OpenToonz
FreeProfessional 2D animation software used on feature films, free and open
Professional 2D animation software supporting frame-by-frame drawing, scanning and coloring paper artwork, skeletal deformation, effects compositing and a multi-layer exposure sheet. Developed by Italy's Digital Video and open-sourced by Japan's Dwango in 2016, its commercial predecessor was used in the production of several animated feature films.
Why we picked it
The provenance is worth stating first: its predecessor, Toonz, was commercial animation software from Italy's Digital Video, used for years in the Japanese animation industry. Dwango acquired it and released it under a BSD licence in 2016 as OpenToonz. What you download is tooling that has genuinely run on commercial animation pipelines.
It is not in the same class as hobbyist animation software:
- The Xsheet (exposure sheet). This is traditional animation's core working method — a vertical grid where each row is a frame and each column a layer, and you assign which drawing appears on each frame. Anyone used to timelines finds it alien at first, but it is extremely efficient for managing complex multi-layer animation and is the industry's shared language.
- Scanning and coloring. Line art drawn on paper can be scanned in, cleaned up, vectorized and then bulk-colored with its fill tools — a pipeline designed for traditional hand-drawn studios.
- Mixed vector and raster within a single scene.
- Skeletal deformation (the Plastic tool) for cutout-style animation without drawing every frame.
- Effects and compositing through a node-based system for light effects, blurs, particles and multiplane camera moves.
- The Toonz palette system, where animation coloring is managed by palette entries, so changing one color number updates that color throughout an entire film.
The barriers are real and must be stated:
- The learning curve is extremely steep. It was designed for trained animation professionals, and its vocabulary comes from traditional pipelines — figuring it out unaided is close to impossible. For a simple animation, start with Pencil2D.
- The interface is dated, retaining plenty of habits from its commercial era and far from intuitive by modern standards.
- Stability can waver. As a community-maintained open-source project, save often on complex projects.
- No 3D. Blender handles that.
Who it suits: people seriously studying 2D animation, those with professional animation backgrounds, and anyone producing complex multi-layer hand-drawn work. If you simply want a character to move, Pencil2D gets you there far faster — then consider whether you need this.