Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists

What it is: Toon Boom Harmony is a popular animating software that many professional animators use in films and animated series. It is also a software that I use frequently. Pros: Toon Boom has a LOT of complicated, amazing features!! One example is a tool allowing you to be able to animate something across a screen without needing to animate the cycle over and over again.  All you need to do is animate a cycle once, and then apply a tool to it that will make the animated figure appear to move across the screen! Another nice feature is how easy the software is to learn.  After just watching a tutorial like the one below, almost every other tool, so long as you have some animation experience, comes naturally to use! You also have many options when it comes to making your brush lines look different. You can have them look like a pencil, chalk, square, or pen! There are so many amazing other features in this program that I couldn’t even BEGIN to cover! Cons: Due to its many features, Toon Boom is also a very complicated program. Glitches occur if your computer software is not updated enough, and if your file’s name has spaces in it, it can also glitch out a bit. In addition, if you have not animated on too many other programs, you may have a hard time understanding the controls. One last con is that this software can cost from $180 to $876 a year, depending on how advanced the model is. My overall opinion: I think that if you have a fair amount of prior animation experience and can afford the high cost of the software, Toon Boom Harmony is definitely worth buying! If you want to buy it, you can find the manufacturer’s website by searching on the name of the software. There are a number of free video tutorials at the site, as well.