Toontastic

© 2010 Toontastic
$10, iPad
Teaches: creativity, language, planning, art, music, telling stories, cartoons
CTR Rating: 88%
Editor's Choice

CTR Review

1/13/2017 See Toontastic 3D (Feb 2017). Note: See Toontastic Jr. Pirates (CTR, Dec 2012). Why watch a cartoon when you can make one? This pirate-themed cartoon storyboarding toolkit exploits the iPad's microphone, touch screen and web connectivity for the sake of creating and sharing puppet-show like productions. Features are limited, however. If you're looking for a variety of clip art, the ability to add text, or the ability to import your own backgrounds or music, you're likely to be disappointed by Toontastic. Hopefully these features might be in future versions. As it is, Toontastic proudly goes where no iPad app has gone before; by giving children a small but playful palette of smart stickers, and making it simple to layer over your voice and quality music. You're forced to start with a story planner, where you can arrange the general parts of your production. Teachers will love this step because it forces children to plan; children less so because they'll just want to get started. But this step correlates nicely with a typical language arts curriculum and it increases the educational value of the experience. To create your cartoon, you choose a background -- a blank screen is an option-- or finger-paint your own, using a rudimentary set of creativity tools (too few drawing options, no fill or undo, too many color choices). Next, you drag one or more "toys" onto the screen, from up to 20 possible, or you can draw your own. Despite the pervasive pirate theme, skin tone and gender choice is possible. Here's where Toontastic starts to shine. By choosing "Start Animation" you can move your character around your screen, puppet-show style, as you talk, sing or play into the iPad's microphone. Next you can select background music, from about 20 classical selections, and watch your scene. If you don't like it, you simply re-record, and move to the next scene. Sharing and revisiting your creation online is easy and automated if your iPad is online, although we weren't able to establish a connection in the early version of the app we reviewed. The bottom line? While this app is limited in content and editing abilities, it successfully provides children with a powerful creative outlet.