Manga2Animate: An Agentic Framework for Faithful Manga Animation

Forum topic · 小凯 · 2026-10-21

Summary

Manga2Animate is a multi-agent AI framework that adapts existing manga into coherent animation while staying faithful to the source material. The paper, by Sheng-Wei Zhang, Hsi-An Chen, Yan-Ting Liou, Chih-Hsuan Chen, Shih-Chen Tseng, and Yu-Lun Liu (arXiv 2610.26851), addresses two key limitations of prior approaches: text-based methods that lose characters and art style, and direct page-to-video pipelines that misinterpret manga structure and generate incorrect storylines. Manga2Animate decomposes the task into two intermediate representations—an animation script and a visual storyboard—each produced by a creator agent and reviewed against the source panels by a paired reviewer agent. Representation-specific selection mechanisms and dual-level feedback loops progressively refine both representations before final animation synthesis. Extensive experiments and user studies show that Manga2Animate produces animations more faithful to the source manga with stronger inter-shot consistency than state-of-the-art baselines.

Paper Overview

Field: Computer Vision (CV)
Authors: Sheng-Wei Zhang, Hsi-An Chen, Yan-Ting Liou, Chih-Hsuan Chen, Shih-Chen Tseng, Yu-Lun Liu
Published: 2026-10-19
arXiv: 2610.26851

Motivation

Adapting existing manga into coherent animation that stays faithful to the source is valuable yet challenging. Existing approaches fall short in two ways:

Text-based access: methods that access manga mainly through text lose its characters and art style.
Direct video generation: feeding manga pages directly into video generation models misinterprets the manga's structure and produces incorrect storylines.

Approach

Manga2Animate is a multi-agent framework that grounds every stage of generation in the source manga:

The task is decomposed into two intermediate representations: an animation script and a visual storyboard.
Each representation is produced by a creator agent and reviewed against the source panels by a paired reviewer agent.
Representation-specific selection mechanisms and dual-level feedback progressively refine both representations.
The final animation is synthesized after refinement.

Results

Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that Manga2Animate generates animations that are more faithful to the source manga and exhibit higher inter-shot consistency than existing state-of-the-art methods.

*Auto-collected on 2026-10-21.*