Panelmation is the Yeşilçam Animation style for AI motion comics: your story unfolds panel by panel, with speech balloons, SFX lettering and halftone dots, and the characters move inside each panel. The balloons point at whoever is actually speaking, which sounds obvious and was the hardest part to build. This post covers what a Panelmation film looks like, how we made the balloons behave, and the defects we had to fix along the way.
What a motion comic is, in our version
A motion comic sits between a comic book and a cartoon. The page grammar stays: panels, gutters, balloons, lettered sound effects, the dot pattern of old printing. But the art is no longer frozen. A character turns their head, rain falls inside the panel, a door swings open while the “KRRK” lettering appears beside it. The reader’s eye still moves the way it moves across a page, and the motion adds just enough life to make it feel like a film.
In Panelmation the director, a language model, writes the story as a sequence of panels from your text. Each panel is drawn in the comic look and animated by a video model. Dialogue goes into balloons, narration into caption boxes, and the whole thing is scored with music and, if you want, voiced. For a longer background on the form, see our article motion comics explained.
Balloons that follow the speaker
A speech balloon has one job: to tell you who is talking. Its tail must point at the right mouth. In a hand-made comic the artist places it; in a generated panel, nobody knows in advance where the characters will end up. Our first tests put balloons in tidy, sensible places that were wrong about half the time, with a line from one character pointing at the other.
The fix came from a part of the pipeline we had built for a different reason. In Premium quality, every generated clip is checked frame by frame by a reviewing model. We extended that reviewer to also find where each speaker’s head is in the panel. Panelmation then places the balloon near that head and points the tail at it. When two characters share a panel, each gets their own balloon pointing at the right person, in the order they speak.
Characters, voices and dialogue
Panelmation is a Cinemation style, so it has everything the family offers. Add up to four characters under Characters, each with a Name and either a look description or an uploaded reference image. Give them voices. Choose the Speech mode: Dialogue fills the balloons and voices the lines, Both adds a narrator in caption boxes, Narrator tells the story over the panels, and Silent keeps it music only, which is surprisingly effective for action pages where the SFX lettering does the talking.
Because comics are dialogue-driven, writing good lines matters here more than anywhere. You can let the director write them, enter up to 30 lines yourself with I will write the dialogue, or press Write dialogue with Sam for a draft. Short lines fit balloons better; a balloon that fills half the panel hides the art.
What we fixed on the way
Motion comics are unforgiving of glitches, because each panel is held on screen long enough for the reader to study it. During testing we collected the kind of defects that ruin a panel and taught the reviewer to catch them.
- The reversing vehicle. A car chase panel in which the car moved confidently backwards while its wheels pointed forward.
- The detached leg. A character jumping a fence whose leg separated from the body for a few frames.
- The disappearing eye. A close-up in which one eye faded out mid-panel.
- The wrong character. A panel where the hero was replaced by a stranger with the same coat.
- Framed keyframes. Drawn panels that came back with their own borders or letterboxing inside our panel border; these are now detected and redrawn.
Only major problems like these trigger a regeneration, and regenerations are capped at 30% of clips, so a film never loops forever chasing perfection. We wrote about that policy in every clip gets a second look.
Who it is for
Webcomic artists who want a trailer for their series. Teachers who want a story students will actually read along with. Brands that want an explainer with personality. Game studios announcing a character. Anyone whose story is mostly people talking, because the balloon carries dialogue better than any other form in animation: you can read it with the sound off.
Making your first motion comic
- Open Animation and choose Panelmation.
- Write the story under What should it tell?, with who says what in quotation marks.
- Add your characters and give each a distinct look; comic readers identify people by silhouette and color.
- Set Speech to Dialogue or Both and choose the length, from 10 to 120 seconds.
- Choose Premium if balloon placement matters to you, since the speaker-finding reviewer runs at that quality.
- Check the Estimated cost, create, preview in the browser, then Get video as MP4, WebP or GIF.
Vertical 9:16 works surprisingly well for motion comics, since a phone screen is roughly the shape of a single tall panel. For comparison with the other looks, see the Cinemation family.
Frequently asked questions
What is Panelmation? Panelmation is a Yeşilçam Animation style that makes AI motion comics panel by panel, with speech balloons, SFX lettering and halftone, animated by a video model.
How do speech balloons know who is speaking? A reviewing model finds where each speaker’s head is in the panel, and the balloon tail is pointed at that person.
What happens if a panel has a glitch? In Premium quality, clips with major defects such as a reversing vehicle or a detached limb are regenerated, up to 30% of clips.
Can I write the balloon text myself? Yes. Choose I will write the dialogue and enter up to 30 lines, each up to 200 characters; they are used as written.