Alibaba's Wan2.2 Animate Lets You Swap Characters Into Any Video
Alibaba's open-weights character animation model turns a single still image into a video that mimics any performer's motion and expressions, with ComfyUI running it on consumer GPUs.
- Wan2.2-Animate-14B is Alibaba's open-weights 14B character animation and replacement model, Apache 2.0.
- Takes a reference image plus a driving video, outputs the character performing that motion at 480p or 720p.
- Replacement mode ships with a relighting LoRA so swapped characters match the scene's lighting.
- ComfyUI integration is official; GGUF quants let it run on 8-12 GB consumer GPUs.
- Trained on 65% more images and 83% more videos than Wan2.1, giving it stronger identity preservation.
- Follow-up Animate-2-14B adds multi-character support, text-driven camera control, and a 10-step distilled variant.
Alibaba’s Wan team has released Wan2.2-Animate-14B, an open-weights video model that transfers a performance from a driving clip to a character image or replaces a performer in existing footage. Combining both tasks in one workflow reduces model switching and manual compositing, while ComfyUI and command-line support allow local inference.
Hugging Face reports more than 7.9 million downloads for the broader Comfy-Org package. That repository contains multiple Wan 2.2 files, and its download counter does not identify distinct users or Animate-only installations.
Two modes share the core model
Wan2.2-Animate-14B accepts a reference character image and a driving video, then runs one of two workflows:
| Mode | What it does | Key requirement |
|---|---|---|
| Move | Generates a new clip in which the reference character follows the driver’s body motion, facial expression, and timing. | Clear reference art and a well-framed driving performance. |
| Replace | Substitutes the source performer while retaining the clip’s camera movement, background, and overall composition. | An accurate character mask and close alignment between source and replacement. |
Replacement mode includes a relighting LoRA that helps the inserted character match the source scene. The model supports 480p and 720p output, although resolution, frame count, and clip length all increase memory use.
Apache 2.0 governs the released model assets. Rights to reference art, source footage, voices, trademarks, and personal likenesses remain separate, so production systems need consent and provenance controls for their inputs and outputs.
Identity depends on preparation
Wan2.2-Animate-14B is designed to preserve the reference character’s face, body shape, clothing, and silhouette while copying the driver’s performance. Earlier animation pipelines often allowed those features to drift between frames because identity preservation competed with unconstrained video generation.
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