16 Types of Animation & Cartoon Styles, Explained

2D animation is the flat, vector-based style most people picture when they hear "animated explainer video." Characters, icons, and backgrounds are drawn or built in vector software and animated frame by frame or through rigged movement. It's the workhorse of the explainer video industry because it balances cost, speed, and clarity better than almost any other style.

Because 2D doesn't need to simulate lighting, depth, or physical materials, revisions are faster and cheaper than in 3D — a real advantage when a script changes mid-production.

3D animation builds characters, products, and environments as digital models with real dimensionality, lighting, and texture, then animates them in three-dimensional space. It's the style of choice when a product's physical form or mechanism is the story — showing how a device assembles, how a part moves, or how light interacts with a surface.

The trade-off is production time and cost: modeling, texturing, rigging, and rendering each add stages that 2D simply skips.

Motion capture (mocap) records a real performer's movement with sensors or camera arrays, then maps that data onto a 3D character rig. It produces the most naturalistic human motion of any animation technique, because the movement genuinely came from a person rather than being hand-animated frame by frame.

It's most common in games, film, and virtual production — commercial explainer work uses it far less often, since the mocap session and cleanup add a production stage most marketing budgets don't need.

Typography animation (kinetic type) uses moving text itself as the primary visual — words that scale, slide, and transform in rhythm with a voiceover or soundtrack. There's little or no character illustration; the words carry the message and the emotion.

It's especially effective for quote-driven content, mission statements, and social clips where sound is often off and text needs to do the work alone.

Infographic animation turns charts, statistics, and step-by-step processes into moving visuals — bars that grow, numbers that count up, icons that appear in sequence. It's built specifically to make quantitative or procedural information easier to absorb than a static slide ever could.

It's a natural fit for B2B content where the selling point is a number: cost savings, efficiency gains, market size.

See B2W's infographic video production services.

Motion graphics combines shapes, icons, text, and UI elements into smooth, design-driven movement — closer to animated graphic design than character storytelling. It's become the default look for software demos and B2B marketing because it renders fast, stays on-brand easily, and clearly represents digital products and interfaces.

Unlike infographic animation, motion graphics isn't limited to charts — it covers logo animation, UI walkthroughs, and abstract brand pieces too.

Explore B2W's motion graphics animation services.

Stop-motion animates real physical objects — puppets, models, paper, everyday items — one frame at a time, photographing tiny incremental movements. The result has a tactile, handmade texture that digital animation can't fully replicate, which is exactly why brands reach for it when they want to stand out.

It's slow and labor-intensive by nature: every second of footage can mean dozens of individually staged shots.

Claymation is stop-motion animation using clay or plasticine figures, reshaped slightly between each frame to create movement. Its soft, rounded look and squash-and-stretch character reads as warm and playful in a way few other styles match — think Wallace & Gromit or the California Raisins.

Like all stop-motion, it's material- and labor-intensive, and figures need constant reshaping and repair during long shoots.

Whiteboard animation simulates a hand drawing simple black-and-white (or lightly colored) illustrations on a blank surface in real time, usually paired with a voiceover. The drawing motion itself holds attention — viewers watch to see what gets sketched next — which is part of why whiteboard videos consistently test well for information retention.

It's especially effective for step-by-step or educational content where the "reveal" of each drawn element reinforces the narration.

Anime is the Japanese animation tradition known for expressive, large-eyed characters, dramatic framing, and dynamic action sequences — manga is its print/comic counterpart, and the two share a visual DNA that's become one of the most recognizable animation aesthetics worldwide. Brands borrow this style when they want to signal energy, youth culture, or a built-in connection to anime fandom.

It demands a specific illustration skill set and character design sensibility that not every animation studio has in-house.

Mixed media animation combines two or more techniques in a single piece — live-action footage blended with 2D overlays, hand-drawn elements layered onto 3D scenes, or stop-motion textures mixed with digital compositing. It exists specifically to solve problems no single style handles well alone.

The flexibility comes at a coordination cost: production has to manage multiple pipelines instead of one.

Explore B2W's mixed media animation services.

Cut-out animation moves flat character pieces — paper, digital cutouts, or vector puppets — like jointed puppets rather than redrawing each frame. South Park is the most famous example, though today it's almost entirely done digitally rather than with literal paper cutouts.

It's efficient for high volumes of dialogue-driven content, since a rigged puppet can be reused across episodes without redrawing characters each time.

Rotoscoping traces animation directly over live-action footage, frame by frame, producing movement that's unusually fluid and naturalistic because it's grounded in real recorded motion. a-ha's "Take On Me" is the most famous commercial example of this technique, and films like A Scanner Darkly have used it since for the same reason.

It's labor-intensive by design — every frame needs individual tracing work — and modern motion capture has replaced much of its commercial use case.

Sand animation is performed live — an artist shapes and reshapes sand on a lit glass surface, projected in real time or filmed for later editing. It's as much performance art as production technique, prized for its improvisational, flowing quality — Kseniya Simonova's Ukraine's Got Talent performance is the style's most widely seen example.

The zoetrope is a 19th-century mechanical device — a spinning cylinder with sequential images viewed through slits — that creates the illusion of motion without any film or digital process at all. It's a foundational piece of animation history, predating cinema itself.

A flipbook creates the illusion of motion from a sequence of drawings on successive pages, flipped quickly by hand. It's often the first animation technique people encounter as kids, and it's a genuine ancestor of frame-by-frame 2D animation as we know it today.