Alibaba Tongyi Lab Releases Wan-Animate Model: Revolutionizing Character Animation and Motion Transfer Technology

In September 2025, Tongyi Lab under Alibaba Group officially launched a groundbreaking animation model called Wan-Animate. This advanced AI animation technology can precisely replicate facial expressions and body movements from reference videos, achieving high-fidelity character animation generation and character replacement, ushering in a new era of animation production.

What is Wan-Animate?

Wan-Animate is a unified framework that integrates animation creation and character replacement. Users only need to provide a character image and a reference video, and the model can make static character images display the dynamic expressions and movements from the video, generating vivid and realistic animated videos. Additionally, Wan-Animate can seamlessly replace animated characters into existing video scenes while maintaining consistent environmental lighting and color tones, achieving natural integration into the scene.

Core Technical Highlights

• Unified Input Framework: Through innovative input methods, it simultaneously integrates reference images, temporal frame information, and environmental lighting, reducing data distribution bias during training and improving generation stability.
• Comprehensive Motion Control:
  • Uses spatially-aligned skeletal signals to achieve precise replication of body movements.
  • Extracts facial implicit features from reference videos to achieve high-precision expression reproduction.
• Environmental Lighting Adaptation: Embeds an auxiliary relighting module (Relighting LoRA) that dynamically adjusts the lighting and colors of animated characters based on the video environment, ensuring harmonious integration between replaced characters and background environments.

Features and Application Scenarios

• Animation Mode: Based on a single character image and video reference, achieves realistic motion and expression animation.
• Replacement Mode: Replaces animated characters into existing videos while maintaining consistent environmental lighting, suitable for film special effects and advertising production.
• Wide Applications:
  • Film and TV production: Classic character performance reproduction and cross-style transformations.
  • Advertising creativity: Character replacement and commercial photography editing.
  • Short video content: Dance movement reproduction and dynamic shot generation.
  • Digital virtual avatars: Personalized virtual anchors and animated character creation.

Advantages and Prospects

Wan-Animate significantly simplifies traditional animation production workflows, eliminating the need for complex 3D modeling or motion capture equipment, greatly reducing creation barriers and production cycles. Its high-quality, high-resolution video output supports various aspect ratios, meeting different platform requirements. The model surpasses existing open-source and commercial animation frameworks across multiple metrics, demonstrating excellent performance and user experience.

With the implementation of Wan-Animate, Alibaba's Tongyi Lab has injected powerful momentum into the animation and video creation field, driving digital content production into a new era of intelligence.

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For more detailed technical information and model downloads, please visit Alibaba's official channels and open-source community platforms.