Juanman Animation: Bringing Images to Life

For the last seven months, I’ve been experimenting with AI for video generation. I was amazed at how it can bring classical paintings to life. In some animations, I tried to inject my own stories, which are often hilarious.


From classical paintings, I attempted to bring old photos to life with AI. Most of the results are astounding. Some are ridiculous and totally unusable.


I’ve been doing 2D animation for the last 20 years, and I thought, Why not try AI? It would surely make animation a lot easier – and faster. First, I tried animating comic covers, and the results are outstanding!


Then I tried animating some of my drawings and saw how easy animation could be using AI.


I’ve done several 2D animated videos using AI and have come to the realization that AI can make things easy and fast – but not always the way you want your outcome to be like.


Here are three 2-second animations of an image. The first two videos used AI. The videos were generated with the prompt “The man strikes the cat with the broom. The cat avoids the broom and jumps away”.


Both produced smooth animations, but did not meet my expectations of a) a forceful strike of the broom, and b) consistency in the character’s look. The two videos came up with different reactions from the cat. In one video, the cat ran away, which is what I wanted. In another video, the cat looks like it is playing with the broom.


The third video is my hand-drawn animation, done in 2 days, or roughly 10 to 12 hours, for a two-second animation! Which AI did in less than 5 minutes!


So my answer to the question whether AI is good for 2D animation is both yes and no.


AI makes lip-syncing very easy.


For action-filled sequences, AI will most likely fail. Hand-drawn animation is still the best option.


For a character that simply walks, AI is usable, except for some unacceptable blurs in the character’s face.


I would still experiment with AI for 2D animation because sometimes I’m too lazy, and I want to get things done fast. But when AI fails, I can always go back to hand-drawn animation, which has been time-tested and very reliable.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 0