Hailuo
MiniMax
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Specifications
Pricing
TBD — pricing not yet announced
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Hailuo is MiniMax's flagship video generation model, released under the brand name "Hailuo AI" (海螺 AI) in China. It earned its reputation on the strength of a single killer feature: best-in-class human portrait animation. While most AI video models animate faces in an uncanny, robotic manner, Hailuo generates nuanced micro-expressions, natural eye movement, and precise lip synchronisation that make animated portraits look genuinely lifelike — a capability that has made it a favourite tool for short-form content creators across Chinese social platforms.
Capabilities
At the core of Hailuo's technical advantage is a specialised facial animation pipeline trained on a large corpus of high-quality human video data. This gives it an edge in three areas: lip sync accuracy for speech and singing content, natural facial expression dynamics (blinking, glancing, and subtle emotional shifts), and head-and-shoulder body motion including breathing and postural micro-movements. The model supports both 16:9 landscape and 9:16 vertical formats with 24 fps output, covering the two most prevalent formats for digital video distribution.
Best Practices
For portrait animation with Hailuo, use a high-resolution input image (at least 512x512) with the face clearly visible, well-lit, and occupying at least 30% of the frame. Avoid heavy shadows across the face or extreme angles that obscure facial landmarks. In your prompt, describe the emotional tone and the type of movement: "she smiles warmly and turns her head slightly to the left, hair moving gently" will produce far more expressive results than "person moving". For lip sync applications, pair Hailuo with an audio track and describe the speech cadence in the prompt for tighter synchronisation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes Hailuo stand out for character animation?
Hailuo by MiniMax is specifically engineered for human-centric video generation. It achieves unusually accurate lip synchronisation — the animated lips match the cadence of any speech or narration described in the prompt — and produces natural micro-expressions (eye blinks, subtle smiles, brow movement) that are often absent in other models. These capabilities make it particularly effective for AI avatars, product spokespeople, and short-form social video content.
How does Hailuo perform in Chinese video generation benchmarks?
Hailuo has consistently ranked at the top of Chinese AI video model leaderboards, including the EvalCrafter and VBench benchmarks, particularly in the human motion and subject consistency categories. Its training data is heavily weighted toward Chinese faces, urban environments, and cultural contexts, which translates to higher quality output for content targeting Chinese-speaking audiences.
When will Hailuo be available on Genace?
MiniMax is currently onboarding international API partners for Hailuo. Genace is in active discussion with MiniMax and expects to launch the integration in the near term. Sign up on the waitlist to receive priority access.
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