A good animated explainer video does one job: it leaves the viewer able to explain your thing to somebody else. Nearly everything else follows from that, including the length, which is the question almost everyone asks first. The short answer is sixty to ninety seconds, one idea, and an opening line that is about the viewer rather than about you. Below is the longer answer, with four films from our own work and what each of them gets right.
How long should an animated explainer video be?
Sixty to ninety seconds for most businesses. Two minutes is the point at which you need a reason.
The evidence is fairly consistent. Wistia’s 2026 State of Video report, drawn from more than 13 million videos, found that videos under a minute average a 52% engagement rate, meaning the typical viewer watches about half of one. Engagement slides as the running time climbs. Wyzowl’s consumer survey found half of people naming one minute as the ideal explainer length and a third naming one to two minutes. Our own finished films nearly all land between sixty and a hundred and twenty seconds, and we did not set out to make that happen.
Here is the more useful way to think about it, though. Length is an output, not an input. The videos that run long were not planned long; they were planned vaguely, and the running time is simply the receipt. Decide the one idea first and the duration mostly decides itself.
The arithmetic is unforgiving and quite freeing once you accept it. A ninety-second video is about 220 words of voiceover. That is half a side of A4. It is room for one idea, properly made, and no room at all for three. If your draft script is 600 words, you do not have a long video, you have three videos arguing with each other.
Length is also the only thing that moves the price, since we quote per finished minute rather than per day: animated explainers start at £950 a minute and app or platform demos at £700, everything included. So a minute you did not need is not a small indulgence.
One idea, carried all the way through
The single clearest difference between a video that works and one that merely exists is whether you can say, in one sentence, what the viewer is meant to walk away holding. Not what the video covers. What it leaves behind.
A good test: write that sentence down before you write anything else, then check every scene against it. Scenes that do not serve it are not bad scenes, they are a different video. The hard part is not finding things to say, it is choosing which two to leave out, and that decision is far cheaper to make in a document than in week four of animation.
This is also where the format question lives. Not everything wants to be a film: if the content is really a set of comparable figures, an infographic may be the better medium, and a video built on top of one tends to feel like a slideshow with music.
It opens with the viewer, not with you
You can usually judge a video in its first eight seconds, and usually by one thing: whose world it starts in.
“Founded in 2016, we are a leading provider of integrated solutions” starts in yours. “Your team spends four hours a week copying numbers between two systems” starts in theirs. The second one earns the next thirty seconds, because the viewer has just been told you understand their Tuesday afternoon.
It sounds obvious written down. It is nonetheless the most common thing we rewrite, because a company that has introduced itself the same way for years stops hearing it. The mechanics of getting this right, including the five beats a working script tends to follow, are in how to write an explainer video script.
Four of our films, and what each one gets right
Abstract principles are easy. Here are four films on our work page that you can watch, and the specific thing each one is doing.
Hiscox, business insurance. The hardest category we work in, because the product is a document. Nobody can see business cover, and nothing happens with it until the worst day of your year. The job of that film is to make an abstract promise concrete without ever becoming alarming, which it does by staying with one business and one plausible bad afternoon rather than listing what the policy includes. If your product is a service, a policy or a contract, this is the problem you have, and it is why financial services work leans so heavily on choosing a single scenario.
Kent and Medway NHS Cancer Alliance. A patient-facing film, which means tone is not a finishing touch, it is the brief. Everything in it, the pace, the warmth of the palette, how much silence is left around the voiceover, is set by the fact that someone may be watching it on the worst week of their life. The lesson generalises: a good explainer matches its tone to the stakes of the thing it is explaining. The same restraint runs through healthcare work generally, and it is why a breezy upbeat track would wreck it.
Really Simple Systems, CRM demo. A different genre. This one exists to get new users productive, so it shows the interface rather than describing it. The discipline in an app or platform demo is resisting the tour: a demo that visits every screen teaches nothing, while one that follows a single task from start to finish teaches that task, and a user who has completed one task will explore the rest themselves.
England Golf, governance and membership. Governance is genuinely dry and the film has two audiences, clubs and players, who care about different halves of it. There is no visual trick that rescues that. What rescues it is sequence: putting the thing people actually want to know first and letting the structure carry the interest, rather than decorating a flat explanation. If your subject is rules, process or eligibility, structure is nearly the whole job.
Those four cover most of the ground: an intangible service, a sensitive subject, a product you can point at, and a process. Whichever yours is closest to, that is the film worth watching twice.
The animation serves the sentence, not the showreel
Good animation in this format is quieter than people expect. One visual idea per line of voiceover, held long enough to read. Transitions that move you from one thought to the next rather than announcing themselves. Type you can read at phone size. A palette that belongs to your brand and leaves one colour spare for the thing you want looked at.
The failure mode is not ugliness, it is competition: a screen so busy that the viewer stops listening in order to look. If you are watching a draft and find you have missed a sentence, that is a note about the animation, not about your concentration.
Sound is closer to half the film than people think
Voiceover casting changes more than almost any other single decision, and it is usually settled in five minutes. The right read for a patient film is not the right read for a product launch, and the wrong one is immediately obvious in a way nobody can quite name.
Two checks worth running on any draft. Watch it with the sound off: the pictures should roughly tell you the story, and if they do not, the animation is illustrating words rather than explaining anything. Then close your eyes and listen: the voiceover alone should still make sense, because a good proportion of your audience will effectively watch it that way, scrolling with the sound muted on one pass and listening properly on the next.
A quick way to judge the one you have
Whether it is a draft from us, something you made in-house, or a competitor’s film you are quietly jealous of, these questions sort the good from the merely finished:
- Can you say in one sentence what the viewer should walk away holding?
- In the first eight seconds, whose problem is on screen?
- If you cut the last fifteen seconds, would anything be lost?
- Is there one clear thing to do at the end, and only one?
- Does it still make sense with the sound off? And with your eyes shut?
- Could somebody who watched it once explain your product to a colleague?
That last one is the only test that really matters. The rest are just ways of getting there.
What it does not need
It does not need to be long, it does not need to list every feature, and it does not need to be the only video you ever make. A tight ninety-second film that does one job well, plus a couple of short social cutdowns from the same assets, will almost always outperform one three-minute film carrying everything. And the fastest way to end up with the three-minute version is to skip the ranking stage at the start, which is one of the things that most reliably goes wrong with an explainer video project.
If you are at the beginning of this, the single highest-leverage hour you can spend is on the brief. How to brief an animated explainer video is the one to read next, and it is mostly about deciding what the video is not about.