Internet Page about GoAnimate
Whether wanting to make something deliberately awful or attempting to create an above-decent video with GoAnimate, I usually find myself stopping before being anywhere near completion and thinking "Why am I doing this?". I do not find any sense of amusement, genuine or ironic, in GoAnimate. It is a horrendously primitive video-creation software, but I probably should elaborate on why.
Firstly, while I can't say that the character designs available to users are awful as there was effort clearly put into it (aside from the family guy bootlegs present in the Comedy World set of characters and backdrops), but everything around it including character animations feels soulless and robotic, an atmosphere only enhanced when using the emotionless text-to-speech voices in videos. This should never be used as a substitute for creating actual flash animations due to these limitations, which should be expected from "drag-and-drop" video-creation software.
If you're okay with drag-and-drop simplicity and just want to make intentionally trashy videos for the sake of it, then that's cool, but I do have an additional nitpick. There is no official way to render your created video into an .mp4 or any video format, and instead playback of videos on the Goanimate basically runs the flash file of the video. This is a problem if your computer or laptop is as awful as mine and causes a staggering drop in framerate if more than one or two characters appear on-screen, as that bug will be a part of the video no matter what. For some reason, this sort of thing is common with drag-and-drop video-creation programs and those similar to it, with one of the few exceptions being Plotagon, which is basically a CGI variant of GoAnimate with even more restrictions.
Okay, the thing about not finding any sense of amusement in GoAnimate was an exaggeration, as I do have something positive to say about the software. For its most popular character themes such as Comedy World, GoAnimate has a great character creator with different body types, and a variety of clothing options and accessories. A favourable pastime is trying to recreate an existing character, or creating alternate versions of characters while still keeping them recognizable. It's somewhat fun, but does not excuse the poor and unappealing experience that GoAnimate offers.
I'll still watch "GoAnimate: The Movie" on every July 30th though. Nothing can stop me.
O1822