Animation style and character consistency

Inputs to prepare

• —A chosen medium and its technical traits (line, number of shading steps, frame rate, material)
• —A text card for each character covering age, face, hair, outfit, props and proportions, or one reference image per character, which you can make first with an image model
• —A short story broken down by seconds or shots
• —Optional style and environment references
• —Any dialogue, sound requirements, duration and aspect ratio

Method steps

1. 01Lock the medium first. Describe it and its technical traits in one paragraph, then say what it is not. The painted stop-motion prompt specifies 12 fps on twos, constant brush boil and no motion blur, and says not clay, not 3D. The sword-duel prompt fixes thin coloured outlines and two-to-three-step cel shading. One creator even bans imitating any existing studio and describes only line and colour.
2. 02Write a card for each character and give them a name. The family comedy lists Mom, Samatha, John and two others up front; the kite short spells out each child's hair, eyes, clothes and shoes. Refer to each character by that name in every shot and never rephrase it.
3. 03If you use reference images, give each one a job. The shipwright prompt has image 1 supply only the environment structure and image 2 only the silhouette and wardrobe, and tells the model to ignore their original rendering and pose. The sword-duel prompt uses its references only for face, eye colour, hair, outfit, build and weapon, never their background, pose or framing.
4. 04Add a consistency clause that also says what may change. The sword-duel prompt allows only expression, gaze, mouth, pose, breathing and natural hair and cloth movement; everything else stays fixed.
5. 05Write the shots by seconds or by cut, naming who is on screen and how the camera changes. The family comedy blocks its scenes as 0–5s and so on; the sword duel runs Cut 1 to Cut 5 with contact points and camera angles.
6. 06Close with bans: face changes, redesigns, extra characters, duplicates, outfit or hair-colour swaps, mixed styles, photorealism, text and watermarks.

Variables to swap

• —Medium: 2D cel, 3D cartoon, clay, painted stop-motion or ink comic, each with its own technical description.
• —Cast: how many characters and each one's card. More characters is harder; see the retests below.
• —References: whether you use them, how many, and what each one is allowed to supply.
• —Story beats and shot count: from 8 seconds in five cuts to 30 seconds across several scenes.
• —Sound: how many lines, whether there is music, ambience only, or no generated audio at all.
• —Duration and aspect ratio.

Common failures and limits

• —Drifting toward realism. In an automatic check on 2026-08-11 (MiniMax H3 768p, three-model vote, no human review) of a clay caricature case, the note says the cute clay figure turned into a realistic adult. Creators guard with bans: no photorealism and no 3D (kite short), no semi-realism or mixed styles (sword duel), not clay and no interpolation (painted stop-motion). (Source: earlier automatic retest note and prompt bans)
• —Characters bleeding into each other. The sword-duel prompt bans feature mixing, face averaging, hair-colour swaps, outfit swaps and clones; the kite prompt bans extra characters and duplicates. (Source: prompt bans)
• —Copying the whole reference image. The shipwright and sword-duel prompts both take only character traits and ignore the reference's rendering, pose, background and framing. Also, our retest data does not record whether the creator's reference images were supplied, so scores on reference-based cases do not test the reference workflow. (Source: prompt constraints, limits of our retest data)
• —Bigger casts and longer scripts scored lower in our retests: the five-person 30-second comedy got 64.9, the shipwright turnaround 63.6, the painted stop-motion 69.6, while two-character 14-second shorts got 90.4 and 85.7. Each was generated once, on a model other than the creator's, so this cannot tell us why. (Source: retest data, weak evidence)
• —Not enough room for the dialogue. In the family comedy retest the transcript stops halfway through Grandma's punchline. Output length is not recorded, so we cannot tell whether time ran out or something else happened. (Source: retest data, single generation)