Animate is a Claude Code skill that renders short videos

Making a 30-second animated explainer or a vertical launch reel still takes a motion designer, Adobe After Effects and a day of rendering. A new MIT-licensed Claude Code skill called Animate asks for a prompt, a reference track and a style, then draws every frame procedurally in a browser canvas and exports an MP4.

Animate was created on 2026-10-04 by a developer who publishes under the GitHub name cth9191. The repository has 230 stars and 33 forks on day five, and is distributed as a Claude Code plugin at cth9191/animate as well as a plain folder for a direct install.

How a run goes

The skill walks a user through five approvals before it spends time on the final render. After an intake pass with questions about subject, format, voice and look, the user approves a numbered beat table of the story, then two to four full-size style frames, then every beat as a storyboard panel. Only after the storyboard is signed off does the build step animate the approved panels and render the MP4.

The README calls each early step "cheap", because the point is to catch wrong story, wrong look or wrong pacing on a still frame rather than after an hour of rendering. The last step is delivery with measured checks: cuts falling on the beat grid, a loudness curve matching the story arc, the loudest moment landing after the silence that leads into it, and narration pace within readable range.

What the styles do

Seven styles ship with the project and one slot is left for a custom look matched from the user's own references. The built-in list is cut paper, crosshatch ink, risograph print, sketchbook, math (a Manim-like black stage with axes and colour-coded variables), pixel art drawn at native resolution and upscaled nearest-neighbour, and isometric line art.

A style is a plug-in rather than a theme: the story grammar, timing, sound engine and renderer stay the same, and the style supplies the drawing kit. A piece picks its style with one line in piece.json. The author's own look option measures the palette, line weight, texture, motion and cut rhythm of the reference material, draws one or two frames next to those references and asks for sign-off, then saves the kit as styles/<name>/ so later pieces reuse it.

What ships with the kit

The repository bundles a story grammar covering eight short-form formats, a kit with seeded randomness, cameras, shape-morph transitions and a loudness stage for phone playback, and a tool chain for build, test tiles, stills, storyboard, export, review and reference comparison. A voice-over step writes the script, takes one line per generation through an ElevenLabs connector (or a user recording), aligns timing with faster-whisper locally and retimes the picture when a take changes.

Animate also screenshots the user's own site or imports logo files, so a launch reel can show the real product inside the chosen style, and lays out every piece for 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 and 16:9 rather than cropping. A frame-hash check confirms a change to the kit left a finished piece pixel-identical, which matters once a team has several pieces built on the same kit and the next change should not quietly rewrite the pieces already finished.

Source

Primary source: cth9191/animate on GitHub, MIT.