ToonFlick

In development

ToonFlick

A 2D cartoon animation studio. Draw, rig, animate and render — in one place.

Written in Rust. Rendered on the GPU. Open to AI agents.

Explore features See screens

96 frames, rendered straight out of ToonFlick.

What it does

Everything a cartoon needs

A hand-drawn line that boils, and a stroke drawing itself on

Lines with character

Vector drawing that feels hand-made — and can stay alive.

  • 12 line brushes: solid, ink, calligraphy, pencil, marker, chalk, dry brush, sketchy, wavy, splatter, dotted, dashed
  • Animated “boiling” lines
  • Per-point line width and per-branch visibility for draw-on effects
  • Smooth, Bézier and NURBS curves
  • Masking, with outlines on the clipped result
  • 26 palette presets, skin tones included
  • Gradient fills and lines, feathered fills, boolean shapes and text layers
A three-bone arm reaching for a moving IK target

Rigs that behave

Bones, controllers and IK, built for cartoon characters.

  • IK with pole targets, angle limits and an IK/FK switch without a jump
  • Joysticks that blend up to nine poses from one handle
  • Blend shapes and correctives driven by bones or joysticks
  • Rig templates: humanoid, face, 360° head, spring hair, soft belly
  • Follow-through springs, wobbling flesh and shape-keeping physics with collider bones
  • Meshes with smooth weights; controllers with 25 handle shapes
A ball bouncing along an eased arc, with its motion path and onion skin

Timing you can see

A timeline and a graph editor made for posing, not for spreadsheets.

  • A graph editor with tangents (auto, spline, linear, flat, free) and extrapolation: cycles, offsets, ping-pong
  • Motion paths you edit on the stage: drag keys, bend the path with handles
  • A tween slider and curve tools: simplify, smooth, bake, Euler filter
  • A timeline with markers, a play range, hold bars and stretchable timing
  • Onion skin, and moves in one click: bounce, anticipation, overshoot, wiggle, walk cycles
A cartoon face switching mouth shapes in time with an audio waveform

Mouths that talk

Switch layers swap whole drawings — made for mouth charts.

  • A drawing strip to pick the shape for each frame
  • Automatic lip-sync from audio, re-run when the sound changes
  • Blinks through a whole shot, and blend-shape mouths on a joystick
A camera frame shaking over a night scene

A camera with nerves

Moves and shakes that make a shot feel held, driven or hit.

  • Shakes: handheld, walk, run, vehicle, earthquake, impact, vibration, drift
  • Moves: push in, pull out, pan, tilt, Dutch angle, snap zoom, Ken Burns
  • Follow a layer or a bone; smooth the camera; impact frames
  • Guides, safe areas and aspect masks; an overview of the camera over the scene
A strip of frames being rendered into video formats MP4ProResWebM PNGGIF

Render and ship

From a quick preview to the final master, soundtrack included.

  • Quick render, and final MP4 (H.264), ProRes 4444 or WebM with transparency
  • PNG and OpenEXR sequences, GIF
  • Presets, a render queue and burn-in for review copies
  • Render jobs split across workers, with a report
  • Review notes and approval: in progress, in review, approved, published
A lamp’s pool of warm light flickering in a dark room, moonlight through a window and a lens flare

Light in the dark

Lamps, moonlight and flares you place on the stage and animate.

  • Light layers — point, spotlight or ambient — moved, turned and keyed like any layer
  • An ambient night that darkens the picture; the other lights shine through it
  • A lens flare from any layer; Light and Lens flare effects; glow with a threshold (bloom)
Picture, drawing and music files turning into layers PSD SVG MIDI

Bring your files

Layered pictures, vector drawings and music, ready to animate.

  • Photoshop .psd with layers, folders, masks, clipping and blend modes; OpenRaster and Krita
  • SVG, Illustrator .ai, PDF and EPS as editable vector shapes; named groups become layers turning at their pivots
  • WebP, BMP, TIFF and TGA pictures; MP3, M4A, OGG and FLAC soundtracks
  • MIDI music played on a built-in piano into the soundtrack
Letters dropping in one after another, and a word waving H E L L O W A V I N G

Letters that move

Titles and captions animated letter by letter, in one click.

  • 15 ready-made animations: Fade, Pop, Drop & bounce, Typewriter, Wave, Jitter, Swing…
  • Each letter on its own clock: start, spacing, length, order and strength
  • Picked from cards with moving previews; the text stays editable
Commands flowing over MCP between an AI agent and ToonFlick AI MCP

Ready for AI agents

Every one of its 130+ commands can be driven over MCP, so AI agents can work in the studio too.

GPU from the ground up

Rendered with wgpu, written in Rust, built from modules.

See every feature →

Performance

Fast by design

ToonFlick is built GPU-first. Rendering runs on the GPU (wgpu, 4× MSAA), the CPU work — rig, IK, tessellation — is spread over all cores, and nothing is redrawn while nothing changes.

1.3 ms
of work per frame for one character
4.9 ms
for 5 characters + 1,000 shapes
500k triangles
at about 20 fps — 20 characters + 5,000 shapes
2M triangles
still interactive at about 7 fps — 50 characters + 20,000 shapes
Frame budget at 24 fps

At 24 fps a frame has about 42 ms, so typical scenes use only a small fraction of the budget.

Measured during playback on an RTX 5080 with 16 CPU threads, at 1920×1080.

A look inside

Screens

The ToonFlick window in Animate mode: tools on the left, the stage with Pip in front of the motel and the Controls panel in the middle, layers and properties on the right, the timeline at the bottom
The whole studio: stage, layers, properties and timeline.
A studio character with its full rig on the stage: the right hand’s IK controller picked, its motion path drawn, Look and Blink joysticks beside the head
Posing a hand on IK, with its motion path.
Three leg rigs side by side: A FK keyed by hand, B IK moved by the foot controller, C IK with a pole target and a knee limit
Knees three ways: FK, IK, and IK with a pole.
The Graph editor under the stage: a bouncing ball’s curves with four keys picked and their tangent handles, and the ball’s motion path on the stage with a picked key’s handles
The graph editor: tangents, extrapolation and the ball’s path on the stage.
A bee’s motion path on the stage, bent by the handles of a picked key, with spacing dots between the keys and a ball below
A motion path bent by a key’s handle.
Pip on the stage with the Mouth switch layer’s drawing strip below: rest, AI, E, O, U, MBP, FV, L, WQ and etc
The mouth drawing strip of a switch layer.
Six mascots, each with an effect recipe — Comic Ink, Sticker, Neon, Toon Shade, Long Shadow, Pastel — and the Effects panel showing Neon’s Outline and Glow
Effect recipes, one click each.
The Review tab beside the stage with approval states, a checklist and note controls; three open notes, flagged on the timeline
Review: notes, checklist and approval.
The hotel lobby at night: the bellhop beside a luggage cart, a warm desk lamp and wall lamps, moonlight falling through the window and a lens flare glowing over the suitcases
Hotel at night: light layers, a lens flare and a bloom.
Fifteen words on a dark background, each with its own letter animation — Fade, Pop, Drop & bounce, Rise, Slide, Spin, Zoom, Flip, Typewriter, Wobble, Wave, Bounce, Jitter, Pulse, Swing — caught mid-move
All fifteen letter animations at once.
A wide kitchen at midnight drawn as an SVG: a lanky chef with a headband stirring a pot and raising an eyebrow, a rat with the cheese on the kitchen island
Midnight kitchen: an SVG cut-out puppet, animated to a MIDI waltz.
The Effect Guide window: effect groups on the left and cards with moving previews for Outline, Drop shadow, Shading and Glow
The Effect Guide: every effect with a moving preview.
The Examples window: categories on the left, including New in 0.13, and cards with previews of the example projects
48 examples to open and take apart.
Samples of line brushes and curves: wavy strokes in ink, pencil, sketchy, splatter, dotted and dashed styles over filled shapes
Brush and curve samples.
The Performance tab measuring frame 30 of a production shot: live stage numbers, the frame split into evaluate, tessellate, encode and GPU, and the time of each layer
The Performance tab: where a frame’s time goes.
The timeline: transport and timecode above rows for the camera, Ghost and Pip with their keys, and a hold bar on the Body bone
The timeline.
  • Rendered frame 1
  • Rendered frame 20
  • Rendered frame 36
  • Rendered frame 60

Clean renders from one shot: frames 1, 20, 36 and 60.

Platforms

Where it runs

Needs a graphics card with Vulkan, Metal or DirectX 12. The builds aren’t signed yet.

Download and install notes →

The ToonFlick start-up splash: deep blue waves with glowing dots

Status

In development

Preview 0.14.1 — free to download →

New in 0.14: characters that talk — dialogue with ElevenLabs voices, lip-sync offline from the sound, mouths that bend.

Current version 0.14.1 · See what’s new

Community

Join the ToonFlick Discord

Ask for help, show what you made, tell us what’s missing — and hear first about new versions.

Join the Discord