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Turn your kid's drawing into a dancing cartoon

Meta's free Animated Drawings demo makes a child's character walk, jump and dance. Use AI to turn it into a little story too.

By Alan Brown

Video cover: Turn your kid's drawing into a dancing cartoon, free
Watch on Instagram ↗
Jump to the prompt ↓

🖍️ Your kid's drawing can now walk, dance and wave.

  • 🎨 It's called Animated Drawings, a free research demo from Meta's AI research team: sketch.metademolab.com/
  • 📸 Snap a photo of the drawing, and the AI finds the character and cuts it out.
  • 🦴 It gives the character a skeleton (arms, legs, head), then you pick a move: walk, jump or dance.
  • 🍎 Teachers use it too: kids animate their character, then write a story about it.
  • 🧑‍💻 The research code is open source on GitHub: github.com/facebookresearch/AnimatedDrawings

Context & limitations

It's a research demo for personal, non-commercial use, and it isn't available in Illinois or Texas. The prompt below turns the character into a story your child can read.

Do this yourself

Help me turn my child's drawing into a short animated story. My child is ___ years old, and the drawing is of ___ (describe it, or I'll upload a photo). Ask me one question at a time: 1. What's the character's name, and what does it like doing? 2. Where does it live? 3. What problem could it have in a very short story? Then give me: - A 5–8 line story my child can read aloud, at their reading level, starring the character. - Which move to pick in Meta's Animated Drawings demo (walk, jump, dance or wave) for each part of the story. - Quick tips for the photo so the tool finds the character: one character, plain white paper, arms and legs not touching the body, good light. - Two follow-up questions I can ask my child to keep the story going. Before suggesting the tool, check that sketch.metademolab.com is still online and note its current terms. Keep everything friendly and age-appropriate.

Animating the character is the fun part; giving it a name, a personality and a short story turns ten minutes of play into reading and writing practice.

Watch on InstagramSource

Want to build this with a teacher?

Pathwise Academy runs small, hands-on AI classes in Singapore for ages 10–17 and adults.

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