Manim: The Mathematical Animation Engine Behind 3Blue1Brown's Videos

If you have watched an educational video on YouTube in the past decade, you have almost certainly seen the work of Manim. The distinctive style of Grant Sanderson’s 3Blue1Brown channel — smooth, precisely animated geometric transformations, equations unfolding in real time, and complex mathematical concepts rendered visually intuitive — is powered entirely by this open-source Python library. Manim stands for Mathematical Animation Engine, and it has democratized the creation of world-class mathematical visualizations.

Sanderson originally wrote Manim as a personal tool to produce the animations for his 3Blue1Brown channel, which has grown to over 6 million subscribers. The library’s first public release came in 2019, and it quickly gained traction among educators, students, and content creators who wanted to bring the same visual clarity to their own projects. The fundamental insight behind Manim is that mathematical animations are not illustrations — they are arguments. A well-designed animation can communicate the logic behind a proof or the intuition behind a concept in a way that static diagrams cannot.

The library has evolved significantly since its initial open-source release. The most important development was the emergence of the ManimCommunity fork, which took Sanderson’s original codebase and added comprehensive documentation, a stable release cycle, extensive testing, and dozens of new features. Both versions remain actively maintained, but they now serve different audiences: the original for production work on 3Blue1Brown, and the community edition for everyone else.

How Did Manim Come to Exist and Why Are There Two Versions?

Manim’s origin story is unusual in open source. Grant Sanderson built the first version of Manim entirely for his own use while creating 3Blue1Brown videos. It was never designed to be a general-purpose animation library — it was a personal tool that happened to be open-sourced. The API was documented only by Sanderson’s own usage patterns, and there were no guarantees about stability or backward compatibility.

As the YouTube channel’s popularity grew, so did interest in the tool. Developers began contributing patches and features, but the codebase was not designed for collaborative maintenance. In 2020, the community formed the ManimCommunity organization to create a forked, community-maintained version that could evolve independently from Sanderson’s production needs. This fork received a complete documentation overhaul, a proper renderer architecture, and a semantic versioning scheme.

graph TB
    A[Grant Sanderson creates Manim\nfor 3Blue1Brown videos] --> B[2019: First open-source release]
    B --> C[Original branch: 3b1b/manim]
    B --> D[2020: ManimCommunity fork]
    D --> E[MCE: ManimCommunity/manim]
    C --> F[Sanderson maintains for\n3Blue1Brown production]
    E --> G[Community features:\nDocs, testing, plugins]
    E --> H[Stable releases:\nv0.18, v0.19+]
    F --> I[Custom patches for\nspecific video needs]

What Can You Create with Manim?

Manim excels at a specific category of animation: precise, programmatic motion of mathematical objects. Its primitive objects — called “Mobjects” — include everything from basic geometric shapes to LaTeX-rendered equations, coordinate systems, function graphs, number lines, and 3D surfaces.

Animations are defined by transforming Mobjects over time: moving a circle, morphing a graph, transforming an equation, or interpolating between two shapes. Manim’s renderer handles the intermediate frames automatically, producing smooth motion with customizable easing functions.

sequenceDiagram
    participant Dev as Developer (Python)
    participant Manim as Manim Engine
    participant FFmpeg as FFmpeg
    participant Output as Video File

    Dev->>Manim: Define Scene class with construct()
    Dev->>Manim: Add mobjects and animations
    Manim->>Manim: Render intermediate frames
    Manim->>Manim: Apply transformations per frame
    Manim->>FFmpeg: Send frame sequence
    FFmpeg->>Output: Encode to MP4
    Output-->>Dev: Complete animation file

How Do You Write a Manim Animation?

Manim animations are pure Python code. Every animation begins by creating a class that inherits from Scene and defining its content in a construct method:

from manim import *

class SquareToCircle(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        square = Square()
        self.play(Create(square))
        self.play(square.animate.move_to(RIGHT))
        self.play(Transform(square, Circle()))
        self.wait(1)

This seven-line script creates a complete animation: a square appears, slides to the right, morphs into a circle, and pauses. Executed with manim -pql scene.py SquareToCircle, it renders to a video file with a single terminal command. The -pql flag means “preview quality, low” — suitable for quick iteration — while -pqh produces high-quality output for publication.

What Hardware Do You Need to Run Manim?

Manim uses the cairo backend by default, which renders entirely on the CPU. An optional OpenGL backend provides faster rendering and real-time preview but requires a capable GPU. The community edition also supports a plugin system for alternative renderers.

Frequently Asked Questions About Manim