Review by C. Jong

Before I begin, let me say that I have absolutely no drawing or artistic skills. I can barely make a Thanksgiving turkey by tracing my hand and coloring it turkey-like with some crayons. So, it was with great surprise that I was able to create an animation of any kind using this software.

To start an animation, you begin with a canvas, where you can either use a predefined character, or draw one of your own with a large pallet of drawing tools. The drawing tools are easy to figure out and work pretty well.

When you’re ready to animate your drawing, you can select key areas of the drawing and animate them using the Bones tool. There are other animation tools as well, but this one is easy to use and is where I spent most of my time. Once you get a repetitive animation going, like walking for instance, you can use switch layers to easily stretch that pattern out for as long as you’d like, making the building of animations easier.

Another nice thing about Anime Studio Debut is that you can import existing MOV or AVI files and plug your animations into home movies, for instance. You can then export back to MOV, AVI, or FLV formats. Though I didn’t do it, I think you can also upload directly to YouTube if you want to.

Overall, I found the program to be fairly easy to use and if I can create a decent looking animation with it, anybody can.