Cinemation is the family of Yeşilçam Animation styles that animates scenes with your own characters, narration and music; eight of its styles use a video model, while Shadowmation and Pixelmation are drawn by a 2.5D animation engine. There are ten Cinemation styles, and one of them, Wuxiamation, comes in two looks, which gives eleven distinct ways to film the same story. This post walks through each one and the kind of job it is good at.

What the ten styles share

Every Cinemation style works the same way under the surface, which is why switching between them costs you nothing but a click. The director, a language model, reads your text and writes the scenes. Your characters, up to four per project, are drawn from your name and description or from a reference image you upload. Each scene becomes a keyframe in the chosen look, the video model animates it (in Shadowmation and Pixelmation, a 2.5D animation engine does), and narration, dialogue and music are laid on top.

All of them support the full Speech selector: Narrator, Dialogue, Both or Silent. All of them keep a speaking character’s voice fixed across the film, and the eight video-model styles also lip-sync the speaking character’s mouth; Shadowmation and Pixelmation show the speaker in the captions instead. And all of them render to MP4, WebP or GIF in 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1, with a target length between 10 and 120 seconds. The only real decision is the look, so here they are.

Wuxiamation: two looks for martial-arts legends

Wuxiamation is made for tales of swordsmen, mountain monasteries and duels on rooftops. Legend 2D paints them as an ink-and-gold scroll, flat and ceremonial, the way a legend would be illustrated. Cinematic 3D gives the same story depth, lighting and camera movement, closer to a feature film. We use Legend 2D for myths and retellings, and Cinematic 3D when the action itself is the point.

Celmation, Toonmation and Toymation: the familiar three

  • Celmation is classic anime: clean line work, expressive eyes, painted skies. It suits coming-of-age stories, quiet slice-of-life moments and anything that needs emotion carried by faces.
  • Toonmation is the classic cartoon, with bouncy timing and bold shapes. It is the style for comedy, for children’s channels and for mascots that need to be likeable in two seconds.
  • Toymation is the cute 3D feature-film look: soft materials, round forms, warm light. Brand characters, toys that come alive and family stories fit here.

If you are unsure where to begin, begin with one of these three. They are the looks audiences read most easily, which makes them good for testing a story before you commit to something more particular.

Neonmation and Pixelmation: two kinds of nostalgia for the future

Neonmation is cyberpunk: rain on dark streets, neon signage, glowing edges. It gives weight to tech product teasers, music visuals and short science fiction. Pixelmation is 16-bit pixel art, the look of the games many of us grew up with. It is excellent for game announcements, retro-themed ads and stories told as if they were a level to be cleared.

Shadowmation and Postermation: rooted in place

Shadowmation brings Karagöz shadow play to the screen: a backlit screen, perforated colored leather puppets and the flicker of the lamp behind them. It is the style we are proudest of, and it got its own post. Use it for folk tales, satire, cultural programming and anything that benefits from the voice of a storyteller.

Postermation is mid-century travel-poster vector art in two to four colors. Think of the Bosphorus at dusk or a morning in Kadıköy rendered as a poster that begins to move. It is ideal for city and tourism content, event promotions and title sequences where elegance matters more than detail.

Panelmation and Claymation: made by hand, or looking like it

Panelmation is the motion comic: the story unfolds panel by panel, with speech balloons, SFX lettering and halftone dots. The balloons point at whoever is actually speaking, which took more work than you would think; we wrote about it in making motion comics. It is a natural fit for webcomic creators, educational stories and dialogue-heavy scripts.

Claymation recreates the plasticine stop-motion look: fingerprints in the clay, slightly handmade movement, miniature sets. Comedy, children’s content and warm brand stories feel at home in it.

Choosing between them

Ask three questions. Who is the audience? Children lean toward Toonmation, Toymation and Claymation; teenagers and adults toward Celmation, Neonmation and Pixelmation. Where will it be watched? Vertical 9:16 on a phone favours bold, readable looks such as Toonmation or Postermation. How much talking is there? Dialogue-heavy scripts are strongest in Panelmation, where the balloons do part of the work, and in Celmation, where faces carry the lines. Our guide on choosing an animation style has a longer decision list, including the non-Cinemation styles.

Quality and cost

Cinemation productions come in two tiers. Professional is fast and economical; Premium brings the best story and scene craft, and in Premium every clip generated by the video model gets an automatic frame-by-frame review for major defects (Shadowmation and Pixelmation, drawn by a 2.5D engine, have no clip review). Because these styles generate images and video, they cost more than the procedural styles such as Papercraft or Typemation. The Estimated cost shows the full price before you start, it is a ceiling, and the difference is refunded when the job finishes.

One more thing that you will hopefully never notice: if a video provider is unavailable, production switches to a backup provider automatically, so the film still completes. All ten styles are on the Animation page.

Frequently asked questions

What is Cinemation? Cinemation is the family of Yeşilçam Animation styles that animates scenes with your own characters, narration and music, using a video model in eight styles and a 2.5D animation engine in Shadowmation and Pixelmation.

Why eleven looks if there are ten styles? Wuxiamation has two looks, Legend 2D and Cinematic 3D, so the ten styles give eleven looks in total.

Can I use my own characters in every Cinemation style? Yes. You can add up to four characters with a name and either a short look description or a reference image, and give each one a voice.

Do all Cinemation styles support dialogue and lip sync? All of them offer Narrator, Dialogue, Both and Silent, and every speaking character has a fixed voice. Lip sync is in the eight video-model styles; Shadowmation and Pixelmation voice the lines with captions showing the speaker, but without mouth animation.