How a Drawing Gets Animated, a Plain-English Explainer for Curious Parents and Kids

By the Scribblie team · Published October 10, 2026 · 8 min read

A still drawing moves for one of two reasons. Either someone made lots of slightly different pictures and showed them quickly, or someone kept one picture and moved its parts, like a puppet. Every animation tool, from a sticky-note flipbook to a film studio's software, is a fancy version of one of those two ideas, or a mix.

Below, the ideas come with everyday comparisons, so you can explain them at the dinner table. There is a short passage near the end written for children to read aloud, or to be read to them.

Your eye is the first accomplice

Animation works because of how we see. If you show the eye a series of pictures quickly enough, each only a little different from the last, the brain stops seeing separate images and invents movement between them. Nobody is quite sure of every detail of how the brain does this, and we will not pretend to be, but anyone who has flicked a flipbook has felt it work.

That means the animator's job is to draw a series of still poses, close enough together that the brain joins the dots. The skill is in choosing which poses, how far apart, and how long to hold each.

To see it for yourself, hold your hand in front of your face and wave it slowly. Now wave it under a strobe light, the kind at a disco. The hand seems to freeze and jump instead of flowing. That jumpiness is what happens when you show too few pictures. Animation lives in the space between smooth and jumpy, and animators choose where to sit.

Frames: what a picture per moment means

Each still picture in an animation is called a frame. Film generally runs at around twenty-four frames each second, and television and phone video are in a similar range. Hand-drawn animation often uses twelve different drawings per second, and shows each for two frames, which saves drawing and still looks smooth. A flipbook with ten pages flicked in a second is about as fast as a child's hand can manage.

More frames per second give smoother movement and cost more work. Fewer give a chunkier, more charming look. Stop-motion films made at the kitchen table often use only five or ten photos a second and are perfectly watchable, as we explain in our stop-motion starter guide.

The big rule underneath all this, whether you use pencil or software, is that small changes between frames look smooth and large changes look like jumps. If a ball moves a thumb's width between pictures, it glides. If it moves a hand's width, it teleports.

Keyframes: the moments that matter

Imagine animating a ball that drops from your hand, hits the floor and bounces back up. You do not need to draw every moment at once. You start with the most important ones: the ball in your hand, the ball hitting the floor and the ball at the top of its bounce. Those are keyframes, or key poses.

Then you fill in the gaps. The pictures in between are called in-betweens. In a big studio, a senior animator draws the key poses, and others draw the in-betweens. On your own, you do both, but thinking in two steps makes it far easier. First decide what matters, then smooth the road between.

Software has taken this idea and run with it. A digital animator can place a ball at point A in frame 1 and at point B in frame 20, and the program works out where it should be in every frame between. It is the same split, with the computer doing the in-betweening. You can try the manual version yourself with a flipbook: draw the first, middle and last pages of a flipping ball, and then fill in the pages between, as we describe in the flipbook guide.

Squash, stretch and why a bouncing ball looks heavy

A ball that keeps its perfect round shape as it bounces looks like a plastic bead. One that squashes slightly on impact and stretches a bit as it speeds up looks alive, and looks like it has weight. This is one of the old rules of hand-drawn animation, and children grasp it quickly, because it matches how things feel.

You can feel the rule by dropping a soft ball and a hard marble and watching how differently they behave. In a drawing, the soft ball gets a flat bottom at the moment of impact. The marble does not squash at all. Animators use the amount of squash to tell the viewer what an object is made of, which is a lovely thing to notice once you know.

The same instinct applies to a character, since a jump starts with a crouch (the wind-up) and ends with a bend of the knees. Without the crouch, a jump looks like the character was yanked up on a string.

The other route: puppets, joints and rigs

Not all animation redraws the picture. Some keeps one picture, cuts it into parts and moves the parts. A paper puppet with split pins at the elbows and knees is the physical version, and you can read how to make one in our paper puppet guide.

On a computer, the same idea is called rigging. A rig is a hidden skeleton, a set of joints like a puppet's pins, that you place inside the character. Each joint controls the part of the picture around it. Move the shoulder joint and the whole arm swings, and move the hip and the leg follows. The viewer sees the character, never the skeleton.

The advantage is that you draw the character once. The cost is that the character can only move in the ways its joints allow. A flat, cut-out style of motion, where an arm turns like a door on a hinge, is the typical look. For a child's drawing of a dog with a wiggly tail, a puppet-style rig can make the tail wag and the head nod, but it cannot make the dog turn around and show its other side, because that side was never drawn.

How a computer gets from a photo to a puppet

Now the clever part. If you photograph a child's drawing and an app animates it, something has to work out what the character is and where its joints might go. In broad terms, a program finds the outline of the figure against the paper, decides which parts are body and limbs, and places a rough skeleton inside. After that, the movements are the puppet routine.

Done by hand, this would take an animator quite a while. Automatic methods are quick and sometimes wrong. A creature with an unusual shape, such as a snake with six heads, a house with legs, or an arm that merges into a tail, can confuse the program, and the result may bend in odd places. That is not your child's fault, and it is useful to say so out loud.

Different apps do different things, and we are not going to describe anyone's internals here, including our own. Some go further and generate new images or voices using AI models, which is a separate question from the moving itself. If you are weighing up apps, our checklist for parents covers what to look at.

Why the results sometimes look odd

If you have tried one of these apps, you will have seen a drawing move in ways that look slightly wrong: an arm that bends in the middle of a sleeve, a face that stays frozen, a leg that stretches like gum. There are a few common reasons.

Busy drawings with overlapping shapes are hard to separate, so the program may not know where one limb ends and another begins. Faint lines get missed, so a thin arm in light pencil can vanish. And figures that are drawn front-on with the arms out are far easier to rig than a profile view with the arms tucked behind.

You can help. A clean photo, taken in daylight and straight on (here is how), improves the starting point. A bold outline, a plain paper background and a character that stands alone on the page also make the job easier. But you should not ask a child to draw differently so an app can cope. The app should cope with the drawing, not the other way round.

Where Scribblie sits, in broad terms

We are building Scribblie, and it is not in the app stores yet. A child draws on paper and takes a photo, draws in the app, or traces a guided shape, and the drawing wakes up, looks around and says hello. In broad terms, it belongs to the family of tools that bring a drawing to life as a character, and then add voice conversation on top. The friend's replies and images may come from AI models, so they can be imperfect. We are not going to explain the machinery in detail here, partly because it will change, and partly because what matters to a parent is the look of the result and the care taken with the child's data, which we cover in how Scribblie works.

A page for children to read, or be read

Here is the version for a seven-year-old, which we have tried to keep honest.

A drawing is a picture that stays still. To make it move, you can do one of two things. You can draw it again and again, each time a tiny bit different, and flick the pages fast. Your eyes get fooled and the picture seems to move. Or you can cut the picture into pieces, like an arm and a leg, join them with pins and wiggle them yourself. Then you are the animator. A computer can do both of these jobs, but it still starts with your drawing.

Ask your child which of the two they would pick for their favourite drawing, and why. Children often have strong views. Some want every wiggle exact and others want the whole thing to run on its own.

A small experiment for the table

Here is a test that covers the main ideas above in under ten minutes. Draw a stick figure on a sticky note with its arm up. On the next note, draw the same figure with its arm slightly lower. Do eight notes, ending with the arm down, and flick them. That is the redraw route.

Now draw the same stick figure on a piece of card, cut the arm out, and fix it with a split pin so it swings. Move the arm up and down by hand. That is the puppet route.

Ask your child which was easier, which looked smoother and which they would use for a dancing dragon. There is no right answer, and you will have covered the two big ideas.