How to Make Viral-Style What If Cartoons With Claude Code

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A wave of new YouTube channels is pulling millions of views with short "What If" cartoons: one stick-figure hero, dusk-lit rooms, fast cuts and a narrator talking straight to you. You can make the same style with Claude Code, and you don't need a video model to do it.

The secret is the character. It isn't generated, it's code. Claude writes it once, so it looks the same in every shot. Remotion turns that code into video, and ElevenLabs does the voice and the sound effects.

This page has everything from the video: the free What If skill, the one-paste setup, the story template, the two prompts and what an episode really costs.

How do you set up the What If skill?

The setup takes about 10 minutes, and you only do it once. You need:

• Claude Code. The video ran Opus 5.5 on extra high effort.
• An ElevenLabs account, for the voice and the sound effects.
• Node, FFmpeg and Python, which are free. Remotion comes with the skill.

You don't have to install any of it by hand. Open Claude Code and paste this:

Install the What If skill from github.com/kelano86/what-if-animation, then set up its studio and everything it needs.

Then make an API key in your ElevenLabs settings, and save it as ELEVENLABS_API_KEY in your environment or in a .env file.

To check it all works, ask Claude to play the two example episodes that come with the skill, Rewind and CopyPaste. If they play, you're ready. Then give it one sentence:

Make a What If episode: what if you never had to sleep?

It writes the script, voices it, storyboards every shot, checks its own images, animates it and adds the sound. The sleep episode in the video took about 40 minutes, and nothing in it was changed by hand.

Prefer to install it yourself? These are the commands from the skill's README:

git clone https://github.com/kelano86/what-if-animation ~/.claude/skills/what-if-animation
cp -r ~/.claude/skills/what-if-animation/studio ./what-if-studio
cd what-if-studio && npm install

Why does the character never change?

On the What If channels, the hero looks exactly the same for minutes at a time. That's the part people assume needs an expensive video model. It doesn't.

In the skill, the character is a rig in code. The same function draws him in every shot and makes every face and pose, so there's nothing to drift. If a shot is wrong, you change a line and render it again, for free.

The video also tested a video model in Higgsfield with the same character. It held up quite well, but each 5-second shot cost about 40 cents. A 5-minute episode is about 60 shots, so that's roughly $25 to $42 in full HD, before you reroll the shots that come out wrong.

How do you get Claude to match a style?

One prompt got a decent first version in about 16 minutes, but it looked too simple. What closed the gap was a method, not a longer prompt: measure the original, write the rules down, build your character once, storyboard and check the images, and animate last.

These are the two prompts from the video. The first makes Claude study a video instead of copying it:

Here's a video. Don't copy it, measure it: how often it cuts, where the light comes from, how much the characters move. Write every rule down.

The original's opening had about 27 cuts a minute, and the first version had 14. Rules like that are what Claude follows on the next try.

The second is the one to steal. A still renders in seconds and a video takes minutes, so get every shot right as an image first:

Render every shot as an image. Look at each one like a viewer would. List what looks wrong, and fix it before you animate anything.

That check caught stairs that looked wrong and a raised hand hidden behind the hood before a single frame was animated. Along with rooms drawn in real perspective, light that comes from lamps and windows, and a new camera angle on every shot, it took the result from about 4 out of 10 to about 8.

What's the story formula behind What If videos?

The look isn't the only reason these videos get watched. The story matters just as much. Five scripts from four channels follow the same pattern, and the skill has it as a template you fill in:

WHAT IF [the power]?

1. Cold open: start in the middle of the action, with 3 or 4 quick demos of the power or a flash-forward to the climax.
2. The premise and its rules: [what changed overnight], [the rules it comes with].
3. The fun part: [escalating wins in everyday life].
4. The not-so-fun part: [the cost, with one real, checked fact and its number].
5. Someone powerful notices: [a man in a suit, robbers, a government].
6. A moral choice, with family at stake: [usually a little sister].
7. Cliffhanger: [a question for the comments, or "Part 1 of 2"].

Ifverse's biggest episode follows it beat by beat. It opens on a fly and a coffee cup. Your reactions are 10 times faster, so you become a sports genius. A normal reaction takes about a quarter of a second. Then comes the World Cup final, and three days later, a black car.

That real fact is the clever part. You learn something true inside the story, so it doesn't feel like AI slop.

What does a What If episode cost?

For the 20-second sleep episode in the video:

• Claude Code wrote it and drew every shot. Nothing extra on the $100-a-month plan.
• ElevenLabs did the voice and the sound effects for about 12 cents.
• Remotion turned it into a video, for free.

An episode is a big job for Claude. On the $20 plan you'll probably hit your usage limit and finish over a couple of resets. Want it longer? Just ask. For a full 7-minute episode, build it a part at a time with the same characters and rooms, and have Claude join the parts at the end.

Will YouTube flag it as AI content?

YouTube's monetisation rules target mass-produced, repetitive videos, not AI as such. So don't copy and paste the skill's episodes, or anyone else's. Change the character, give it a personality and make it your own brand. That's what makes a channel, not the tool behind it.

Animation is one job Claude can take on. To find the ones costing your business the most time, take the free AI bottleneck test, or read our insights on AI implementation.