AnimateDiff Review — The Motion Module That Unlocked AI Video for the Stable Diffusion Ecosystem

AnimateDiff (guoyww, 2023) adds plug-and-play temporal attention layers to any Stable Diffusion 1.5 or SDXL checkpoint, enabling text-to-video without retraining. Supports MotionLoRA, SparseCtrl, sliding window for longer clips, and has massive ComfyUI integration via ComfyUI-AnimateDiff-Evolved. Apache 2.0. 8 GB VRAM for SD1.5 variants. Not a standalone model — a motion module paradigm. Rating: 4/5 for its ecosystem; 3/5 for raw quality vs. 2025-era DiT models.