Create Cartoons and Anime With Opentoonz Toon Time

OpenToonz is a professional animation tool for comic and manga artists.

- By Ralf Kirschner

Many readers associate the terms “manga” and “anime” respectively with Japanese comics and animated series, such as Dragon Ball or Pokemon, but today, manga and anime are global phenomena, and artists all over the world devote their attention and effort to the forms.

If you want to experiment with animation yourself, there is no need to stick to pen and paper. OpenToonz [1] is an open source tool that meets the highest animation standards. The program was partly developed in cooperation with famous animation companies such as Studio Ghibli [2], the creative minds behind classic anime films such as Princess Mononoke, Chihiro’s Spirited Away, and How the Wind Rises.

OpenToonz is available in the package sources of most popular Linux distributions, so installing should be easy. To test the software with a sample scene, download the sample animation as a ZIP archive from the project page [3] (OpenToonz_sample.zip). You can view this sample on YouTube without installing OpenToonz [4]. Figure 1 shows OpenToonz with the official sample, which stars a dog named Dwanko.

Basic Terms