Cartoon Studio
an open-source desktop app for making 2D cartoon shows
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Hi HN — I built Cartoon Studio, an open-source desktop app for making simple 2D cartoon scenes and shows.The basic flow is: place SVG characters on a scene, write dialogue, pick voices, and render to MP4. It handles word timestamps, mouth cues, and lip-sync automatically.This started as me playing around with Jellypod's Speech SDK and HeyGen's HyperFrames. I wanted a small tool that could go from script to video without a big animation pipeline and next thing I knew I was trying to create my own South Park style show and here we are. :DA few details:- desktop app built with Electron- supports multiple TTS providers through Jellypod's Speech SDK- renders via HyperFrames- lets you upload or generate characters and backdrop scenes- includes default characters/scenes so you can try it quickly- open sourceIt runs from source today. AI features use bring-your-own API keys, but the app itself is fully inspectable and local-first in the sense that there’s no hosted backend or telemetry.Here are some fun examples of the the types of videos you can create:https://x.com/deepwhitman/status/2046425875789631701https://x.com/deepwhitman/status/2047040471579697512And the repo:https://github.com/Jellypod-Inc/cartoon-studioHappy to answer questions and appreciate any feedback!
HN · launched Apr 23, 2026 · 15 upvotes (top 29%) · 0 views
Niche: animation and motion graphics software · 226 launches, 24 in the last 7 days ▲ +26% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 226 launches in animation and motion graphics software →
Could you build this?
Yes This is a desktop app wrapping SVG rendering, standard TTS APIs, and existing open-source forced-alignment/phoneme libraries (like Rhubarb) to export video via FFmpeg.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Rhubarb (lip-sync tool), Synfig Studio (animation software), Moho (character animation), Papagayo (lip-sync), Jellypod (text-to-speech)
Concerns raised: Lip-sync quality insufficient for non-forgiving animation styles, Oversimplified mouth representation (two circles vs. viseme sets), Text-to-speech sounds artificial/uncanny valley, Vowel-per-word heuristic may not scale, Misleading 'Studio' branding for limited static character tool
Feature requests: Comprehensive viseme-based lip-sync system, Integration with Synfig Studio, Support for more sophisticated mouth/jaw animation, More natural-sounding speech synthesis
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 340 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #135 of 341 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 176 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Sketch & Ink Studio · ph · 2026-11-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- DoodleMate: Animate Your Child's Hand Drawings Without Generative AI · hn · 2026-05-06 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Fuzzy Studio · hn · 2026-01-27 · 57 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- I built a tool that creates videos out of React code · hn · 2025-12-24 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Voodle Studio · ph · 2026-09-18 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Toonbee AI · ph · 2026-10-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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