Stick Nodes Pro - Animator

Review by eFreeware

Stick Nodes Pro is a stickfigure animation studio built for phones and tablets, and it grew out of the Pivot style of animating: simple figures, moved joint by joint, frame after frame. That focus is the most distinctive thing about it. Rather than trying to be a general-purpose video editor, it does one job in a way that makes sense on a touchscreen.

If you have ever wanted to make a short cartoon with stickmen, this is the sort of tool that gets you there without a desktop computer. It suits students, hobbyists and anyone teaching themselves the basics of animation, and the developer pitches it as usable in a school setting. It is also meant to stay useful as you improve, with enough control for people who have been animating for years.

The app has been around a long time. It first appeared in August 2014 and has been updated steadily since, with a 4.8 average from more than ten thousand ratings and over 100,000 installs. That kind of history suggests a tool that has been refined rather than abandoned.

Building a figure and moving it

At its core, the app is about constructing stickfigures and animating them. You can shape a figure from a variety of shapes, set color and scale for each segment, and use gradients, so the result does not have to look like the plain black stickman you might expect. Figures can be joined together, which makes it easier to simulate one character holding or wearing an object.

Once a figure exists, the animation work is mostly about frames. The app includes automatic frame tweening, which you can customize, to make movement between keyframes look smoother than a raw sequence would. There is also an onion-skin view, undo and redo, and background images, which are the standard tools you would want when you are placing one drawing on top of the last.

A camera tool lets you pan, zoom and rotate around the scene, similar in spirit to the virtual camera used in Flash-style animation. That matters if you want a shot to move rather than sit still. Textfields give you a way to put words and speech into a scene without drawing them by hand.

Movieclips, images and imported skins

Movieclips are the app's answer to repeated motion. You can create an animation object once and reuse or loop it inside a project, which saves rebuilding the same walk cycle or effect every time it appears. For anyone who has animated before, this is the feature that turns a toy into something you can plan a longer piece with.

The app is not limited to drawn stickmen. You can import and animate images, and it can bring in Minecraft skins and animate them, so the same tool covers a different style of character. That flexibility is unusual for an app with such a narrow starting point.

There is also a library to draw from. The developer points to more than 30,000 stickfigures available to download from the Stick Nodes website, with new ones added over time, and projects, figures and movieclips can be saved, opened and shared. If you would rather borrow than build, that is a substantial starting point.

Sound, filters and getting the result out

Sound effects can be attached to frames, which is how you give a punch, a step or a fall some weight. Filters such as transparency, blur and glow let you change how a figure reads against the background, and the Pro version adds more of them alongside the core set.

Export is where the work leaves the app. Animations can be saved as animated GIFs or as MP4 video, and the MP4 route is specific to the Pro version. Files made in older versions of Pivot, before 3.0, can be opened as well, which is a nod to the tool this one grew out of.

The interface is available in English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish. Recent updates have addressed the selection of joined nodes and a crash caused by duplicate figure IDs, which are the sort of fixes that matter more the longer a project gets.

What the paid version changes

Stick Nodes Pro costs $3.99 as a one-time purchase. There are no ads in the app and no in-app purchases, so the price is the whole cost. That is a straightforward arrangement.

The Pro features are specific. You get no startup ad, no watermark on exported animations, the ability to add sound effects to frames, MP4 export rather than GIF only, and a wider set of stickfigure filters including blur and glow. The developer notes that sounds, filters and MP4 export are Pro-only, so those are the things you are paying for.

For someone making animations to share publicly, the watermark alone is often the deciding factor, since a clean export is easier to post. For someone experimenting, the question is whether sound and video export are part of what you want to do. Either way, the payment is a single decision rather than an ongoing one.

How it compares with other animation tools

The obvious alternative is a full desktop animation program, which offers more power but asks you to work at a computer and spend time learning a much larger interface. Stick Nodes Pro trades some of that depth for portability, and the trade is deliberate: the developer built it with mobile devices in mind.

Another option is a general video editor on the phone. Those tend to be built around cutting and arranging existing footage rather than drawing movement frame by frame, so they solve a different problem. If your goal is to make a figure move, a dedicated animation app is the more direct route.

There are also simpler stickman apps that focus on quick, playful results. Stick Nodes Pro sits above that level, with tweening, movieclips and a camera, and it is priced accordingly. The choice comes down to how much control you want over the result.

A tool for patient beginners and hobby animators

I would point this at two groups. The first is people new to animation who want to learn by doing, because the stickfigure format keeps the drawing problem out of the way and lets you concentrate on timing and movement. The second is hobbyists who already animate and want something they can use anywhere, with movieclips and tweening to keep longer projects manageable.

The price is low and the terms are simple: $3.99, no ads, no in-app purchases. The Pro extras, particularly watermark-free exports and MP4 video, are the kind of thing you notice every time you finish a project. The library of downloadable figures and the community around the app give you somewhere to start and somewhere to share.

The work itself is still work. Animating frame by frame takes patience, and no feature list changes that. If you are willing to put in the time, this is a well-established Android app with a long update history and a strong rating behind it, and it is built for exactly the job it advertises.

What's new in version 4.3.4

◆ Fixed selection of joined nodes ◆ Fixed crashes caused by rare duplication of ID for some figures ◆ See the full changelog: https://sticknodes.com