From Planet to Pantheon: Greco-Roman Myth as Solar-System Metaphor in the Generative AI Short Film GREAT RED SPOT

Generative AI now makes it possible for a single creator to produce a short film in days. We spent a week from ideation of a film to make a storyboard and a character sheet, and just two days on everything from generating images and videos to editing. To make it happen, we used a pipeline from prompts written in Claude and key images in ChatGPT to generating video clips in Kling AI, then editing and sound in After Effects. The subject of this paper, however, is not the speed of production. The film's most distinctive part is the way it links Greco-Roman mythology to the solar system, using the planets as characters and the orbital relationships between them to carry the story forward. We set out to combine narrative pleasure with a sense of scale, and chose metaphor-driven direction so the audience could interpret the film for themselves.

Conceptual metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson [1] argue that metaphor is a way of understanding one domain in terms of another, not mere ornament. The source domain lends its structure to the target. In this film the mapping runs both ways: the solar system (source) gives a physical stage to the myth, and the myth (source) gives emotional meaning to the solar system. Because the planets already carry the gods' Latin names, the audience needs no glossary. The metaphor is pre-installed in everyday language.
The mythic journey. Campbell [2] describes the hero's departure, trials and descent into a dark realm to recover something lost. The Greek katabasis, a living person's descent to the underworld, is its sharpest form. Pluto, named for the Roman lord of the dead, sits at the cold edge of the system. A journey outward from Jupiter to Pluto is therefore, read mythically, a descent to Hades.
A scientific event as myth. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined a planet as a body that orbits the Sun, is nearly round, and has cleared its orbital neighborhood. Pluto fails the third test and was reclassified as a dwarf planet [3]. The film reads this taxonomic decision as an exile from the family, the event that sets the story in motion.

Each character is built from three layers: the planet's appearance, the god's attributes, and a role in the family drama (Table I). According to the production notes [4], the core emotion, a twisted family love, was drawn from Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga Fire Punch. Three choices stand out. First, Jupiter's body is his planet. The ochre trousers and the red marks wound into his skin let a viewer see the gas giant in a human figure without any caption. Second, Hades becomes a little sister. In myth Hades is Zeus's brother. Recasting the god as a younger sister turns sibling rivalry into protective love, the Fire Punch emotion the creator sought. She never appears; she exists only as the locket and the final title card, and her absence drives the plot. Third, Cerberus changes masters. The hound that guards the underworld travels with Jupiter. It is a living trace of Pluto and a sign that the journey's goal is the realm of the dead.

The plot follows the real order of the planets outward from Jupiter. Each stage pairs a human-scale scene on the ground with a cosmic-scale shot in space, so every act happens twice: as a walk and as a planetary event.
Exile. Two title cards: "In 2006, Pluto was ejected from the solar system" and "Jupiter decided to go find his little sister, Pluto."
Departure (Jupiter). A wounded young man wakes beside the three-headed dog, the locket in his hand. He crosses a plain striped like Jupiter's clouds and rides a ruined bus, clutching the dog.
Saturn. Planetary rings sweep across the sky as he walks a mirror-like salt flat.
Uranus. He runs across a frozen sea below ice cliffs; in space, Jupiter shatters Uranus into shards of ice.
Neptune. In a sea fortress under trident banners, Poseidon raises his glowing trident to bar the way; in space, Jupiter collides with Neptune.
Arrival. Jupiter hangs beside a small grey Pluto. On a shore he opens his palm to the locket, then clenches a fist. Two final cards read "Hades" and "Just wait a moment."
The route carries two further readings. Read genealogically, it runs backward through the family tree: Saturn is Cronus, the father, and Uranus is Ouranos, the grandfather. Jupiter's violence against them restages the Greek succession myth, in which each generation overthrows the last. Read mythically, the outward journey is a katabasis [2]. The synopsis calls it crossing "a river that cannot be recrossed," an allusion to the Styx. The film also turns the IAU criterion into irony. Pluto lost its status for failing to clear its orbital neighborhood [3]. Jupiter, the most massive planet, does exactly that, clearing Uranus and Neptune from his path. The power that defines a planet becomes the brother's destructive love. The ending withholds resolution: the sister is named but never seen, and "Just wait a moment" leaves the rescue open.

Metaphor-driven direction fits AI production well. The production notes [4] report that faces, costumes and proportions drifted between cuts, that Cerberus often split into several separate dogs, and that a usable clip took 4 to 10 or more generations. A story told through dialogue and continuous performance would expose these flaws. A story told through emblems (red markings, a trident, a heart-shaped locket, a ringed sky) survives them, because meaning rests on symbols the viewer recognizes, not on exact likeness. The division of labor confirms this. AI generated images and clips, while the human decided theme, structure, selection, pacing and final judgment. The planet–god mapping is that human contribution: it organizes every generated shot into one legible system. GREAT RED SPOT shows that a familiar double vocabulary, planetary names that are also divine names, can carry a complete family tragedy in four minutes with four lines of text. Future work will combine Blender or live footage with AI video for better motion control, and train on character sheets for consistency.

Acknowledgments. This research was supported by the Gyeongbuk ANCHOR system through the GyeongbukANCHOR CENTER, funded by the Ministry of Education (MoE) and Gyeonsangbuk-do, Republic of Korea (2026-ANCHOR-15-107).