Claude Animated Shorts: a free skill for 3D cartoon story shorts

What it is. Claude Animated Shorts, from GitHub user mromidev, goes with the creator's video on making viral animated shorts with Claude. It produces the faceless 'cartoon characters in a 3D world' format common on TikTok and Reels: ink outlines, a painted 3D town, lens blur, gliding cameras, a march score and sound effects. Everything renders locally with three.js in Remotion, so there are no generation fees. The worked example is a 67-second short about the 1831 Broughton bridge collapse. The repo went up on Oct 31 (late evening MDT) and passed 480 stars by Monday morning, helped by a @RoundtableSpace post with about 49K views and 216 bookmarks.

How it works. SKILL.md lays out the pipeline. Claude picks one surprising true story and sources its facts, then writes a script to a fixed beat formula at about 3.7 words per second (hook, setting, escalation, the snap, a deadpan line, an everyday analogy, the consequence, a callback). You record or generate a voice track with word timings. Claude then plans shots and cameras in a story.ts file timed to those words, builds the world and characters from templates (Kenney CC0 props recoloured with painted textures), and renders stills for review before the full 1440x2560 render. Python scripts synthesize the music and sound effects and mix them with ducking and loudness targets. QA helpers compare your frames side by side with reference frames.

What it needs. Remotion with @remotion/three, Node, Python 3 and ffmpeg, and a big temp drive: the README warns that each Remotion bundle copies about 1.3 GB of public assets. You install it by copying the folder into ~/.claude/skills/cartoon-3d-short/ and asking Claude Code to use the cartoon short skill.

One caveat. The code and docs are MIT, but the references folder includes 38 frames and 20 contact sheets taken from another creator's shorts, which the skill describes as a channel studied privately for style. The README says these are for style study only, and the skill itself tells Claude never to copy that channel's scripts, characters or shots. If you publish with it, treat those references as off-limits and make the story, characters and voice your own, as the author asks.

Our take: this is one of the most complete skills we've seen for a single, specific format. It covers research, script formula, timing, world-building, audio and frame QA, not just 'Claude writes some Remotion'. For faceless channels it's a zero-generation-cost path to a format usually made with paid video models. Expect to adjust the style once you've made your first short.