AnimateBanana: Transforming Process Diagrams into Animated Narratives

Diagrams are often used to visually communicate scientific processes. However, conveying process dynamics and explanatory flow from a static diagram is challenging. Although animated narratives improve comprehension and engagement, creating them from a diagram is a manual and time-consuming process. We present **AnimateBanana, a framework for automatically transforming process-oriented scientific diagrams into animated narratives**. Given a diagram and a user-specified presentation style, AnimateBanana first constructs an editable, animation-aware programmatic representation of the diagram. Specialized multimodal agents progressively reason over the source diagram and structured intermediate representations to determine presentation structure, narration, and animation. Critic-mediated feedback is used to refine intermediate outputs. **The resulting narratives are faithful to the source diagram, controllable, and deployable across multiple presentation formats (PDF, SVG, GIF, MP4, and PPTX). To support this new task, we introduce AnimateBench, a curated benchmark of 5000 process-oriented diagrams with verified animated narratives** spanning diverse diagram families, presentation styles, and levels of structural complexity, including expert-derived reference narratives where available. We further introduce task-specific metrics for evaluating final narratives. Automated evaluation and controlled user studies show that AnimateBanana substantially outperforms competing baselines across animation validity and narrative quality. Ablations further support explicit intermediate representations, source diagram grounding, and stage-wise critic feedback as important design choices for reliable animated narrative generation.