Lottie for React Native, iOS, and Android

Lottie component for React Native (iOS and Android)

Lottie is a mobile library for Android and iOS that parses Adobe After Effects animations exported as JSON with bodymovin and renders them natively on mobile!

For the first time, designers can create and ship beautiful animations without an engineer painstakingly recreating it by hand. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words so here are 13,000:


All of these animations were created in After Effects, exported with bodymovin, and rendered natively with no additional engineering effort.

Related Projects

This project is only the code to wrap and expose Lottie to React Native. The parsing/rendering code can be found in their respective libraries:

Lottie for iOS

Lottie for Android

Installation

Get started with Lottie by installing the node module:

npm i --save lottie-react-native

From here, RN's built in linking should work:

react-native link lottie-react-native

If you're using CocoaPods on iOS, you can put the following in your Podfile:

pod 'lottie-react-native', :path => '../node_modules/lottie-react-native'

Please file an issue if you have any trouble!

Basic Usage

See full component API

Lottie's animation progress can be controlled with an Animated value:

import React from 'react';
import { Animated } from 'react-native';
import Animation from 'lottie-react-native';

export default class BasicExample extends React.Component {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props);
    this.state = {
      progress: new Animated.Value(0),
    };
  }

  componentDidMount() {
    Animated.timing(this.state.progress, {
      toValue: 1,
      duration: 5000,
    }).start();
  }

  render() {
    return (
      <Animation
        style={{
          width: 200,
          height: 200,
        }}
        source={require('../path/to/animation.json')}
        progress={this.state.progress}
      />
    );
  }
}

Additionally, there is an imperative API which is sometimes simpler.

import React from 'react';
import Animation from 'lottie-react-native';

export default class BasicExample extends React.Component {
  componentDidMount() {
    this.animation.play();
  }

  render() {
    return (
      <Animation
        ref={animation => { this.animation = animation; }}
        style={{
          width: 200,
          height: 200,
        }}
        source={require('../path/to/animation.json')}
      />
    );
  }
}

Running the Example Project

You can check out the example project with the following instructions

1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-react-native.git
2. Open: cd lottie-react-native and Install: npm install

For Running iOS:

1. If you don't have CocoaPods installed, run sudo gem install cocoapods
2. Install pods: npm run build:pods
3. Run Example: npm run run:ios

For Running Android:

1. Run Example: npm run run:android

Alternatives

1. Build animations by hand. Building animations by hand is a huge time commitment for design and engingeering across Android and iOS. It's often hard or even impossible to justify spending so much time to get an animation right.
2. Facebook Keyframes. Keyframes is a wonderful new library from Facebook that they built for reactions. However, Keyframes doesn't support some of Lottie's features such as masks, mattes, trim paths, dash patterns, and more.
3. Gifs. Gifs are more than double the size of a bodymovin JSON and are rendered at a fixed size that can't be scaled up to match large and high density screens.
4. Png sequences. Png sequences are even worse than gifs in that their file sizes are often 30-50x the size of the bodymovin json and also can't be scaled up.

Why is it called Lottie?

Lottie is named after a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation. Her best known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) – the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, preceding Walt Disney's feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) by over ten years The art of Lotte Reineger

Contributing

See the Contributors Guide

License

Apache-2.0