🧸 Early learning (ages 2-6) · 🎨 Art, music and story makers
Animated Drawings
By Meta (FAIR research). Visit Animated Drawings
Desk research from the maker's own pages. Not yet tried by us. Checked 2026-10-24.
A free browser demo from Meta's research lab that brings a photo of a child's drawing of a person or character to life. You upload the picture, adjust the box, outline and joints the AI finds, then pick a motion such as walking, dancing or jumping, and get a short animated clip. It came from a 2023 research paper; the open-source code was archived in September 2025, but the demo still loads.
Our take: A fun parent-run activity with a child's drawing if you read the consent screen and click Disagree unless you want the drawing in a dataset; skip if your child would use it alone.
Checked in a browser
A browser check on 2026-10-25: what loads, the ads and trackers we saw, and what a child meets first. Not a hands-on test.
| Child safety: 4 out of 5 | No ads or chat; a Meta cookie prompt covers the page, and the tool asks for a photo of a drawing (upload not tested). |
|---|---|
| Data: 5 out of 5 | Only code libraries (jsdelivr, bootstrapcdn, Google Fonts) were contacted and no cookies were set while the cookie prompt was unanswered. |
| Ease: 3 out of 5 | A clear 'Try it now' button, but the cookie prompt dims the page and covers the bottom of the screen until a grown-up answers it. |
| Cost honesty: 5 out of 5 | Free; no price shown. |
What we found
- 4 third-party hosts (CDNs only); 0 cookies.
- 0 ad frames.
- A Meta cookie prompt ('Allow the use of cookies from Meta on this browser?') appeared on load; the check did not answer it.
From the test: No ads or trackers before the cookie prompt is answered; a grown-up needs to handle the prompt and the drawing upload.
| Ages it suits | run by adults; drawings by kids about 3-10 |
|---|---|
| What its terms say about age | 18+ only. Users must be adults, may not let anyone under 18 use the demo, and must not live in or use it from Illinois or Texas. (terms) |
| Price | Free. Free (Oct 2026) |
| Works on | Web |
| Account | No account needed |
| Ads | None |
| In-app purchases | None |
| The AI in it | Computer-vision models find the figure, cut it from the background, place its joints and map motion-capture moves onto it. |
What's good
- Free, no account, real delight for young artists
- Research consent is opt-in, with a clear Disagree button
- Shows kids how AI 'sees' a body
Watch for
- Adults only by its own terms; not for kids to use alone
- Not allowed for users in Illinois or Texas
- Agreeing to research use gives Meta a permanent license to the drawing
- Research demo with archived code; it could stop working
Data and privacy
Before you start, it asks permission (optional) to use uploaded drawings and your edits to train its model, have human annotators review them, publish them in papers, and release them in a public dataset; agreeing grants Meta a perpetual license. Drawings must not contain names or other identifying details. Read the privacy policy.
Does it work?
Meta's own research paper (ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2023) describes the method and a public dataset of 178,000 drawings collected through the demo; no independent studies of its effect on children found.
In the Big Index
- On the list 12 weekend AI projects for families
- On the list 12 creative projects with AI that keep your child the author
- On the list 10 AI activities for preschoolers
- On the list Top 20 AI sites for learning for kids (2026)
- On the list 11 AI art tools that are safer for kids
- On the list 11 AI story makers and storytelling apps for kids
- On the list 17 free AI tools a family can try this weekend
- Animated Drawings
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Where these facts come from
- https://sketch.metademolab.com/
- https://sketch.metademolab.com/static/js/main.207096f3.chunk.js
- https://github.com/facebookresearch/AnimatedDrawings
Prices, terms and features change. Nobody paid to be listed, nothing here is an affiliate link, and Peabody never rates itself. Where we and the maker disagree, the maker's own pages are the ones to trust.