Free 2D bone animation in your browser, no account

Bone animation, also called skeletal animation, is how most 2D game and cartoon characters move today: instead of drawing every frame, you build a character on a skeleton once and then move the bones. Jabbertoon's character creator lets you build such a character in a web browser, for free, with nothing to install and no account.

Start from a spine

Open the creator and choose a start: a body that stands up, seen from the front, or one on all fours, seen from the side. Either way you begin with a body, a head and a face, so the character can already blink, breathe and talk. You can also start from one of the six ready-made characters, a person, a kid, a dog, a cat, a bird or a monster, and change it.

Add parts

Select a part, then add another to it from the picture grid: legs, arms, a tail, ears, wings, horns, fins, hair or glasses. Each new part arrives where it belongs for the body you chose, and paired parts such as arms and ears come as pairs that mirror each other. Legs are numbered for you, so a body with four legs walks with all four.

Put shapes on the bones and colour them

Every part is a shape on a bone. Drag a part to move it, use the corner handle to resize it and the top handle to turn it, and make chains such as tails and ears longer or shorter. Pick a colour and tap the parts to paint them. Turn on Show skeleton to see the bones as lines and the joints as dots: that is the rig every move drives.

Watch it move

Under the stage, try a move on your character: walk, wave, jump, wag or talk. Because Jabbertoon's moves work by the names of body parts rather than by drawings, a move made for the person also plays on your creature: a walk steps every leg it has, a wave lifts whatever answers to the arm, and a tail wag finds the tail. That is called retargeting, and our guide to rigs, clips and retargeting explains it with real data.

Save it and use it

Give your character a made-up name and save it to My characters in this browser, download it as a file to keep, or copy a link that opens it. Then use it in a cartoon in the studio, or make a move just for it in the block editor. Nothing you build is uploaded: it stays on your device until you share it yourself.

Why bones?

A drawing can only be moved as a whole. A character on bones can be posed in any way its joints allow, played through any move, drawn in any of the six looks, and turned to face front, side or back from the same skeleton. Building one is the first step to understanding how animated characters work, from cartoons to games.