Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-03)

• Claude Fable 5.1’s ability to generate creative, visual content (specifically an animated pelican SVG) scales dramatically with increased reasoning effort, producing significantly more detailed and sophisticated outputs.
• For the “pelican benchmark” prompt, Fable 5.1’s lower reasoning levels (low, medium) appeared to skip reasoning entirely, while “xhigh” and “max” levels engaged in extensive, multi-step reasoning to create intricate designs, including specific details like a blue hat, fish basket, and corrected bicycle geometry.
• This enhanced quality comes at a substantial cost and time premium: generating the “max” pelican cost $3.30 and took nearly 14 minutes, compared to approximately 10 cents and 23 seconds for the basic low/medium outputs.
• Fable 5.1 can also animate existing SVGs, demonstrated by taking the “Max” pelican and prompting it to animate for an additional $1.37.