# Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic Replication

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14055 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14055/

## Key facts

- Cited by 80 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [Motion Representations for Articulated Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11280/) (2021)
- [Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14367/) (2022)
- [LivePortrait: Efficient Portrait Animation with Stitching and Retargeting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03168/) (2024)
- [MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19680/) (2024)
- [AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17694/) (2024)
- [VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10667/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12090/) (2026)
- [VINO: A Unified Visual Generator with Interleaved OmniModal Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02358/) (2026)
- [DreamID-Omni: Unified Framework for Controllable Human-Centric Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12160/) (2026)
- [SCAIL: Towards Studio-Grade Character Animation via In-Context Learning of 3D-Consistent Pose Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05905/) (2025)
- [EchoMotion: Unified Human Video and Motion Generation via Dual-Modality Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18814/) (2025)
- [Knot Forcing: Taming Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models for Real-time Infinite Interactive Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21734/) (2025)
- [SteadyDancer: Harmonized and Coherent Human Image Animation with First-Frame Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19320/) (2025)
- [Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13674/) (2025)
- [PISCO: Precise Video Instance Insertion with Sparse Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08277/) (2026)
- [One-to-All Animation: Alignment-Free Character Animation and Image Pose Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22940/) (2025)
- [MACE-Dance: Motion-Appearance Cascaded Experts for Music-Driven Dance Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18181/) (2025)
- [ConsID-Gen: View-Consistent and Identity-Preserving Image-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10113/) (2026)
- [SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-End In-Context Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10804/) (2026)
- [MoCha:End-to-End Video Character Replacement without Structural Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08587/) (2026)
- [CoMoVi: Co-Generation of 3D Human Motions and Realistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10632/) (2026)
- [OmniTransfer: All-in-one Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14250/) (2026)
- [FlashPortrait: 6x Faster Infinite Portrait Animation with Adaptive Latent Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16900/) (2025)
- [DreamActor-M2: Universal Character Image Animation via Spatiotemporal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21716/) (2026)
- [Worldscape-MoE: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts World Model for Scalable Heterogeneous Action Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03964/) (2026)
- [Exploring MLLM-Diffusion Information Transfer with MetaCanvas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11464/) (2025)
- [DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15524/) (2025)
- [Kling-MotionControl Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03160/) (2026)
- [VEFX-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Generic Video Editing and Visual Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16272/) (2026)
- [SocialDirector: Training-Free Social Interaction Control for Multi-Person Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10079/) (2026)
- [Making Avatars Interact: Towards Text-Driven Human-Object Interaction for Controllable Talking Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01538/) (2026)
- [Let Your Image Move with Your Motion! -- Implicit Multi-Object Multi-Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01000/) (2026)
- [Large-scale Codec Avatars: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Large-scale Avatar Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02320/) (2026)
- [TripVVT: A Large-Scale Triplet Dataset and a Coarse-Mask Baseline for In-the-Wild Video Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27958/) (2026)
- [EverAnimate: Minute-Scale Human Animation via Latent Flow Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15042/) (2026)
- [OmniDance: Multimodal Driven Dance Video Generation with Large-scale Internet Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30019/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Wan-Animate, a unified framework for character animation and replacement. Given a character image and a reference video, Wan-Animate can animate the character by precisely replicating the expressions and movements of the character in the video to generate high-fidelity character videos. Alternatively, it can integrate the animated character into the reference video to replace the original character, replicating the scene's lighting and color tone to achieve seamless environmental integration. Wan-Animate is built upon the Wan model. To adapt it for character animation tasks, we employ a modified input paradigm to differentiate between reference conditions and regions for generation. This design unifies multiple tasks into a common symbolic representation. We use spatially-aligned skeleton signals to replicate body motion and implicit facial features extracted from source images to reenact expressions, enabling the generation of character videos with high controllability and expressiveness. Furthermore, to enhance environmental integration during character replacement, we develop an auxiliary Relighting LoRA. This module preserves the character's appearance consistency while applying the appropriate environmental lighting and color tone. Experimental results demonstrate that Wan-Animate achieves state-of-the-art performance. We are committed to open-sourcing the model weights and its source code.