For somebody interested in cartoons, art, animation, and art design like me, Flipnote Studio may be my Game of Show. No, I’m not kidding. This upcoming DSiWare title (no release date right now) will be FREE for download and will make animators out of us all. The game uses a simple interface to walk you through making your own flipbook-style animation. At its core, of course, ALL animation is flipbook-style. I’ll walk you through my experience.

First step: think of an idea. First thought that came to mind, of course, was a dinosaur. Why not draw a roaring tyrannosaur? So I drew a tyrannosaur head, making use of the limited pen thickness options. I press right on the D-pad to do to the next slide, which helpfully showed a ghost outline of the first sketch. The demo rep at the booth showed me that if I don’t want to draw the whole thing again, I can just save the original image, copy it onto the next slide, and erase/redraw from there. For a simplistic drawing like mine, merely re-outlining with minor changes takes just as much time, but for more complicated efforts, the copy/pasting option is much better. Anyway, for the next slide, I drew it with its mouth open a little bit. Next slide, mouth open more. Next slide, yet more. You can see where this is going. Eventually, I became happy enough to test the animation. With a press of the down button on the D-pad, my tyrannosaur was roaring happily, even though the animation only lasted six frames. It was still amazing to see my animation come to life! The rep said that if I wanted, I could add sound to the animation (RRRROOOOOAAAARRRR!!!), but I chose not to at that particular juncture. Some things are best saved for less public spaces.

The animation was great but extremely rusty, and I was inspired to try something else. I decided to imitate the great Gertie the Dinosaur and draw a generalized sauropod head eating something and then licking its lips. Through fifteen frames of animation (all done by retracing), I drew “Gertie” chomping on an invisible leaf and then swallowing and licking her lips. With more frames comes a smoother final product, and a chill ran down my spine. I was animating!

The rep told me that players will be able to upload their creations to a website (no further details) and send them to other DSi’s in the vicinity. Hopefully, players will also be able to download other users’ creations on that same website to show their friends. The rep showed me some really awesome animations that had been saved to that DSi, including a sequence created with the airbrush that looked like stop-motion animation. Really incredible stuff, folks.

The fact that Flipnote Studio doesn’t have a release date yet is disappointing but the fact that it will be free more than makes up for it. I’m ridiculously excited about this one.