Anima Style Gallery

If you've poked at Anima at all, you've heard the one piece of advice that decides whether you love it or bounce off it: the base's default look is deliberately plain, and artist tags are where all the magic lives. The model knows thousands of Danbooru artists cold, and a single @name in your prompt reshapes the whole output. This node is a visual browser for that knowledge - 20,000+ artist styles you can scroll, search, sort and preview, then drop into your prompt as a ready-made tag. No LoRAs, no downloads, no model calls. Just pick and prompt.

Why this exists

Anima's artist-tag fidelity was called "pretty overpowered" from the very first preview, and its plain default aesthetic means you basically have to use those tags to get output you like. That created a discovery problem: how do you find which of the 20,000 artists click with you? The community answer came fast - first ThetaCursed's Anima Style Explorer website, then animadex, then a small crop of ComfyUI pickers. XAV's take is the gallery-flavored one: an actual image preview rendered right on the node, plus a full-screen gallery for real browsing instead of scrolling a giant dropdown.

How it works

The Python side is almost embarrassingly simple. The single artist input is a dropdown of 20,000 entries in the format name (rank/id) - dairi (1/87540) is the default - and the node just strips off the numbers and prepends an @, so picking dairi outputs the string @dairi. That's it. The work happens in the bundled JavaScript: it draws the artist's preview thumbnail onto the node (loaded from ThetaCursed's style-explorer image repo by ID), and adds two buttons - Gallery, which opens the full-screen browser with search, sort by Realistic/Cartoon/Cute, favorites and a lightbox, and Random, which does exactly what you hope. All 20,000 styles are shipped in a ~3MB data.json inside the pack, so the dropdown itself works fully offline.

The fields that matter

There's exactly one input and one output, which is the appeal:

• artist - the only thing you set. Pick from the dropdown, roll the Random button, or hit Gallery to actually browse. The node label calls it "Artist's style," which is honest.
• prompt (STRING) - the output. It's the @name tag, ready to drop into your prompt. The typical wiring is through a StringConcatenate node alongside your main prompt text, then into a CLIP Text Encode; the example workflow in the pack shows exactly that.

Install

Same as any custom node. In ComfyUI Manager, search comfyui-xav-anima-style-selector and install, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/XAV-Games/comfyui-xav-anima-style-selector

Restart ComfyUI. There are zero Python dependencies - the whole thing is the node class plus its JS. Note that this pack does not include the Anima checkpoint; you still need the base model loaded yourself (UNET + the Qwen text encoder + Qwen VAE, as in the example workflow).

Gotchas

The name of the game is that previews are fetched from the web (raw.githubusercontent.com/ThetaCursed/...). If you're offline, the dropdown still works and the @name output is still correct - you just lose the thumbnails and the gallery shows nothing. Don't panic and reinstall; it's network, not the node.

Second: the README says the node "outputs the style author name," which understates it - you actually get the @ prefix already. Don't add your own @ in the prompt text or you'll end up with @@dairi, which Anima will read as a doubled, mangled tag.

And a size warning: 20,000 entries is a lot of dropdown. Scrolling it by hand is miserable - that's what the Gallery button is for. This is a small, young pack from a single author (there's one self-post on r/comfyui and basically no community chatter around it yet), so treat it as a handy utility rather than a battle-tested ecosystem staple. It does one thing and does it simply, which is more than most of the alternatives can say.