Toonz goes open-source?

open-toonz

This one made me check that it isn’t 1st of April today. No, it’s obviously not. So, here’s how it is: Toonz animation software is announced to be released as open-source!

Toonz is a 2D animation software developed by Digital Video S.p.A., used in production by Studio Ghibli (Japan) and Melnitsa Animation (Russia).

The decision to release Toonz as open-source born as result of agreement between Digital Video (original developer of Toonz) and Japanese publisher Dwango (which is going to held open-source developement). The free version is promised to become available for download on March 26th, entitled as “OpenToonz”.

Read official announcement

Official release procedure and demonstration will take place at the Kadokawa booth in AnimeJapan 2016 held at Tokyo Big-Sight March 26-27. In addition, a business seminar entitled “Open Source Project of Animation Production Tool” will be held at the Creation Stage on March 26th (11:00-11:45). Nobuo Kawakami, chairman of Dwango and Shun Iwasawa, assistant professor at Tokyo University, will be on stage welcoming Studio’s Ghibli’s Executive Imaging Director Atsushi Okui as a special guest.

So, it looks like free software world is going to get a great addition to its animation suite! How this would impact the future of Morevna and Synfig? Obviously a lot! But let’s hold from hasty statements. First, it is still unclear if the source will be released at the same time as free version. At the end, it is still possible that it repeat a sad story of Lightworks (source announced but never released). Even in a “good scenario”, the changes obviously won’t take place immediately, since there are no Linux version of Toonz available (yet?). Still, the announcement looks very promising and we will watch closely for the situation with Toonz.

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