Toontastic Review

When we were kids, moviemaking was the stuff of dreams. While we couldn’t exactly replicate Hollywood in our backyards, we could use He-Man, G.I. Joes, Play-Doh, and a clunky video camera to come close. Launchpad Toys’ app, Toontastic, reminds us of the good old days and makes animated moviemaking accessible to the iDevice-toting family.

In short, Toontastic uses a number of charming tools, characters, and backgrounds for you and the special kiddos in your life to make professional-looking animated tales right on your iPad. It also allows you (and kids around the world) to share the movies you’ve made with it’s in-house Toontube service.

This app had us from the get-go, with it’s surprisingly expansive feature set and a simple, intuitive UI that most curious youngsters should be able to figure out in no time.

When you start Toontastic for the first time, you will be prompted to set up an account in order to use its sharing features. Unfortunately, setting up our account was a bit cumbersome, because there are so many hoops the app asks you to jump through in the name of online safety, including multiple external links and an e-mail verification. Additionally, there seemed to be some bugs in the verification system, so our initial e-mail didn’t go through at first, and our password failed to register properly. Eventually, though, all was well, and we were able to start making movies.

The actual production process is as simple as can be. Kids are prompted (through recorded narration) to create a story arc that follows the characters from setup to conflict resolution. At each step of the way, budding animators can choose from an array of colorful pre-drawn backgrounds, or they can draw their own. Since the in-app painting tool is so rudimentary, we think most will stick with the pre-loaded library.

From there, a number of whimsical characters await. Toontastic comes with several thematically linked groups, including pirates, knights and dragons, and under-the-sea. Our resident four-year-old was in hog heaven putting a dastardly pirate up against a tenacious squid.

Animating the story is a simple matter of dragging the characters around the screen and speaking narration or dialogue into the iPad microphone. If this were a program aimed at adults, we would likely be frustrated with the inability to fine tune movement, angles or sound recording, but since it’s for kids, its simple features and ease of use are perfect.

The storytelling doesn’t end there, though. You can add any one of a number of evocative classical tunes to each scene. Kids simply select a mood for the scene by tapping on a cartoonish emoticon and then moving a slider to pick the song they like.

When the cartoon is finished, Toontastic will prompt you to add a title and the name of the director, and voila - your movie is ready to be published on Toontube! The online library is equally easy to use, even if you are not able to search or sort through the results.

At every step of the way, Toontastic marks itself as the ideal app for little Spielberg’s. The friendly tutorial narration is easy to follow, and the characters and sliders are simple for tiny fingers to manipulate. Additionally, there is no need to worry about editing, multi-step soundtrack inclusion, or any other micromanagement, so the learning curve is just gentle enough for the app’s target audience.

At the same time, there are plenty of locations, characters, and songs for kids to stay entertained for a long time. We are thrilled that developers like Launchpad Toys have realized the iPad’s potential as a tool for childhood creativity (and adult nostalgia) and can guarantee that our family will be moviemaking in Toontastic for a long time to come.