# Kākāpō Party

> Source: <https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/26/kakapo-party/>
> Published: 2026-09-26 23:39:06+00:00

**Tool:** [Kākāpō Party](https://tools.simonwillison.net/kakapo-party)

I gave presented a closing keynote for the [WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/world-congress-north-america) yesterday. As [a STAR moment](https://simonwillison.net/2019/Dec/10/better-presentations/) I decided to weave in references to the record breaking [kākāpō breeding season](https://www.doc.govt.nz/news/media-releases/2026-media-releases/kakapo-population-reaches-new-milestone/) we had in 2026.

For my closing slide I wanted to celebrate, and I had seen some buzz around how good Claude Opus 5.5 was at creating pixel art animations. So I rounded up three Kakapo photos from Google image search and dropped them into Claude with this prompt:

`Here are some photos of kakapo parrots just to remind you what they look like`

`I need you to make an animation in animated pixel art on HTML 5 canvas of obviously pixel art kakapo jumping up and down having a party with confetti and suchlike - there should be at least 20 of them`

Here's [the transcript](https://claude.ai/share/43bec0be-a0a3-4737-bfac-34894af34ddc), and this is the [resulting page](https://tools.simonwillison.net/kakapo-party). It's pretty great!

I wanted to embed it in a Keynote presentation file, so I downloaded the HTML and told a local Claude Code session:

`Make me a video of file:///Users/simon/Downloads/kakapo-party.html - you need to load it in a browser and click on it a few times to get the confetti effect, the video should be 15s long`

`don't start clicking until 3s in`

`make sure several clicks are spread around the clickable area`

Claude Code used Playwright ([transcript here](https://gisthost.github.io/?368b481fba654c4fb84d90188da77581/page-001.html)) and produced this video, which was exactly what I needed for my final slide:

Here's the full Playwright script it used, which was pleasingly short:

``` python
# /// script
# dependencies = ["playwright"]
# ///
import time
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
W, H = 1280, 720
# Canvas fills the viewport; spread clicks across corners, edges and centre
clicks = [
    (3.0, 640, 360),   # centre
    (4.2, 160, 120),   # top-left
    (5.4, 1120, 120),  # top-right
    (6.6, 180, 600),   # bottom-left
    (7.8, 1100, 600),  # bottom-right
    (9.0, 640, 100),   # top-centre
    (10.0, 380, 380),  # mid-left
    (11.0, 900, 380),  # mid-right
    (12.2, 640, 620),  # bottom-centre
    (13.2, 640, 300),  # finale centre
]
with sync_playwright() as p:
    b = p.chromium.launch()
    ctx = b.new_context(viewport={"width":W,"height":H}, record_video_dir="vids", record_video_size={"width":W,"height":H})
    page = ctx.new_page()
    t0 = time.time()
    page.goto("file:///Users/simon/Downloads/kakapo-party.html")
    for t,x,y in clicks:
        time.sleep(max(0, t-(time.time()-t0)))
        page.mouse.click(x,y)
    time.sleep(max(0, 16.0-(time.time()-t0)))
    ctx.close(); b.close()
```

Tags: [animation](https://simonwillison.net/tags/animation), [speaking](https://simonwillison.net/tags/speaking), [ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), [kakapo](https://simonwillison.net/tags/kakapo), [playwright](https://simonwillison.net/tags/playwright), [generative-ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai), [llms](https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms), [anthropic](https://simonwillison.net/tags/anthropic), [claude](https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude), [claude-code](https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude-code)