and where it’s pointing.

Salvaging What We Can

Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to “bring down the ill-founded machinery of these books of chivalry.” I don’t aspire to that much. There’s a lot of idealism in my battle, but it’s more modest: believing that doing things this way might help salvage something, maintain some standards, and win back part of an audience lobotomized by modern-day chivalric romances.

There’s nothing wrong with all of us having a little Quixotic idealism. But perhaps it would be wiser to set off on an adventure with something more than a sword, and try to get out of the way before the windmill’s sail knocks our block off.

What would Cervantes think if he rose from his grave? I have no idea. But I suspect he’d recognize the struggle.

If you haven’t watched The Sorrowful Figure yet, you can watch the full film here or down below.