Animation Creator for the iPhone and iPod Touch Video Review

One of my favorite computer programs as a kid was an official Disney animation program for the, yes, PC. It came with a thick book teaching animation technique, and allowed you to work like a real animator with "onion skin" effect, showing you your animations on previous cels. Unfortunately, it was an unwieldy process of swapping out floppies endlessly, and turned out the animation process was a bit too tedious for me at that age.

Fast forward to 2009, and we have Animation Creator for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The app uses the same onion skin technique to allow you to see your last cel as you work on your animated masterpiece. While you can adjust the brush stroke size, the program is a bit limited but the iPhone itself. Now on a tablet... It turns out the animation process is still fairly tedious, but that's the nature of the art, not the fault of the app.

You can use your own photos as backgrounds, change paint colors, and playback your creation at a several different speeds. Unfortunately, you can't get your carefully crafted animation off the phone with this version of the software. The developer has told us an export option will be coming in a future release as it is obviously a key feature.

Now you can dabble in animation between classes, waiting for the bus/train, etc. And you don't have to swap a single floppy disk!

(iTunes Link)

Here's a look: