How to Make an Anime Short From a Text Prompt, With Dialogue and a Cast That Stays the Same

Anime is the style people ask AI video for most, and the one where generic text-to-video fails most visibly: faces drift between shots, dialogue is mumbled, the "anime" is a vague filter. We build ReelMint, and the Anime tab exists because that failure is fixable with structure. Here is how it works, from a line of text to a posted reel.

What the Anime tab does differently

A prompt becomes a cast, then character sheets, then a shot list, then the clips. The cast step is the one that matters: each character gets a fixed look (a sheet with the face, the hair, the outfit) that is sent to the video model on every shot, so episode three looks like episode one. Dialogue is written per shot and spoken by the model's native voices, in Japanese or any other language, with subtitles if you want them.

Step by step

1. Write the premise in one or two sentences. "A courier girl on a rooftop in Shibuya during a sakura storm, chasing a letter the wind took." Name the characters if you have names; the studio invents them otherwise.
2. Approve the cast. You get one sheet per character. Change the hair, the outfit, the age, and regenerate the sheet until it is right. This is cheap; do not skip it.
3. Pick the model and the length. Wan 3.0 for 30-second scenes with native audio, Kling 3.0 Standard for native voices at a lower price, Seedance 2.0 Mini for the cheapest voiced option. The price is on the button.
4. Generate. Multi-scene pieces are filmed with continuity: each scene continues the previous ending, and a scene that goes stale after you regenerate an earlier one is flagged so you can refilm it.
5. Post. Share to YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook and X with a caption per platform, or schedule it.

Writing prompts that look like anime

• Say the medium: "2D anime, cel shading, clean line art". The model needs the word.
• Describe light, not style: "late afternoon backlight, petals in the air, long shadows".
• One action per shot. "She catches the letter" is a shot. "She catches the letter and runs down the stairs and meets him" is three.
• Put the dialogue in quotes and name the speaker. The voice goes to the right mouth.
• Do not use real franchise or character names. They are blocked, and the output would not be yours to post anyway.

See three finished ones for free

The free examples include three anime clips with their prompts: a sakura storm on a rooftop (Wan 3.0), rain over Shibuya with dialogue (Seedance 2.0 Mini), and a launch sequence (Kling 3.0 Standard). A new account can claim all three with no card and keep the files. Read the prompts; they are the best tutorial.

Cost

A 15-second anime clip with voices on the cheaper voiced models is in the tens of credits; a 30-second Wan 3.0 scene with native audio is more, and a multi-scene episode is the sum of its scenes plus a few credits of scene writing. Plans start at Lite, $9.99 a month for 800 credits, every model on every plan. The anime guide and Minty's one-minute tutorial show the whole flow on screen.