claude-animate

A Claude Code plugin that lets Claude work inside Adobe Animate. Through JSFL scripts, Claude can:

• open .fla files and read symbols, layers, keyframes, labels, matrices and pivots;
• move, rotate and scale puppet parts, and change pivots and keyframes;
• build in-between views and poses by tweening part transforms between existing keyframes (for example, a new 34° view between a 7/8 view and a 3/4 view of a character turnaround);
• draw new vector shapes with fills and strokes;
• edit vector geometry exactly through the XFL XML (xfl.py): export shapes to JSON, change them, write them back, or warp a part with control points;
• see what it did: it renders symbols to PNG with a coordinate grid, an onion-skin overlay, contact sheets and zoomed crops, and it can screenshot the Animate window (useful for dialogs and errors).

Claude never clicks in the UI. It writes a script, runs it in Animate, renders the result, looks at it, and iterates.

Install

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add TypeGuja/claude-animate
/plugin install animate@claude-animate

Or copy skills/animate into ~/.claude/skills/.

Requirements:

• Adobe Animate (tested with Animate 2024 on Windows 10);
• Python 3 for the runner;
• Pillow for look.py (pip install pillow);
• NumPy for xfl.py and look.py diff; 7-Zip is used for unpacking when installed.

If Animate is not in the default location, set ANIMATE_EXE to the path of Animate.exe.

How it works

file	what
run_jsfl.py	Inlines lib.jsfl and your script into one file, starts Animate with it, waits, and prints the log. The log is written line by line, so a crash still shows how far the script got.
lib.jsfl	Helpers for inspecting, transforming, drawing and rendering.
look.py	Claude's eyes: screen, grid, onion, sheet, zoom, diff.
xfl.py	Exact geometry I/O on the XFL inside a .fla: unpack/pack, export/import shapes as JSON, thin-plate-spline warp.
examples/	inspect.jsfl, draw.jsfl, inbetween.jsfl.

On first run Animate asks "Run as command or open for editing?". Click Run (and tick "don't ask again" if offered).

Known Animate quirks (handled or documented)

• Editing shape vertices through shape.beginEdit() crashes Animate 2024. Claude redraws shapes instead.
• path.addCurve ignores its control points, so curves are sampled and then smoothed with optimizeCurves.
• doc.selectAll() grabs every layer. The library selects the current layer only.
• JSFL has no JSON; the library ships its own toJSON.

Safety

The skill tells Claude to work on copies (openCopy) and never overwrite your source files.

License

MIT