Element: animationcancel event

Limited availability

This feature is not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers.

The animationcancel event is fired when a CSS Animation unexpectedly aborts. In other words, any time it stops running without sending an animationend event. This might happen when the animation-name is changed such that the animation is removed, or when the animating node is hidden using CSS. Therefore, either directly or because any of its containing nodes are hidden.

An event handler for this event can be added by setting the onanimationcancel property, or using addEventListener().

Syntax

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

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

onanimationcancel = (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 code gets an element that's currently being animated and adds a listener to the animationcancel event. It then sets the element's display property to none, which will trigger the animationcancel event.

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

animated.addEventListener("animationcancel", () => {
  console.log("Animation canceled");
});

animated.style.display = "none";

The same, but using the onanimationcancel property instead of addEventListener():

const animated = document.querySelector(".animated");
animated.onanimationcancel = () => {
  console.log("Animation canceled");
};

animated.style.display = "none";

Live example

HTML

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

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-animationcancel

Browser compatibility

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This page was last modified on ⁨Sep 25, 2025⁩ by MDN contributors.

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