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Element: animationstart event

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since ⁨December 2019⁩.

The animationstart event is fired when a CSS Animation has started. If there is an animation-delay, this event will fire once the delay period has expired. A negative delay will cause the event to fire with an elapsedTime equal to the absolute value of the delay (and, correspondingly, the animation will begin playing at that time index into the sequence).

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

addEventListener("animationstart", (event) => { })

onanimationstart = (event) => { }

Event type

An AnimationEvent. Inherits from Event.

Event properties

Also inherits properties from its parent Event.

AnimationEvent.animationName Read only: A string containing the value of the animation-name that generated the animation.
AnimationEvent.elapsedTime Read only: A float giving the amount of time the animation has been running, in seconds, when this event fired, excluding any time the animation was paused. For an animationstart event, elapsedTime is 0.0 unless there was a negative value for animation-delay, in which case the event will be fired with elapsedTime containing (-1 * delay).
AnimationEvent.pseudoElement Read only: A string, starting with '::', containing the name of the pseudo-element the animation runs on. If the animation doesn't run on a pseudo-element but on the element, an empty string: ''.

Examples

This listens for the animationstart event and logs a message when it is fired:

const animated = document.querySelector(".animated");

animated.addEventListener("animationstart", () => {
  console.log("Animation started");
});

The same, but using onanimationstart:

const animated = document.querySelector(".animated");

animated.onanimationstart = () => {
  console.log("Animation started");
};

Live example

HTML

<div class="animation-example">
  <div class="container">
    <p class="animation">You chose a cold night to visit our planet.</p>
  </div>
  <button class="activate" type="button">Activate animation</button>
  <div class="event-log"></div>
</div>

CSS

.container {
  height: 3rem;
}

.event-log {
  width: 25rem;
  height: 2rem;
  border: 1px solid black;
  margin: 0.2rem;
  padding: 0.2rem;
}

.animation.active {
  animation-duration: 2s;
  animation-name: slide-in;
  animation-iteration-count: 2;
}

@keyframes slide-in {
  from {
    transform: translateX(100%) scaleX(3);
  }
  to {
    transform: translateX(0) scaleX(1);
  }
}

JavaScript

const animation = document.querySelector("p.animation");
const animationEventLog = document.querySelector(
  ".animation-example>.event-log",
);
const applyAnimation = document.querySelector(
  ".animation-example>button.activate",
);
let iterationCount = 0;

animation.addEventListener("animationstart", () => {
  animationEventLog.textContent = `${animationEventLog.textContent}'animation started' `;
});

animation.addEventListener("animationiteration", () => {
  iterationCount++;
  animationEventLog.textContent = `${animationEventLog.textContent}'animation iterations: ${iterationCount}' `;
});

animation.addEventListener("animationend", () => {
  animationEventLog.textContent = `${animationEventLog.textContent}'animation ended'`;
  animation.classList.remove("active");
  applyAnimation.textContent = "Activate animation";
});

animation.addEventListener("animationcancel", () => {
  animationEventLog.textContent = `${animationEventLog.textContent}'animation canceled'`;
});

applyAnimation.addEventListener("click", () => {
  animation.classList.toggle("active");
  animationEventLog.textContent = "";
  iterationCount = 0;
  const active = animation.classList.contains("active");
  applyAnimation.textContent = active
    ? "Cancel animation"
    : "Activate animation";
});

Result

Specifications

Specification
CSS Animations Level 1> # eventdef-globaleventhandlers-animationstart>

Browser compatibility

	Desktop					Mobile
	Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Opera	Safari	Chrome Android	Firefox for Android	Opera Android	Safari on IOS	Samsung Internet	WebView Android	WebView on iOS
`animationstart_event`	7981 43–79 The `onanimationstart` event handler property is not supported. To listen to this event, use `document.addEventListener('animationstart', function() {});`.	1881 12–18 The `onanimationstart` event handler property is not supported. To listen to this event, use `document.addEventListener('animationstart', function() {});`.	51 5–51 The `onanimationstart` event handler property is not supported. To listen to this event, use `document.addEventListener('animationstart', function() {});`.	6668 30–66 The `onanimationstart` event handler property is not supported. To listen to this event, use `document.addEventListener('animationstart', function() {});`.	9	7981 43–79 The `onanimationstart` event handler property is not supported. To listen to this event, use `document.addEventListener('animationstart', function() {});`.	51 5–51 The `onanimationstart` event handler property is not supported. To listen to this event, use `document.addEventListener('animationstart', function() {});`.	5758 30–57 The `onanimationstart` event handler property is not supported. To listen to this event, use `document.addEventListener('animationstart', function() {});`.	9	12.013.0 4.0–12.0 The `onanimationstart` event handler property is not supported. To listen to this event, use `document.addEventListener('animationstart', function() {});`.	7981 43–79 The `onanimationstart` event handler property is not supported. To listen to this event, use `document.addEventListener('animationstart', function() {});`.	9