Toonz gets open sourced

Digital Video, the company that created Toonz, has tied up with Dwango, a Japanese publisher. The two firms recently announced that they have entered into an agreement for Dwango to acquire Toonz.

Toonz is enterprise animation software that was independently developed by Digital Video (Rome, Italy). The software is used by developers for scanning, cleaning up of drawings, editing, animation and compositing. It was also used while making ‘Futurama’, ‘Princess Mononoke’ and ‘Spirited Away’, over the years.

The two companies have decided to seal the deal under the premise that Dwango will be publishing and developing an open source platform based on Toonz (OpenToonz), with effect from March 2016. Moreover, the Toonz Studio Ghibli Version is going to be offered to the animation community as a free download.

OpenToonz includes features that have been developed by Studio Ghibli, which has been a long time user of Toonz. Dwango will be using OpenToonz to create a platform that enables research labs and the animation film industry to work together.

Now, Digital Video is going to shift over to the open source business model and will offer the industry commissioning, installation and configuration, training, support and customisation services. This will allow the animators’ community to use state-ofart technology at no cost. The company will also continue to develop and market the Toonz Premium version at a very competitive rate to companies willing to invest in the customisation of Toonz for their own projects.