Toon Boom Animate, released in November 2008. All Images Courtesy of Toon Boom Animation.

If you've seen the eye-popping animated blockbusters lately, including WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda, you'll know that CG animation now rules the roost. In fact, ever since Pixar wowed us with environments and characters that looked like they could leap off the screen, 2D animation has taken a bit of a back seat to this newcomer. But a new wave of digital tools, starting back in the early 1990s with TVPaint and other software, allows 2D artists to take unique advantage of computer horsepower. Around the turn of the century, Adobe Flash emerged as the breakout player in this segment, of course, even though it was never truly intended for TV or feature film production. But Flash surely isn't the only game in town.

The Montreal-based team at Toon Boom, which offer Harmony and Storyboard Pro, among others, are no strangers to this market, and have seen their products used on such high-profile projects as The Simpsons Movie, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and The Triplets of Belleville. But with their latest release, Toon Boom Animate, they have brought to market a tool that has the potential to storm the Flash gates.

As a mega-user of Flash, I know those gates well, and can't actually imagine a 2D world in which I wouldn't use Flash. But I'm also starting to see how these tools just might co-exist in a powerful pastiche of software unity.

Drawing is easy and fun in Animate.

Drawing on Past Strengths
Digital 2D tools are often bemoaned as the death of drawing. These software packages allow artists to simply push digital puppets around the screen without so much as doodling a single toothy grin. Any artist who picks up Animate will find puppet animation a snap, but drawing is such a pleasant experience that I suspect they'll be anxious to start sketching in-betweens the moment they key in the serial number. Toon Boom is, after all, the team behind Storyboard Pro, which has quickly become an industry favorite, and the drawing tools are equally as fluid and damn close to paper-and-pencil experience. If you use a transparent brush, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between a sketch created in Animate and your chew-marked blue pencil.

And if you've used a light table, you'll enjoy the ability to rotate the workspace by holding down a few shortcut keys. It's one of the little things that an animator will become so accustomed to, and wonder how they ever got along without it.

Reinventing the Color Wheel
Color functionality isn't something I thought I'd crow about, but Toon Boom Animate delivers the goods in this department. As you start dropping colors into your project, you can name your various choices according to the element. For instance, if I pick a hair color, the color palette allows you to name this particular shade "hair." But it goes beyond that. If you ever decide to change that hair color down the road, every piece of artwork you dropped that color into will change accordingly. You'll find yourself coloring a bit more carefully with Toon Boom Animate, because this function can come back to bite you -- like if you colored the shoes with the same color as the hair.