Adobe Animate

What is Adobe Animate?

Adobe Animate is a 2D animation tool with a long and storied history. It began life in 1996 as FutureSplash Animator, became the legendary Flash, and was renamed Adobe Animate in 2016 to reflect that it no longer only produced Flash content. Today it is used for web animation, games, explainer videos and character animation.

The heart of the tool is the timeline: you draw with vector brushes, animate frame by frame or with tweens, and add rigs for character animation. Exports cover HTML5 Canvas and WebGL for the web, video formats for film and social, and formats that plug into game engines.

It matters because it is one of the most accessible ways to make professional 2D animation. The drawing tools are excellent, the timeline is approachable, and the web export pipeline is battle-tested from two decades of Flash and HTML5 games.

Key Features

• Frame-by-frame animation with powerful drawing tools
• Vector brushes, fills and pressure-sensitive strokes
• Classic and motion tweens for smooth movement
• Asset rigging with the bone tool for character animation
• Symbols, nesting and a familiar timeline workflow
• HTML5 Canvas and WebGL export for the web
• Audio integration for synchronized sound
• Camera and parallax tools for scene depth

How to get started

Adobe Animate is part of Creative Cloud, so you subscribe, install it from the Creative Cloud app, and launch it. A free trial is available on the Adobe website if you want to test it first.

For a first project, create a new HTML5 Canvas document, draw a simple shape with the brush tool, and animate it with a few keyframes on the timeline. From there the tutorials on Adobe's help site cover characters, rigging and game export.

• Start a Creative Cloud trial and install Adobe Animate
• Create a new HTML5 Canvas document
• Draw a simple character or shape
• Animate it with keyframes on the timeline
• Try the bone tool to rig a character
• Export to video, HTML5 or a game engine format

Use cases

• Web banners, ads and animated marketing content
• HTML5 games and interactive web experiences
• 2D game sprite and character animation
• Explainer videos and motion graphics
• Cartoon shorts and character animation

Pricing and licensing

Adobe Animate is sold as a subscription through Adobe Creative Cloud. You can subscribe to Animate on its own or as part of the All Apps plan, and prices are listed on the Adobe website, which occasionally adjusts them.

There is no perpetual license option in the modern model. Check the Adobe site for current pricing, student discounts and the free trial.

Pros and cons

Adobe Animate's strengths are its drawing tools, its web export pipeline and its familiarity. Millions of people learned animation on Flash, and the muscle memory carries straight over, while the HTML5 output keeps web games and banners alive in a post-Flash world.

The downsides are the subscription price and the tool's scope. It is less specialized than dedicated rigging tools like Spine for game characters, and for pure frame-by-frame studio work, competitors like Toon Boom offer deeper production features.

Alternatives

• Toon Boom Harmony: the studio standard for 2D character animation
• Spine: skeletal animation built for game sprites
• Rive: interactive vector animation that ships straight into apps
• DragonBones: free skeletal animation tool for 2D games
• OpenToonz: free and open source frame-by-frame animation