Can It Be Done in React Native?

Every so often somebody posts a beautiful interaction from a shipped app — a card that peels, a chart that scrubs, a transition that shouldn't be possible on a JavaScript thread — and the question in the replies is always the same. William Candillon has been answering it on video since 2018.

The format is consistent: pick a real interface effect, usually from a well-known app or a Dribbble shot, then rebuild it live in React Native and explain every decision. Candillon works on React Native Skia and collaborated with Christian Falch on bringing Skia to React Native, so the tooling he reaches for is the tooling he helps build — mostly Reanimated, Gesture Handler, and increasingly Skia for anything involving custom drawing.

What the videos cover

Gesture-driven animation is the spine of the series: interruptible drags, velocity-aware springs, worklets running on the UI thread, and the shared-value plumbing that makes 60fps possible without round-tripping to JavaScript. More recent episodes lean hard into Skia — shaders, path morphing, blurs, custom charts — which is a meaningful shift from the earlier Reanimated-only material.

Source for the episodes lives on his GitHub, which is more useful than the videos alone; several projects have been updated across Reanimated major versions while the video that explains them has not.

What it assumes you know

A lot, and it does not apologise for it. There is no onboarding, no 'what is a component', no project setup walkthrough. Candillon moves at working-developer speed and expects you to already be comfortable in React Native, in TypeScript, and with the general shape of the animation libraries before you press play. If you have not written a worklet before, your first episode will be rough.

The other thing to know: this is a channel, not a course. There is no ordering, no prerequisites graph, no completion. Older episodes reference APIs that have since changed — Reanimated in particular went through a breaking rewrite — so a video from a few years back may not compile against today's packages. Cross-reference the repo.

Who it's for — and who should skip it

If you build React Native professionally and your animations feel a beat behind what designers hand you, this is the single best free resource we know of. Nothing else goes this deep on gesture and motion.

Skip it entirely if you're learning React Native. It'll be dispiriting rather than instructive. Skip it too if your app is mostly forms and lists — you'll enjoy the videos and never use any of it.

Our take

Unmatched at what it does, and genuinely hard to substitute. The weakness is structural: an unsorted YouTube archive is a bad teaching format, version drift is real, and there's no path through it other than picking episodes that look interesting. Use the GitHub repo as your index and expect to fix imports.