Animated Drawings

Animated Drawings is a free web tool from Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab that uses artificial intelligence to transform hand-drawn characters into short animated videos. It is designed for parents, educators, and anyone who wants to bring their artwork or their children's doodles to life without requiring animation software, technical expertise, or an account.

How It Works

The tool guides users through a five-step browser-based workflow. After uploading a drawing of a character — ideally on a plain background — the AI detects the figure and presents a bounding box that the user can adjust. It then segments the character from the background using AI-driven masking, with a manual correction option for complex cases. Next, the tool places a skeletal rig of joints on the character, which users can reposition to better match the drawing's proportions. Finally, the user selects a preset animation and the tool retargets the motion onto the character, producing a downloadable MP4 video.

Key Features

• Preset motion library: Animations are organised into Walking, Jumping, Dancing, and Funny categories, providing immediate variety without additional configuration.
• Interactive skeleton and mask editing: Users can reposition joints and correct the character outline, improving animation quality for drawings with unusual proportions or cluttered backgrounds.
• MP4 export: Finished animations are downloadable as video files suitable for sharing on social media or saving as a personal keepsake.
• No account required: The tool runs entirely in a web browser and requires no registration or sign-in.
• Open source: Meta has published the animation code and the Amateur Drawings Dataset on GitHub under the facebookresearch/AnimatedDrawings repository, making the system available for research and further development.

Underlying Technology

Most AI models trained on photographs perform poorly on children's drawings because abstract art features exaggerated proportions, missing limbs, and inconsistent style. Meta's system was fine-tuned on millions of amateur sketches, enabling it to reliably detect figures, estimate poses, and segment characters that standard vision models would not recognise.

The animation pipeline performs four core tasks: detecting the drawn figure using object detection models; segmenting the character from its background at the pixel level; estimating skeletal pose even for non-standard body shapes; and retargeting 3D motion capture data to the 2D character using a technique called twisted-perspective retargeting, which produces natural-looking movement while preserving the original drawing style.

Use Cases

• Families: Parents can upload children's artwork and create animated videos that turn a drawing session into a shareable, interactive experience.
• Educators: Teachers can use the tool to introduce animation, AI, and digital storytelling concepts in an accessible, hands-on format.
• Hobbyist creators: Illustrators and casual artists can experiment with character animation for social media content or personal creative projects.
• Researchers and developers: The open-source code and dataset enable teams to build on Meta's models for academic work or new applications in creative AI.

Availability and Pricing

Animated Drawings is free to use at sketch.metademolab.com with no subscription, download, or account required. Users are offered the option to contribute their uploaded image to Meta's public research dataset, though this is entirely voluntary. The tool's acceptable use policy restricts it to personal, non-commercial purposes.