Working on the normal basics of stick figure animation, create individual frames of action and then view them in sequence, producing the animation. Think of a story, design the frames and watch your work of art in action!

Of course, you can modify each Pivot Stickfigure Animator frame in any way you want, using some of the preset characters, creating your own, adding color and changing the background with your own creations. Once you are happy with the animation, hit play to see how it's turned out. You can view the frames in miniature, editing, moving or erasing them as necessary.

Once finished, you can save the Pivot Stickfigure Animation as a .GIF file. There aren't many configuration options apart from ones relating to the stick figures themselves, but we didn't notice anything we would really like to change. Creating a cool animation takes time and patience, but the process is fun and challenging. Pivot Stickfigure Animator is a winner all around!

Move over Disney, Pivot Stickfigure Animator has come to town!

Download Pivot Stickfigure Animator 2.2.7 in Softonic

Pencil is based around traditional hand-drawn animation techniques, and it's free. At the center of the application is a timeline, which allows you to add four types of layers: bitmap image, vector image, sound, and camera. The animation basically works by setting keyframes one each layer and arranging the different layers on top of each other.

You start by sketching out your characters in bitmap format using the pencil tool, before adding a vector layer and inking it out with the pen tool and fill tool. The principle of Pencil is very simple and the interface is much clearer than that of Flash or a similar high-end animation tool. What we liked about Pencil is that all the tools and options are on display from the start and nothing is hidden, plus you can detach or remove palettes to make things easier on yourself.

The problem with Pencil is that it's very difficult to produce good quality drawings unless you have a graphics tablet - most mouses simply aren't conducive to precise sketching. What's more, there aren't any predefined shapes, objects or templates included that might help you get started.

So, while Pencil might be a good way to learn the basic principles of cartoon animation, it's difficult to create anything truly impressive unless you've lots of patience.

Download Pencil 0.4.4b in Softonic

MonkeyJam helps you record your own animation movies following the stop motion technique. Use your digital video camera or your webcam and record as many frames as you need to create your movie.
MonkeyJam will then organize them in layers, thus creating a very well-categorized draft of your movie. You can preview the result at any moment and check if everything's going all right.

Working with MonkeyJam is a lot of fun. It's very easy to start recording your own movie and getting nice results even with zero training. The only problem we encountered is the fact the animation is displayed as a continuous loop that we didn't know how to stop, both in preview and also once it was rendered as an AVI video file.

Stop motion is made easy with MonkeyJam.

Download MonkeyJam 3.0.050529 in Softonic

Stykz is a dead easy animation tool with which you can create basic animated sequences with stick figures and other geometrical shapes. You can't use your own drawings or add a background, but on the upside Stykz offers you complete control over each single frame, and a dozen points in each figure to create movement.

Each new frame you insert in the animation sequence shows an outline of the previous position so that you can create the new movement with higher accuracy. The program also includes a built-in player to preview the final animation.

Stykz lets you export your animation to several different formats (animated GIF and QuickTime movie among others) but has one main drawback: the Undo tool doesn't work. The author has promised that it'll be fixed in future releases though. Meanwhile, you can save at different stages along your work and revert the animation at a previously saved point as a workaround.

With Stykz you can learn and practice the basics of animations by creating basic animated sequences with simple stick figures.

Download Stykz 1.0.2 in Softonic

With this version of the program you will be able to morph just two pictures. Be careful to choose passport-style photos so that the application can easily understand the contour of the two faces and create a better transition effect.

This can come handy in case of more complex pictures like when you have more than one person in a photo and also when the software doesn’t automatically recognise the facial features of your chosen subject.