In Zeb Haradon’s The Lucky Bucks, we meet Alex, a young buck heading into his first mating season, romping through the forest and marking every tree imaginable. “Yeah, this is my neighborhood now,” he says with a bold declaration. Ready to sire anyone, he sets his sights on a young doe named Jessica.
Before fulfilling his wildest dreams, our h***y protagonist meets up with Mortimer, the legendary buck from the forest next door. He’s had his fill of does in his part of the forest and is looking for new ones, which brings him to Alex’s territory. The challenge is on, and the two bucks lock horns. Alex eventually defeats Mortimer, but their horns get tangled together in the process.
Stuck as an unwilling two-headed creature, they start starving and drying out, forced to shuffle around the forest in the same direction if they want even a chance at surviving. They eventually reach a water hole, and with their lives hanging in the balance on the next sip, Alex makes his move and kills Mortimer while they’re still tangled together.
Though Mortimer is dead, the two are still stuck together, and Alex is burdened with carrying Mortimer’s carcass everywhere he goes. Over time, it begins decaying, attracting predators who devour Mortimer’s body—leaving only the head—and nauseating any young doe who comes into range, even the ugly ones. With every step, Alex is dodging danger, struggling to stay alive, and watching his big mating-season plan get wrecked by the one win he can’t un-win.
“Though Mortimer is dead, the two are still stuck together…”
In The Lucky Bucks, filmmaker Zeb Haradon uses AI to bring a story he wrote to life in a way that couldn’t be done before with the resources he had. The Lucky Bucks comes from his 2018 book, Cousin Calls, and was later produced using generative image/video tools, aiming for a look inspired by the painter Vanessa Steinhilb. Haradon also frames his tale as a “Schopenhauerian cervine sex comedy” and describes the finished film as “27 minutes long and sad.”
Once you get past the Schopenhauer quotes at the opening title sequence, there’s no doubt that The Lucky Bucks was composed entirely from generative AI. If you’re looking for artwork that comes to life in a natural, authentic way, you won’t find it here. In almost all AI films I’ve seen, characters evolve in their design, looking vastly different by the end than at the start.
The end sequence is also loaded with AI problems: characters move authentically one moment, then do something completely impossible the next. Then there’s also the notorious misspelling of simple words.
But it’s clear writer/animator Zeb Haradon isn’t trying to solve all the problems of AI; he’s trying to tell his story using the medium as a tool. The story is raw, gritty, and down-to-earth: a buck who’s trying to get laid, and in this heightened hormonal state, he starts making bad decisions… the first of which is challenging his closest rival to a dick-swinging contest. With its children’s storybook color scheme and drawings, the story plays out as a philosophical treatise on death and procreation, and is decidedly for adults. This tale would be great for a Sick-and-Twisted festival, if they still run it.
In The Lucky Bucks, Zeb Haradon uses new tools to deliver an old-fashioned cautionary tale where instinctual procreation and the male ego make a lethal combo. By the end, Alex’s “victory” has turned into a decaying “albatross,” and survival becomes his only goal.
"…Schopenhauerian cervine sex comedy"
