An Italian software saves the cartoon – The Republic

Rome – The appointment is for Friday when Toonz, the Italian software used among others by the Ghibli Oscar Hayao Miyazaki , will become free and available to all. An earthquake in the world of animated film decided just in Japan but built with the help of the same Digital Video of Rome, that that program to create characters from a to z invented it in 1993. Over the years it was sold to giants like Fox of the Simpsons and Futurama, Universal, Cartoon Network, until the French Folimage and Chinese CCTV has now become open source. “It could not be otherwise,” he says Claudio Mattei , 61, co-founder of the company. “The Japanese animation school, and not only she, is in crisis and a crisis in the professional software industry. From Friday, everyone will be able to count on a stable platform, comprehensive, free of charge. But we will start to sell our own version for a few hundreds of euro as it happens in the Linux world. Just as well that come out of the scene in silence. “ an anchor of salvation more than a suicide then. The Digital Video sold the first copy of Toonz in Germany for $ 27 thousand. Today, after the season of the proceeds of the late nineties records, it is struggling to find new customers willing to shell out the five thousand Euros needed for a license. The source code for my food, the heart of the program, has been bought on the advice of Miyazaki and the Ghibli producer historian, Toshio Suzuki . Both at the end of career, facing the prospect of closing the division that manufactures cartons, you have wondered how they could do something to stop the decline of Japanese industry which is now carried out outside most of the productions. Some years ago, when we had met the “father” of Gundam Yoshiyuki Tomino , that phenomenon had pointed angrily: “Today Japanese animation almost no longer exists. It is given in” outsourcing “, in production houses scattered across Asia, from Vietnam to Korea. so much so that sometimes I wonder if we have not given in “outsourcing” ourselves. in a few years we will not know to do anything. it does not matter whether it’s a draw character, write a story, create an animated series, invented a digital device. and this also applies to video games. “

Here, Miyazaki and Suzuki, have come up with a remedy. Initially, it evaluated the idea of ​​creating a program from scratch, then opted for Toonz they used from the time of Princess Mononoke in 1997, the first film of Ghibli, where he was employed digital. After contact Mattei and his companions, have turned to Dwango, a publisher 2.0 very active on the Web, whose founder Nobuo Kawakami as well as being one of their friends is an animation enthusiast. He has made available and purchased the source code for a figure that does not want to reveal but ensures Mattei be low. Because the condition is to publish it in open source form and without any right to sell it commercially. And now in Dwango he is entering much of the Ghibli staff who followed the party software, starting with their leader Shun Iwasawa.

“In the end it will be a new beginning”, hopes Mattei. “And it is in line with our history, always rather hectic. You think, originally Toonz called Ciak. We chose that name because we felt internationally, only to discover that the ciack abroad are told.” Clapperboard “And if you do not been for the Canadian Softimage, which in ’93, began to deploy our software, we would not be going anywhere. he pictures the credibility of a Roman house development in Hollywood and around in those days? “. Softimage with the program for animation took flight. Steven Spielberg chose him to Balto Universal. Softimage was then acquired by Microsoft for $ 120 million and for my food was distributed by Bill Gates multinational. Microsoft, in turn, sold the package to Avid Softimage 270 million,
Toonz changed again distributor. But by then he had already major customers around the world.

But when the price of the software began to decline dramatically – the first was Maya – things took a different turn. With this move, Digital Video has varied business model by removing oxygen to someone, starting from their historic competitor Toom Boom. But they will benefit others, beginning with the youngest and studies that have few if not very few resources.

topics:

game

games

software

toonz

japan

Open source

Starring:

Claudio Mattei

Toshio Suzuki

Hayao Miyazaki

Yoshiyuki Tomino

Nobuo Kawakami