The Toonz animation software used by Studio Ghibli, maker of amazing movies by Hayao Miyazaki such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, has been slated for release as free and open source software. This release is part of a deal by Japanese publisher Dwango who have inked an agreement for the acquisition of Toonz.

The software was independently developed by Digital Video and the agreement closed on the condition that Dwango would publish and develop an open source platform based on the animation software called OpenToonz. Effective Saturday, March 26 the Toonz Studio Ghibli animation software will be made available to the animation community as a free download.

“During the production of Princess Mononoke in 1995, we needed a software enabling us to create a certain section of the animation digitally,” said Mr. Atsushi Okui, Executive Imaging Director at Studio Ghibli. “We checked for what was available at that time and chose ‘Toonz’.”

Princess Mononoke was released in the United States in 1999 (and Japan in 1997) with a budget of $23.5 million USD and made a box office of $159.4 million. As an animated movie, it presented a fantasy story set in the Muromachi period of Japan where forest gods are being corrupted by human industry and the forest itself is being destroyed. Since then, Stuido Ghibli has released eleven other films including Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle.

Okui went on to add that the software permitted frictionless theatre-quality animation with the ability to combine hand-drawn animation with digitally painted animiation. Once Studio Ghibli began using Toonz and followed it through multiple major updates that embraced ease-of-use and enhanced its capabilities.

“We are happy to hear that this open source version contains the Ghibli Edition,” Okui continued. “We hope that many people inside and outside of the animation industry will utilize this software for their work. We would like to extend our gratitude to the staff of Digital Video.”

Aside from providing animation for Studio Ghibli’s movies, Toonz is also used to produce TV cartoons such as Futurama (with 140 episodes released between 1999 and 2013) and even the video game Discworld 2.

Open sourced tool has potential implications for the entire animation industry

Toonz has provided a powerful tool for animation within the Japanese anime and video games industry for over a decade. The release of the base platform as free and open source means that indie and garage animators, as well as indie game developers, will have at their fingertips an industry time-tested tool to speed up development and release of smaller projects.

“It is a great honor for us to be able to release OpenToonz as open source software,” said Dwango chairman Nobuo Kawakami. “We’d like to express our deepest appreciation to Digital Video and Studio Ghibli for their help and support. We hope the high-quality software that meets the demands of animation professionals will contribute to revitalizing the animation industry. Dwango will also utilize OpenToonz in order to present its research and development results.”

Although the company will be releasing the open source platform OpenToonz, Digital Video intends to continue development of Toonz Premium. This software fork is aimed at professional animation studios and will be sold at a competitive price.

The company intends to use the open source release of the Toonz platform to expand its marketshare and make Toonz “a world standard for 2D animation.” With an open source release, OpenToonz opens to an extremely wide audience of animators. The open source business model also means that Digital Video can provide technical training and support for users in a service model.

Image credit: Toonz Premium animation software from Digital Video