In the application of digital model of animation scene, image restoration technology and image denoising technology are the basic tasks of practical operation, which are closely related, but there exist also essential differences. The reason is that both of them want to obtain the original image from the degraded noise image or damaged image, but generally speaking, as there is no sufficient constraint information to accurately recover the original image, both of them are unwell-posed inverse problems. Therefore, on the basis of understanding the basic content and application research status of variational partial differential equations (PDEs), this paper discusses the application value of variational PDEs in image denoising and restoration according to the image processing requirements in the digital model of animation scenes.