OpenToonz is a full 2D animation studio: drawing, scanning, ink and paint, rigging, effects and final compositing in one application. It is not a toy sketch tool — it is the open-source continuation of Toonz, the animation software developed by Digital Video S.p.A. in Italy, customised inside Studio Ghibli and used across its productions. DWANGO started the OpenToonz project with Digital Video and Studio Ghibli and released the code to the public.

That lineage is the reason the feature list reads like a production checklist rather than a hobbyist one. Toonz was first used for some cuts of Princess Mononoke, and its ink and paint, colour design and digital composition stages went on to support almost every Ghibli film; from Arrietty onwards it was customised in-house, and those production-driven changes are in the code you download today. Anyone can use OpenToonz free of charge, for commercial and non-commercial work alike.

Key features

• GTS, the Ghibli scan tool. A scanning front-end built inside the studio for hand-drawn animation: sequential scans are tied to frame numbers, four scan modes are supported (black-and-white or colour, with or without binarisation), scan settings can be saved and re-applied when part of a cut has to be rescanned, and TWAIN-compliant scanners are driven directly. Windows only.
• Digital ink and paint. Anti-aliased strokes, with drawing data and palette data kept independent — which makes temporary colour fills quick and lets a palette change propagate across a whole level. Large-resolution drawings stay responsive.
• Xsheet-style compositing. The timeline is a timestep sheet, the way an animation exposure sheet works, and effects are combined in a node-tree GUI. Images can be handled at real size with resolution (dpi) awareness, including millimetre units, so print and film formats come out at the right scale.
• Both raster and vector drawing in the same application, plus conversion between colour 2-value TGA image sequences and the native OpenToonz format, so material from an existing pipeline can be brought in.
• An effects SDK. DWANGO published a plug-in SDK for image-processing effects, so researchers and studios can add their own. DWANGO’s own research team shipped effects built with it, including a deep-learning style-transfer effect that repaints line art in a chosen style, plus plugins for period-looking incident light and wavy-glass distortion.
• Localised interface — Japanese out of the box, with community translations managed through Weblate.

Why choose it

Very little open-source software can claim that its ancestor carried the post-production of major theatrical animation. OpenToonz gives you the same structure those productions used: a real exposure sheet, separate levels and palettes, a compositing node graph and a scanner pipeline for paper drawings. For a 2D animator moving off proprietary software, that means the workflow — not just the drawing tools — transfers. Studios and schools also get a package they can modify and redistribute, since the source is under a BSD licence.

Worth knowing

The licence has two layers: the source code is under the New (3-clause) BSD licence, while the installer is governed by the OpenToonz terms of use — check both if redistribution matters to you. Official installers exist for Windows (64-bit) and macOS; Linux is served by AppImage builds produced by the project’s CI and by a community Snap that has not been refreshed since 2021, and OpenToonz is not packaged in Debian. GTS, the scan tool, is Windows-only. The interface is dense and clearly grown from a studio pipeline, so expect a learning curve: the startup manual’s introduction and ink-and-paint volumes are the fastest way in.

Use cases

• 2D short films and series work that need an exposure sheet, levels and a compositing graph.
• Traditional paper animation, from scanning pencil tests to finished ink and paint.
• Teaching animation production in a school or workshop with no per-seat licence cost.
• Effects research — write a plugin against the SDK and see it in a working animation pipeline.

Licence

Free and open source — the source code is released under the BSD 3-Clause “New” licence. Free for commercial and non-commercial use.

Alternatives

• Synfig Studio — vector tweening animation, a gentler start than a full production pipeline.
• Krita — painting and frame-by-frame animation with a friendlier brush engine.
• Blender — 3D suite whose Grease Pencil covers 2D animation inside a 3D scene.
• Natron — node-based compositing when the animation is drawn elsewhere.

Project home: opentoonz.github.io — the official site and the GitHub repository are the only official sources.