Wan-Animate: Unified Character Animation and Replacement with Holistic
  Replication
Authors: name: Gang Cheng; name: Xin Gao; name: Li Hu; name: Siqi Hu; name: Mingyang Huang; name: Chaonan Ji; name: Ju Li; name: Dechao Meng; name: Jinwei Qi; name: Penchong Qiao; name: Zhen Shen; name: Yafei Song; name: Ke Sun; name: Linrui Tian; name: Feng Wang; name: Guangyuan Wang; name: Qi Wang; name: Zhongjian Wang; name: Jiayu Xiao; name: Sheng Xu; name: Bang Zhang; name: Peng Zhang; name: Xindi Zhang; name: Zhe Zhang; name: Jingren Zhou; name: Lian Zhuo
Published: 2025-09-17 15:00:57

Abstract: 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.