Amazing Animation brings cute pictures, funny sounds, and a kid-friendly interface together in a package that lets children produce short animations or interactive presentations. Think Kid Pix meets MacroMind Director.
Of course, animation is notoriously more fun to watch than to make. For this reason the designers of Amazing Animation eschew traditional animation techniques. Instead, kids produce animations primarily by dragging “stamps” across “scenes,” or backgrounds. Stamps contain mini animations that run in continuous cycles — a horse running, a bird flying, a planet spinning, and so on. As the child drags the stamp, the program generates animation frames by laying down successive members of the stamp cycle along the motion path.
Amazing Animation comes with 32 animating stamps and 9 background scenes (a CD-ROM version has additional clip art). You can set transitions, such as wipes or dissolves, between scenes. The program also has 55 predefined sounds, some of which loop indefinitely to provide background accompaniment. To add a sound to an animation, you simply move to the desired frame and select the sound from a menu.
The developers recommend Amazing Animation for children ages 5 to 14. Younger users will tend just to play with the canned sounds and graphics. Older or more adventurous kids can create their own backgrounds and stamps with the built-in graphics module. Children can also record sounds using the Mac’s microphone.
The three highly computer-literate kids I tried this program on all thought Amazing Animation was pretty cool. After an hour or so, however, the youngest, at 7, seemed bored with moving the premade graphics around. After the same amount of time, his 9-year-old sister, whose designs were more ambitious, was coming up against the inherent truth about animation: producing interesting effects takes planning and nitpick) persistence. She also bumped into some of the program’s limitations. For example, there’s no way to flip a stamp so that the car, say, can motor right to left instead of vice versa. The teenager, a 15-year-old, had no doubts that his friends would easily be able to master the program, but judged that the interface might be a bit user-cuddly for their tastes.
The Last Word There’s nothing quite like the joy of seeing one of your drawings pick itself up off the page and do tricks. Amazing Animation lets kids share that joy. The program is best suited to highly motivated kids in the 9-to-14-year-old range who have access to adult advice. If you’re the sort of parent who thinks your kids are better off playing with the computer than watching TV, Amazing Animation is the sort of program that justifies that belief.
Matazzoni, Joe. (January 1995). Amazing Animation. Macworld. (pg. 87).