Data Intelligents

Toon Lab

Every way to build a cartoon character in a browser, in one place — 14 named approaches you can actually play with, each with its researched pros, cons and verdict. The three we shipped are marked Shipped studios.

Animo

animo

The bake-off winner, shipped — spring rig + character builder + talking lip-sync

About this approach

The Vector Rig taken all the way to a product: a 24-channel spring rig over original parametric SVG art, orthogonal action x expression catalogs, a slot-based character builder, and TTS lip-sync with a 4-provider fallback chain (ElevenLabs -> OpenAI -> Deepgram -> OpenRouter) with Deepgram-STT timing recovery when a provider returns no word timings. Characters persist per user in Postgres.

Realism vs bar
License
Fully owned original art; MIT runtime deps. TTS is metered per provider.
Cost
$0 to render; TTS billed per character of speech
Effort
Highest of any entry — this is the one that was carried to a finished product
Determinism
Pose is a pure function of the state vector; audio timing follows the provider timestamps
Customization
First-class — every slot and colour is data, saved per user
LLM fit
Best of all — an LLM directs it AND can edit the art, because the art is code

Pros

  • The proven winner: everything below it was evaluated to pick this
  • Lip-sync that actually works, with a fallback chain so one dead key is not an outage
  • DB-backed saved characters, frictionless auth, zero art-licensing risk
  • No runtime dependencies — plain SVG in the DOM, SSR-friendly

Cons

  • Every hairstyle and garment is hand-authored art work
  • Front view only — turns would need a redrawn 3/4 atlas
  • Cut-out joints show hard elbow breaks (no mesh deformation)
  • Speech costs money and needs provider keys configured

Verdict — THE SHIPPED ANSWER — what the bake-off chose, running as a live app at /animo. Start here unless you need something it explicitly cannot do.

The highest-polish flat-vector figure in the repo (three review campaigns: doodle calibration, anatomical ROM limits, then eyes/third-tone/waist). The runtime imposes no ceiling — remaining distance to the bar is art iteration.