Anime style: 2D cel look, limited animation, clean line weight
A filled 7-part prompt for a hand-drawn anime shot: flat cel shading, animation on twos, a held painted background, and the three things the style breaks in current video models.
SUBJECT: {subject, with 2-3 visual details: hair colour and shape, one accessory, outfit colours} ACTION: {one action, one beat, e.g. 'turns from the window and lets the curtain fall'} SETTING: a quiet 2D background painted in flat colour fields with a soft gradient sky, late afternoon, a suburban street with power lines and a vending machine; the background holds still while the character moves CAMERA: medium shot, eye level, static; one slow horizontal pan at the end of the shot, no zoom LENS & LIGHT: flat, no lens; cel shading with two tones per surface (base colour and one hard-edged shadow), a thin rim of light on the hair, no gradients on the skin STYLE: hand-drawn 2D anime cel look, limited animation on twos (12 drawings per second), a consistent clean dark line weight around characters, thinner lines inside, backgrounds without outlines, slight paper-like texture, muted pastel palette with one saturated accent; no 3D, no photoreal, no CGI shading SOUND: soft wind, distant cicadas, no music DURATION: 5 seconds. No on-screen text, no subtitles, no logos, no speech.
Paste into the video model as one paragraph; remove the labels once you are happy with the content.
Tips
- What it breaks: mouths and speech (the lip flap drifts), fast action (the model smears instead of drawing in-betweens), and any text, including signs. Keep the character silent and the action slow.
- Faces drift within the shot more than in photoreal styles. One character, one beat, under 6 seconds; use the first-frame method with a still from an image model for anything that must match a previous clip.
- Aspect: 16:9 for a scene with a background; 9:16 only for a character close-up, because the painted background is what sells the style and a vertical crop removes it.
- Try first: Kling or Runway with an image-model still as the first frame; the 'on twos' instruction is honoured more often from a still than from text alone. A suggestion to start with, not a measurement.
| works with | Kling: Kling text/image-to-video prompts. · Runway: Runway Gen prompts and camera controls. · Veo: Google text-to-video / image-to-video prompts. · Image models: Midjourney, Flux, Imagen: keyframes and style boards for image-to-video. |
| cost | Free. The video or image model you paste it into has its own pricing. |
| status | Unverified: written from the technique, not yet run end to end by us. |
| license | CC BY 4.0 for the text here; skills are MIT. |
| updated | 2026-11-01 |
| for agents | anime-cel-style-video-prompt.md |
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