# A Method for Animating Children's Drawings of the Human Figure

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12741 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12741/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03477/) (2017)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Photo Wake-Up: 3D Character Animation from a Single Photo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02246/) (2018)
- [Transfer Learning for Pose Estimation of Illustrated Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01819/) (2021)
- [CharacterGAN: Few-Shot Keypoint Character Animation and Reposing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03141/) (2021)
- [Neural Puppet: Generative Layered Cartoon Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02060/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Breathing Life Into Sketches Using Text-to-Video Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13608/) (2023)
- [It's All About Your Sketch: Democratising Sketch Control in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07234/) (2024)
- [AniClipart: Clipart Animation with Text-to-Video Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12347/) (2024)
- [Sketch2Anim: Towards Transferring Sketch Storyboards into 3D Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19189/) (2025)
- [FlipSketch: Flipping Static Drawings to Text-Guided Sketch Animations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10818/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Sketch Animation: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with Temporal Consistency and Rigidity Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19381/) (2024)
- [Multi-Object Sketch Animation by Scene Decomposition and Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19351/) (2025)
- [FairyGen: Storied Cartoon Video from a Single Child-Drawn Character](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21272/) (2025)
- [Toon3D: Seeing Cartoons from New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10320/) (2024)
- [Occlusion-robust Stylization for Drawing-based 3D Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00398/) (2025)
- [See-through: Single-image Layer Decomposition for Anime Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03749/) (2026)
- [From Rigging to Waving: 3D-Guided Diffusion for Natural Animation of Hand-Drawn Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06573/) (2025)
- [Sketch2PoseNet: Efficient and Generalized Sketch to 3D Human Pose Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26196/) (2025)
- [Sketch2Motion: Text-driven 2D Sketch to 3D Animation via Diffusion-guided Skeleton Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28394/) (2026)
- [Instance-guided Cartoon Editing with a Large-scale Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01943/) (2023)
- [Maia: A Real-time Non-Verbal Chat for Human-AI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06385/) (2024)
- [DreamDance: Animating Character Art via Inpainting Stable Gaussian Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24733/) (2025)
- [Vector sketch animation generation with differentiable motion trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25857/) (2025)
- [ProxyImg: Towards Highly-Controllable Image Representation via Hierarchical Disentangled Proxy Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01881/) (2026)
- [SPECSIA: Stylization Dataset for Novel-View Enhancement in Drawing-based 3D Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00525/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Children's drawings have a wonderful inventiveness, creativity, and variety to them. We present a system that automatically animates children's drawings of the human figure, is robust to the variance inherent in these depictions, and is simple and straightforward enough for anyone to use. We demonstrate the value and broad appeal of our approach by building and releasing the Animated Drawings Demo, a freely available public website that has been used by millions of people around the world. We present a set of experiments exploring the amount of training data needed for fine-tuning, as well as a perceptual study demonstrating the appeal of a novel twisted perspective retargeting technique. Finally, we introduce the Amateur Drawings Dataset, a first-of-its-kind annotated dataset, collected via the public demo, containing over 178,000 amateur drawings and corresponding user-accepted character bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and joint location annotations.