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

A pinch of Adobe Photoshop, a handful of Adobe Illustrator, and a hint of Adobe Flash. This is the magic formula behind Anime Studio, a program with a steep learning curve but which will keep you entertained for hours.

Thanks to the Anime Studio tutorial, you'll be able to start with basic animations very soon after installation. For practice, you can use the characters and sounds from Anime Studio library. The workflow is intuitive, because the program uses a method that designers are already used to: working with layers, a timeline, vector graphics (light and malleable) and a simple and effective palette.

If you're not familiar with such programs, there's no doubt that Anime Studio will take a while to get used to. Some determination and a while spent with the program should see you right, however, and you'll very quickly see why Anime Studio is a winner. The bone-rigging system is innovative and time-saving, the character wizard makes life easy, and Anime Studio's upload to YouTube/Facebook feature means the whole world can see your fantastic creations.

For non-professional but serious animators, Anime Studio is a great option and worth the work you'll need to put in.

Download Anime Studio Debut 8.2 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

Many photo programs have a bad reputation, but there's no arguing that they can be a great way of getting the maximum value from your photographs. This image animation software definitely weighs in at the complicated end of the scale, but if you want a lot of control over your images, Amara Photo Animation Software will provide it.

The Amara Photo Animation Software interface is off-putting. It’s old-fashioned and cluttered, and hard to know where to begin. There's an online tutorial available and we definitely recommend taking a look before starting.

The main attraction of Amara Photo Animation Software is the use of Key Points. These allow you to give each of the photos in your slideshow various points of focus, which lend a movie-like quality to your presentation.

Team this with the range of editing options (zoom, fade, text, etc.) and the ability to add a soundtrack, and you'll soon see that despite its shortcomings, Amara Photo Animation Software goes a step further than its rivals.

Amara Photo Animation Software has some nice features, but sacrifices quite a lot in usability and appearance.

Download Amara Photo Animation Software 3.0 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

Overview

Toon Boom Studio enables professional animators to create rich, eye-catching animations for video, websites, television, film, games, mobile devices, e-learning applications and much more. It should be clear from the start that this is strictly a professional application although the developers do offer a more basic version of Toon Boom Studio for beginners.

Features

Toon Boom Studio allows you to import media such as templates, movies and photos in SWF, AI, PSD, JPEG, TGA and GIF format. The aim of the studio is to make animation on your PC as natural as drawing with pen and paper.

You can bring life to your animations with sound (in WAV, AIFF, MP3 format). To make things look more realistic, there's a lip sync analyzer to make sure your characters lip-sync in time.

There are also zoom in and out features, the ability to create 3D spaces and to scale and rotate your creations until they're exactly right. Export formats are fairly flexible too including Flash (SWF), QuickTime, DV Stream and AVI. The other big advantage that Toon Boom Studio offers is that you don't need to learn how to animate in Flash to use it.

Toon Boom Studio is a powerful and flexible professional animation packages that should make your creations come to life.

Download Toon Boom Studio 6.0 in Softonic

Overview

Digital animation technology has improved so much that it’s now possible to animate your own talking heads from your home PC. CrazyTalk promises to give you all the tools you need to import images and photographs before quickly applying mouth, head and eye movement to create realistic looking avatars and fun animations.

At first users might be a little skeptical about the value of CrazyTalk, Give it a try though and you'll be pleasantly surprised by the power of the utility. Granted, most peoples' initial efforts with the program will likely be limited to taking pictures of friends and adding famous song or movie audio clips to them just for kicks. These first experiments in CrazyTalk will be a little clunky and look far from realistic when you rely on the automatic lip-syncing functionality.

Features

Once you delve deeper into CrazyTalk's settings though, you'll start to realize that you can actually produce some impressive animations.

With enough tinkering you can customize everything in CrazyTalk, from the teeth in the character’s mouth to their facial movements and their range of movement. Best of all is the built-in timeline, which gives you complete control of the animation and sound, much as you would do in Flash, or a video-editing suite.

CrazyTalk offers alpha channel support, making it ideal for producing talking images to welcome visitors to your web site or in presentations. The simple-to-use export facilities also allow you to save to a range of formats as a media file, email attachment or a personalized greeting.

There are a few flaws with CrazyTalk that are a little frustrating though. The auto lip sync feature isn't all that impressive or accurate, for one, and there's no support for MP3 format audio. There also aren't all that many preset templates to work from, which might be bothersome to some users.

CrazyTalk requires some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it you'll be able to create unique facial animations.

Download CrazyTalk Pro 7.12.1302 in Softonic

Crazy Talk Animator allows you to combine images, videos and flash animations into impressive 2D creations. This includes the ability to add actors, create scenes or landscapes and add special effects. Like most 2D OR 3D modelling packages, Crazy Talk Animator is not easy to use but it does have several easy to follow tutorials and web resources to help you create your animations step by step.

The first step is to take a photo of your face. Crazy Talk Animator then teaches you how to animate it by giving you a few simple phrases to animate. This involves marking points of facial expression which Crazy Talk Animator uses to morph and animate it.

The possibilities are endless with Crazy Talk Animator and with some patience and dedication, you can create some really impressive animations. Note that to get more from Crazy Talk Animator, you need to download a resource pack which is available from the author's website.

Crazy Talk Animator Pro is a powerful 2D animating package although does require some time to learn.

Download Crazy Talk Animator PRO 1.2 in Softonic

Stickman includes a vast catalog of ready-to-use backgrounds, figures and all kinds of elements. Some are available offline, while to access others, you'll need to be online. There is also a default example animation, which is perfect for starting out, and you can always draw your own.

Stickman opens with a selection of options, including tutorials, videos and the option to open existing programs. We'd recommend watching some tutorials and classes first - Stickman's a great program, but you'll need to put some effort in before you feel comfortable with the program.

Getting help

In general, animation programs are hard to get a handle on, and Stickman's no exception. It offers huge possibilities, but becomes a little complex as a result. You'll be able to create fun animations, that's for sure, but not without putting some work in. Luckily, the program comes with a 30-day trial, which is perfect to give it a whirl, discover all the features, animation mechanisms and extras, and decide if it's the one for you. We think it's definitely worth a shot!

Stickman is a complex - and not the most modern of its type - program, but a little work will allow you to produce awesome stick animations in no time at all.

Download Stickman 5.6 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.