In this paper we present a novel generative deformable model motivated by Pictorial Structures (PS) and Active Appearance Models (AAMs) for object alignment in-the-wild. Inspired by the tree structure used in PS, the proposed Active Pictorial Structures (APS)1 model the appearance of the object using multiple graph-based pairwise normal distributions (Gaussian Markov Random Field) between the patches extracted from the regions around adjacent landmarks. We show that this formulation is more accurate than using a single multivariate distribution (Principal Component Analysis) as commonly done in the literature. APS employ a weighted inverse compositional Gauss-Newton optimization with fixed Jacobian and Hessian that achieves close to real-time performance and state-of-the-art results. Finally, APS have a spring-like graph-based deformation prior term that makes them robust to bad initializations. We present extensive experiments on the task of face alignment, showing that APS outperform current state-of-the-art methods. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first weighted inverse compositional technique that proves to be so accurate and efficient at the same time.