OpenToonz Does What Adobe Animate Can't: Power a Studio Ghibli Film
opentoonz/opentoonz is a BSD-3-licensed 2D animation tool with 5,400+ stars, 616 forks, and 5,025 commits on GitHub. It powered the 2024 Best Animated Feature Oscar winner. You can clone it right now, build it on your machine, and ship a feature film with it.
It costs nothing. Adobe Animate — now in maintenance mode — runs $34.49/month.
This is not a theoretical comparison. One of these tools rendered The Boy and the Heron. Here's what the repo actually contains, why it matters, and how to start using it.
A 33-Year-Old Codebase That Refuses to Die
The software in opentoonz/opentoonz started in 1993. Not as open source. Not as a startup. As an Italian animation tool called Toonz, built by Digital Video S.p.A. in Rome, running on SGI IRIX workstations and distributed by Softimage.
Microsoft bought Softimage. Toonz came along. Then in 1995, a small Japanese animation studio asked to...
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