A skill that teaches your agent to paint like Van Gogh — in code

What it does

It’s a Claude Code / Codex skill that makes your coding agent produce animated art with code instead of keyframes. You say “make a Van Gogh-style animation” or “animate my voiceover,” and it designs a frame first, then writes the scene as code — brushstrokes, transitions, camera moves and all. Humans in the frame are handled by generated images; everything else is drawn programmatically, down to the synthesized soundtrack.

The interesting bit

The skill doesn’t just ship code — it ships accumulated craft. Each of the 53 style recipe cards records parameters, signature transitions, and known weaknesses, and there’s a doc of “what actually worked.” The author even sent four read-only agents off to build 20 unseen styles, then folded their wheels into one shared library. Plus a delivery gate: film_gate.py red-lights a finished film if it’s basically a slideshow with no in-shot motion.

Key highlights

• 53 art-style recipe cards (Van Gogh to Dunhuang murals) each paired with runnable scene code in scripts/engine/scenes/
• 9 explainer-animation grammars — Kurzgesagt, Vox, whiteboard, 3Blue1Brown, kinetic type — 8 with demo films and parameterized clips
• A long-scroll “walking through paintings” skeleton where the art style swaps as the hero crosses each world boundary
• qa.py measures stability, motion and flow; a fresh agent that never saw production reviews the final cut
• Breakdown tooling (analyze/breakdown.py) turns a reference animation into a “map you can code from” — transitions, beat grid, motion heatmaps

Caveats

• The 35-style overview uses one fixed composition by design (it’s an art-history speedrun mechanism) — the README explicitly warns not to reuse it for new subjects
• Some full-film reference code requires you to supply your own assets (e.g., characters for the finance-explainer snapshot)
• Python-side tooling despite the repo being tagged JavaScript; you’ll need uv, ffmpeg, and Playwright Chromium

Verdict

Worth a look if you want your agent making genuinely animated explainer or art videos rather than static slides with crossfades. If you expected a JS animation library to import, this isn’t that — it’s an agent skill plus a Python render engine.