Anima is a 2 billion parameter text-to-image model created via a collaboration between CircleStone Labs and Comfy Org. It is focused mainly on anime concepts, characters, and styles, but is also capable of generating a wide variety of other non-photorealistic content. The model is designed for making illustrations and artistic images, and will not work well at realism.

It is trained on several million anime images and about 800k non-anime artistic images. No synthetic data was used for training. The knowledge cut-off date for the anime training data is September 2025.

Versions

• Anima-Base

  • The pretrained, unrefined base model. Maximum flexibility, diversity, and style adherence.

  • LoRAs should be trained using this version.

• Anima-Aesthetic

  • Fine-tuned for better consistency and a higher quality default art style.

• Anima-Turbo

  • Distilled version for fast generations.

  • Use at CFG 1 and 8-12 steps.

  • The distillation process also increases stability and gives the model a strong default style, but reduces diversity.

I recommend starting with Anima-Turbo. On average, it is only slightly worse than Anima-Aesthetic, while being very fast to generate (and much cheaper if you use it on an online platform that scales the cost with step count). This makes it very convenient for quickly iterating on prompts. The increased stability can even make it better than Aesthetic in some cases.

Installing and running

Get the text encoder and VAE from the HuggingFage page.

The model is natively supported in ComfyUI. The model files go in their respective folders inside your model directory:

• anima-base-v1.0.safetensors goes in ComfyUI/models/diffusion_models

• qwen_3_06b_base.safetensors goes in ComfyUI/models/text_encoders

• qwen_image_vae.safetensors goes in ComfyUI/models/vae (this is the Qwen-Image VAE, you might already have it)

Generation settings

• Works at resolutions between 512^2 and 1536^2 pixels.

• 30-50 steps, CFG 4-6.

  • The Aesthetic version can tolerate lower CFGs such as 3, and often looks better with them.

• A variety of samplers work. Some of my favorites:

  • er_sde: neutral style, flat colors, sharp lines. I use this as a reasonable default.

  • euler_a: Softer, thinner lines. Can sometimes tend towards a 2.5D look. CFG can be pushed a bit higher than other samplers without burning the image.

  • dpmpp_2m_sde_gpu: similar in style to er_sde but can produce more variety and be more "creative". Depending on the prompt it can get too wild sometimes.

  • euler: a basic sampler that is a bit more creative than er_sde. Good with the Turbo and Aesthetic versions, since those are naturally more stable.

• If going for a more realistic / painterly look, the beta57 scheduler (ComfyUI RES4LYF custom node pack) can help make better textures, since it puts more emphasis on low-noise timesteps.

Prompting

The model is trained on Danbooru-style tags, natural language captions, and combinations of tags and captions.

• Use lowercase for tags, and spaces instead of underscores. Score tags are the only tags that use underscores.

• Recommended positive prefix: "masterpiece, best quality, score_7, safe, "

• Recommended negative: "worst quality, low quality, score_1, score_2, score_3, artist name, blurry, jpeg artifacts, chromatic aberration"

• When using a tag that is different between Danbooru and Gelbooru, prefer the Gelbooru version.

• Prompt weighting works, but needs a weight higher than typically used for SDXL. Example: "(chibi:2)"

Aesthetic Version Prompting

Anima-Aesthetic is fine-tuned only on high quality images, with all of the quality tags stripped out from the captions. You don't need to use quality tags in the positive at all, but "masterpiece, best quality, " is safe to leave in. I recommend not using score_* tags in both the positive and negative prompt. It is already high quality enough and the score tags can push it too hard into slop territory.

Tag order

[quality/meta/year/safety tags] [1girl/1boy/1other etc] [character] [series] [artist] [general tags]

Within each tag section, the tags can be in arbitrary order.

Quality tags

Human score based: masterpiece, best quality, good quality, normal quality, low quality, worst quality

PonyV7 aesthetic model based: score_9, score_8, ..., score_1

You can use either the human score quality tags, the aesthetic model tags, both together, or neither. All combinations work.

Time period tags

Specific year: year 2025, year 2024, ...

Period: newest, recent, mid, early, old

Meta tags

highres, absurdres, anime screenshot, jpeg artifacts, official art, etc

Safety tags

safe, sensitive, nsfw, explicit

Artist tags

See the full description on the original page