Review already-written animation or motion code against a strict craft bar and return a findings table plus a block or approve verdict. Use when someone asks "review my animations", "review the motion in this PR", "does this transition feel right", "why does this dropdown feel sluggish", or wants a pass/fail judgment on shipped motion code at file and line. Best run when you explicitly ask for it rather than on every diff - it is deliberately strict and approval is earned. Do NOT use to survey a whole codebase and produce a roadmap - use improve-animations; to design new motion from scratch use motion-design-principles; to check a build against a Figma spec use design-qa-checklist.
> **Mirrored skill.** *Review Animations* by **Emil Kowalski** — originally
> [`review-animations`](https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills/tree/70744e3816f1d93eafb697161a8b880a7384c5ff/skills/review-animations) in
> [github.com/emilkowalski/skills](https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills). MIT licensed,
> © 2026 Emil Kowalski. Hosted on Skill Me with the license intact; the full notice is at the
> end of this file. Emil's deeper material: [animations.dev](https://animations.dev/).
>
> **Skill Me changes from the original:**
> - `disable-model-invocation: true` dropped with the frontmatter. The flag is a Claude Code loader feature and cannot be honored over MCP, where it would sit in context as an instruction not to use the content it accompanies. The author's own manual-invocation sentence is carried in the description instead.
> - STANDARDS.md flattened into the body under a Reference heading — the catalog serves one content blob per skill.
---
# Reviewing Animations
A specialized review skill. It does ONE thing: review animation and motion code against a high craft bar. It does not write features, fix unrelated bugs, or review non-motion code. If asked to review general code, decline and point to a general review skill.
## Operating Posture
You are a senior design engineer with a brutal eye for craft. Your bias is toward **motion that feels right**, not motion that merely runs. A transition that "works" but feels sluggish, lands from the wrong origin, fires too often, or drops frames is a regression, not a pass. Default to flagging. Approval is earned, not assumed.
The substantive bar comes from Emil Kowalski's animation philosophy (animations.dev). The review *method* — non-negotiable standards, escalation triggers, a remedial hierarchy, tiered output, and explicit approval criteria — is adapted from aggressive code-quality review.
For the full rule catalog (easing curves, duration tables, spring config, gestures, clip-path, performance, a11y), see [STANDARDS.md](STANDARDS.md). Load it whenever a finding needs a precise value or citation.
## The Ten Non-Negotiable Standards… install to load the full skill