Kiara Advani discusses her role in the film 'Toxic' after the trailer release

The Tongyi Wan team from Alibaba has introduced Wan-Animate-2, a character animation framework now available in the open source. The architecture of this system completely eliminates the need for skeletal pose extraction and motion characteristic compression, feeding the video signal directly into a diffusion Transformer. As a result, a system was created capable of operating at 24 frames per second, and in direct comparisons, it demonstrates results comparable to closed commercial leaders such as ByteDance's Dreamina and Kuaishou's KLING MotionControl.

The breakthrough of Wan-Animate-2 lies precisely in how it bypasses older methods. Previous workflows required an intermediate pose estimation step that converted the source video into a skeletal structure. This process simultaneously compressed information and created failure points if the skeleton failed. Wan-Animate-2 retains the control signal in the form of raw pixels, allowing the diffusion Transformer to learn the correspondence independently, which leads to noticeably cleaner hand distortions and fewer limb artifacts during complex movements.

The framework's capabilities extend beyond single-character animation; it supports multi-character scenarios and multiple cameras. One control video can simultaneously drive several target characters, and the same animation can be rendered from different specified camera positions without requiring retraining. The system also stably handles non-standard aspect ratios and various body types of characters, eliminating the fragility that long plagued most open-source character animation projects.

The practical significance of this achievement is structural. Character animation has long been a bottleneck in creating high-level commercial video. Generation models could create scenes, compositing could place characters, but obtaining a stylized character performing arbitrary movement while maintaining its identity almost always relied on manual frame-by-frame animation. Wan-Animate-2 closes this gap by providing weights that any developer can run locally.

Alibaba's broader plans within the Tongyi Wan family are becoming clearer. Wan 3.0, released earlier in August, enabled document-input video generation for enterprise use. Wan-Animate-2 opens up character animation possibilities for the developer and creator community. These two releases together cover both ends of the production cycle. For the open-source video ecosystem, the more important question is no longer whether Chinese labs can match the quality of closed commercial products—they have already done so. The question now is about the speed of integrating the new model into subsequent processing tools.

For fans of 90s Tamil cinema, the name 'Idhayam Murali' is not new. In the cult film 'Idhayam,' the late actor Murali portrayed a lover who could not express his feelings, and whose love remained one-sided, which can be compared to a modern 'introverted' lover.

Decades later, the actor's son, Atharv, presented this inherited theme in a new format. The film 'Idhayam Murali,' released on Netflix, also features a character unable to voice what he feels; however, unlike the heavy drama of the 90s, the story is presented in a lighter, more contemporary style characteristic of the 'Gen Z' era. Director Aakash Bhaskaran attempted to combine nostalgia for the past with a modern romantic plot.

The action begins during a flight when Idhaya Murali (Atharv) returns from New York to India with his close friends. Only 24 hours remain until his wedding, and everyone is in a hurry. During the journey, they meet a passenger named Surya (Fahad Fasil). Although Surya shows little interest in others' conversations, Idhaya's friends persuade him to tell his story. This is where the flashback begins, detailing Idhaya's love life. The story spans five different time periods, in which four different women enter Idhaya's life: the childhood crush Gita Miss (Jonita Gandhi), the first love Samantha (Priti Mukundan), the college girl Kayadu Lohar, and the fiancée (in a surprise cameo).

The main question of the plot is whom Idhaya considers his true love among the women while suppressing his emotions, and whether he will confess in time. Idhaya was raised by his uncle Thanga (Natradjan Subramanian), who himself never knew how to openly express his feelings, and this habit has the most negative impact on Idhaya's love life. However, an interesting point is noted in the film: when Idhaya experiences heartbreak, he does not collapse like the heroes of the 90s, but handles it quite easily. Despite the film presenting him as a product of old ideas, his pragmatic approach to love appears quite modern, fitting the Gen Z generation.

This entertaining romantic comedy has everything necessary. It features a smart and attractive cast, energetic music by Thamaana (only background music, as the songs are poorly remembered). The beautiful cinematography by Manoj Parmakhansa and CH Sai makes the film visually rich. The creators deliberately maintained the light atmosphere of the film so that no scene becomes overly emotional or dramatic. By abandoning the heaviness of classic 90s romance, the film achieves a fresh, modern execution.

Nevertheless, this light tone becomes the main weakness of the picture. Viewers cannot feel a strong emotional connection to the question of whether the hero will get his love. Even when he manages to find love, believing in it seems somewhat difficult. Although the female characters are very beautiful and hold prestigious professions such as teacher, NASA astronaut, and doctor, they are given a rather limited range in terms of scriptwriting. It is unclear why they fell in love with each other. Even the friend characters do not receive special traits that would make them memorable.