From static panels to moving frames
Adapting manga into coherent animation that preserves the source's characters and art style remains a persistent challenge. Current approaches typically either extract text descriptions, which discards visual personality, or feed raw manga pages directly into video generation models, where the model's misunderstanding of manga layout and narrative flow leads to inconsistent storylines and broken character continuity. Both paths fail to keep the source's visual and narrative intent intact throughout the animation process.
An agentic decomposition into script and storyboard
Manga2Animate reframes the problem as a two-stage agentic pipeline. The task is decomposed into an animation script, which captures pose, action, and panel transition logic, and a visual storyboard, which encodes character positioning, panel composition, and stylistic cues. Each intermediate representation is generated by a creator agent and immediately evaluated by a paired reviewer agent that compares the output against the original source panels. This creator‑reviewer loop ensures that every generated element can be traced back to a specific panel and panel sequence.
Representation-specific selection and dual-level feedback
Beyond simple generation, the framework applies representation‑specific selection mechanisms that choose the most faithful frames or panel arrangements from the candidates produced by the creator agents. Dual‑level feedback then refines both the script and the storyboard: the first level provides corrective signals at the granularity of individual panels, while the second level enforces global narrative coherence across shots. These feedback signals are not generic—they are tailored to the kind of information each representation carries, so the script receives timing and flow corrections, and the storyboard receives spatial and style corrections.
Experimental results and user validation
Automated evaluation across a set of manga adaptation tasks shows that Manga2Animate produces animations that are more faithful to the source material and more consistent from shot to shot than state‑of‑the‑art video generation baselines. A concurrent user study corroborates these findings, with participants preferring the output of Manga2Animate for its faithfulness to the original panels and its ability to maintain character and style consistency throughout the generated sequence.
What the framework enables
Because every generation stage is grounded in the source panels through the creator‑reviewer cycle, the approach opens the door to fine‑grained control over the animation process. Creators could intervene at the script level to adjust pacing or at the storyboard level to reposition characters without rerunning the entire pipeline. The dual‑feedback structure also suggests a path toward iterative refinement, where artists can correct specific aspects of the animation and have those corrections propagated through the remaining stages.
Limitations and current scope
The evaluation is focused on manga-to‑animation conversion; it is unclear how the framework would transfer to other forms of sequential art or to purely text‑driven story generation without substantial modification. The creator‑reviewer agents operate within a fixed architecture, and extending the approach to longer-form narratives or more complex panel interactions would require additional design work. Additionally, the user study was conducted on a limited set of manga pages, so broader generalizability remains to be established.