The story of how I came up with the idea to use Nano Banana and Kling AI to turn my child’s hand-drawn pictures into his favorite cartoon is a long one.
My child has a painting class every Thursday evening. For the first few weeks, he thought it was quite fun. When it was time for class, he would happily grab his small water bottle and run to the painting studio. After just a month or two, the story took a turn. One week he said it was too hot and he didn’t want to go. The next week he said his chest hurt and he wasn’t feeling well, and he even said with conviction, “Which is more important, a person or their body?” The time after that, he said the teacher was too strict and wouldn’t let them use black paint. In short, he came up with a variety of excuses to avoid painting.
Encountering Nano Banana
Just then, I saw the release of Nano Banana, a new benchmark for Google’s AI image generation，and everyone on the internet was showing off its various features, like creating 3D models from photos and changing avatars from photos. So, I mentioned to my child, “Mom will turn your drawing into a short movie with tanks and rockets which he likes those very much .” Unexpectedly, this one sentence made him full of anticipation. Before class was even over, he asked the teacher to take a picture and send it to me.
Original painting
Once I got the drawing, I uploaded it to Gemini 2.5 Flash Image（Nano Banana） with the following prompt:
Prompt: This is a picture of a panda traveling on a small train. Based on this image, please generate four scenes that the little panda sees from the train, while maintaining the consistency of the small train and the character on it. Scene 1: tank, Scene 2: rocket, Scene 3: camels, Scene 4: ocean. Depict these four scenes using the original artist’s style.
Nano Banana then generated the four images below. The consistency was very strong, and the overall hand-drawn effect was excellent. Haha, it was a little too well-drawn.
Tank-Made by Nano Banana
Rocket-Made by Nano Banana
Desert-Made by Nano Banana
Ocean-Made by Nano Banana
Then, I used my child’s original drawing and the four hand-drawn images generated by Nano Banana, and used Kling AI’s beginning-and-end frame feature to create four 5-second videos. The prompts were as follows:
- This is a story of a little panda driving a small train on a trip. The little panda drives the small train through a forest and sees a tank, and the tank is firing.
- This is a story of a little panda driving a small train on a trip. The little panda sees a tank, and the tank is firing. The small train continues to drive and sees a rocket being launched. The rocket soars into the sky, leaving a long trail of flame behind it.
- This is a story of a little panda driving a small train on a trip. The little panda sees a rocket being launched. The rocket soars into the sky, leaving a long trail of flame behind it. The small train continues to drive and sees a herd of camels walking in the desert.
- This is a story of a little panda driving a small train on a trip. The little panda sees a herd of camels walking in the desert. The small train continues to drive and sees a vast ocean, with a whale leaping out of the water.
Finally, I combined these four 5-second videos into a 20-second short film. When my child came home from school and saw the short film he created, he not only watched it many times himself but also asked me to send it to his painting teacher.
Just like that, a casual doodle, with the magic of Nano Banana and Kling AI, became a unique animated world in my child’s eyes. He excitedly played it back over and over, his eyes shining as if he saw his imagination really driving a small train through the desert and over the ocean. AI did not replace his paintbrush, but rather gave his creativity wings, turning his naive lines into a movie that tells a story.
Technology is never just a cold tool. When it understands a child’s innocence and is willing to stoop down and accompany every wild creation, it becomes the warmest romance of this era—it quietly hides in our lives, turning an ordinary Thursday evening into a continuous, glowing surprise.
