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Manga2Anime

October 2025 • Nathan Cavaglione

Hunter x Hunter manga panels transformed to anime

From Static Panels to Moving Animation

I got a little addicted to turning my favorite mangas into animated versions using Google’s Nano Banana, Imagen3 and Veo3.1 models. What started as an experiment became a week-long exploration of what’s possible (and what’s not) with current AI video generation. Below is my best creation.

The Reality Check

After spending a day working with Veo 3.1 to turn half a chapter into an animated version, I had to walk back on my initial excitement: we’re still not there yet on full automatic manga-to-anime generation.

Video and image models are mind-blowing, but turning static manga into moving anime is a different beast. The main limitation is that the model has to invent too much. It can’t take a style reference for how the anime should look yet, so it fills in the blanks and drifts too far from the intended style. The results are good enough for fan-made action, but not studio quality.

Another limitation is keeping voice and character consistency across scenes, with currently no feature for those except prompting.

The Recipe

That said, I found a few cheap tricks that make the difference. The key idea is to have very neat “base images” to generate the videos from:

  1. Crop the image from the manga with a screenshot tool
  2. Remove any undesirable elements using Imagen3 (paint the areas you want removed, like text bubbles)
  3. Color the image using Gemini Nano Banana (tell it “Color EVERYTHING in this image” otherwise it gets lazy)
  4. Extend the image with Imagen3 to fit a 16:9 format (that’s what Veo 3.1 expects)
  5. Animate it using Veo3.1 and mention the text bubbles so they are generated in the audio
  6. Stick all the videos together using gemini-cli, with a low volume soundtrack to convey emotions

It’s not anything that can be easily automated with code. A lot of redoing with custom prompting is involved, but it can accelerate the work of artists.

Here is a video breaking down the process visually:

The Verdict

AI is evolving fast, but full studio automation is still a few steps away.