What is a good free cartooning, animation program?

Question

I just want to make simple cartoons.

Answer 1

What do you mean by cartoon? If you're looking to make either a drawing or a comic strip, any digital image editor like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator could be used. Some free alternatives would be Paint.NET and Gimp.

http://www.getpaint.net

http://www.gimpshop.com/

If you want to do animation, some of the better commercial 2D animation programs such as Digicel Flipbook, Toon Boom, TVPaint, TAB, and PAP, have Student or Express versions that are fairly inexpensive. However, you might be disappointed by how crippled these stripped down programs are compared to their more expensive Pro versions. But if you look hard enough you should be able to find them cracked online (rapidshare, bittorrent). There are some free alternatives.

If you're doing old school drawn on paper frame by frame stuff or stop-motion or 2D, I'd suggest MonkeyJam. It's free.

http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.co...

If you're on a Mac, use Pencil(there's PC and Linux versions as well).

http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil...

If you want to do Flash animation like the stuff on Newgrounds.com, either break down and buy Adobe Flash or you can try Creatoon or Synfig, which are free. They're not Flash, but they also do vector based symbol oriented

animation.

http://www.creatoon.com/index.php

http://www.synfig.org/

Here are some online resources about the basic principles of animation.

http://www.idleworm.com/how/index.shtml

http://www.awn.com/tooninstitute/lessonp...

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/...

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/...

http://w ww.karmatoons.com/drawing/1a.htm

http://w ww.animationarena.com/principles-of-anim...

http://w ww.animationmeat.com/notes/notes.html