Wan2.2 Animate — Turn a Single Photo into a 720p Character Performance

TL;DR
Wan2.2-Animate-14B is an open-weight character animation model with two modes: Animation (drive a static image) and Replacement (swap subjects in existing footage).
It pairs skeleton + facial feature control with a Relighting LoRA to keep motion faithful and lighting consistent.
Verify licensing, latency, and GPU requirements in your environment before scaling deliverables.

1. Release snapshot — what actually shipped

• Launch date & channels: Wan-AI published Wan2.2-Animate-14B on Sept 19, 2025 with weights, scripts, and demos on Hugging Face, ModelScope, and wan.video (Wan-AI release notes).
• Unified task coverage: One checkpoint handles both character animation and subject replacement by switching runtime flags, avoiding separate models for each scenario (Wan-Animate project page).
• Open-source posture: Code + weights live under the Wan2.2 repo with consumer-grade inference options (RTX 4090 class for 720p/24–25fps), enabling on-prem or cloud deployments without SaaS lock-in (Wan-AI release notes).
• Hands-on verdict: Early testers report four-minute turnarounds for 10-second clips at 720p/25fps through the hosted UI, with micro-expression fidelity and auto-relighting intact (Skywork hands-on).

2. How the pipeline works under the hood

2.1 Condition design

Wan-Animate refines Wan2.2’s image-to-video backbone by splitting inputs into symbolic channels: skeleton heatmaps steer body pose, implicit facial embeddings preserve expression, and segmentation masks isolate regions for editability (Wan-Animate project page). This separation keeps the denoiser controllable without retraining for every rig.

2.2 Dual modes in practice