ClaudeAnimationBase gives Claude a hand-painted cartoon character and 31 acted emotions so one prompt returns an animated short in p5.js

Writing a 15-second cartoon by hand is a half-day's work for someone who already knows an animation tool, and more than that for anyone who does not.

ClaudeAnimationBase is a GitHub repository by John Heibel, created on 23 September 2026 and released under MIT. It gives Claude a ready-made cast and drawing kit so the model can write an animated short in p5.js from a one-line description. The repo had 803 stars and 75 forks on 5 October, 12 days after creation. The README says it is a starter kit for animating hand-painted cartoons with Claude.

What is inside the kit

The repository bundles three things the model needs to draw a scene: a character called Clawd, 31 acted emotion poses, and a p5.js project with p5.brush, a drawing library that renders hand-painted strokes in the browser. The author also includes a guide for Claude that explains how the character moves, what the brush strokes do, and how a scene is assembled.

Everything runs in a browser window. The user writes a sentence to Claude, Claude writes p5.js code that uses the kit, and the sketch plays as a short animation. Nothing is sent to a video model and nothing is pre-rendered.

What it does not do

The kit draws Clawd. It does not draw other characters, and the character style is fixed. The visual output is p5.brush strokes in a browser, which is a specific hand-drawn look rather than a general animation engine. There is no sound in the starter kit, and no export to video out of the box.

A user who wants a different character, a photographic style, or a 30-second film in a client's brand will need to extend the kit or pick a different tool. Those limits are what makes the kit useful: a model that is asked to draw anything often draws nothing recognisable, so narrowing the domain to one character and one brush is what gives the output a consistent look.

Why the pattern matters more than the character

The news here is not Clawd specifically. It is that a working short-form animation kit now ships as a few hundred lines of p5.js plus a style guide written for a model to read. The same pattern applies to any other medium a model can draw with code: SVG for diagrams, Three.js for 3D, Remotion for video. Give the model the drawing library, a known cast and a style guide, and it writes the scene.

The traction

803 stars in 12 days is 67 stars a day on GitHub, which is enough to say the repository is being noticed by developers. Nothing about the star count tells you whether the output is good. A reader who wants to judge that will clone the repo and ask Claude to draw a scene they recognise, which is the test the project actually asks of the kit.

Heibel also credits the p5.brush library, written by Alejandro Campos Uribe, which the kit depends on for the painted look. The MIT license covers the starter kit itself.

Source

• Repository: JohnHeibel/ClaudeAnimationBase on GitHub