Claude Animation Skill

Claude Animation

Hand-drawn 2D animation, written as code. Give it a story and get a frame-exact MP4 that looks drawn:
paper grain, hatching, brush ink, watercolour that blooms, glossy characters with real anatomy, whole worlds
in cross-section, and sound synthesised from the same timeline as the picture.

MIT licensed. Node + ffmpeg. No browser, no GPU, no API keys.

Why this exists

Ask a model to "animate a story in JavaScript" and you get flat shapes sliding around. What makes code look
drawn isn't the model, it's a vocabulary of detail and a habit of looking. This skill is both,
written down after making the films:

1. A detail bible. Every surface gets base → texture → edge. Soil is hatch + strata + pebbles; chitin is a
gradient with form hatch, a specular streak, rim light and setae; leaves have serrated edges and pale veins;
fungus is a spongy mass that grows. Line weight falls off with depth. The skill makes the model ask for
detail surface by surface instead of hoping for it.

2. Rigs with anatomy. The ant has a segmented gaster, a petiole node, a humped thorax, a compound eye with
two highlights, toothed mandibles that open, elbowed beaded antennae, and six legs with femur, knee, tibia,
tarsus and claws, walking on a real tripod gait. It can carry, chew, rear up, sweat, blink, be a queen — and
draw itself in layers: sketch, ink, colour, polish.

3. A colony kit. Leaves you can cut, leaf pieces to carry, eggs, larvae, cocoons, stores, a fungus garden,
roots, and nestCanvas() — chambers and tunnels baked into textured soil, returning paths an ant can walk.

4. A harness that makes you look. sheet, strip (12 consecutive frames around a fast action),
verify (a frame must be identical rendered in or out of order), and a staged render that never
overwrites a good…