To improve encoding quality in an animation.

An animation encoding device is provided with an input buffer 2, a movement vector detector 4, vector storage equipment 5, movement compensating equipment 6, a subtracter 3, DCT equipment 7, a quantizer 8, an inverse quantizer 10, inverse DCT equipment 11, an adder 12, a frame memory 13, a variable length encoder 9, a vector code length optimizer 14 for reading a movement vector stored in the storing equipment 5, calculating a differential movement vector and selecting the combination of a variable length code with a fixed length code to permit the total code amount of the differential movement vector to be the shortest one when the movement vector is encoded, a vector encoder 15 for encoding the variable length of the movement vector through the use of the combination of the variable length code with the fixed length code, which are selected by the optimizer 14, and outputting it and a multiplexer 16.