Disney's Magic Artist Cartoon Maker

List Price: $19.99

Customer Reviews:

Extremely frustrating. I expect better from Disney.  [Posted on 2004-11-27]
I've just spent the last two hours playing this game with my children. What garbage. I guess for $7.99, you get what you pay for. Here are some of my complaints:
1) The game is crashing the computer every 10 minutes or so. The computer locks up so badly, even Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work: I have to turn the power off and then back on again to reboot. I'm not having this problem with any other program. (Note that I'm running on Windows 98 SE with 196 MB of Ram, so I'm running at way more the minimum requirements.)
2) The program is very hard to figure out. It's completely non-standard for a Windows program. There are no menus, and no labels on any of the animated buttons. There is a help system, but it is not available while the program is running. I can launch the help system before the program and press Alt-Tab during the program to open up help, but this sometimes freezes help.
3) The help system is compiled HTML, but there is no way to print out the whole thing. It let's you print individual pages, but I didn't try that.
4) The animation capabilities are very limited. There are lots of characters that do a simple thing standing in place, and my kids liked this at first, but quickly got bored. (So Mickey can jump up and down, and even be instructed to laugh. Big deal.) But the primary animation feature of controlling one character and making him (or her) move through the background doing different things was very hard to figure out and very limited. (I'm a professional software developer and I've worked with many graphic packages, but none were ever as confusing as this.)
5. Based on the box, my kids were expecting to make movies. This was not so, and they were disappointed. If you think of this as Disney Magic Artist Deluxe (which comes with it) plus some small animated extras, then for $7.99 it doesn't seem so bad.
6. Disney makes great films. I wish there was some thought put into making the program stable and easy to use.

a great way to bring out imagination [Posted on 2005-08-01]
this game is really fun and it lets you imagine the way you want to. i recommand it. its not short its as long as you make it to be you can even put food commercials and have a special guest. you have very little to choose from the commercials and special guest but who cares i dont mind you shouldnt neither!!!! buy it you can make like 100 cartoons and it would save em all. warning:addiction may occure. :-)

Basic & fun [Posted on 2007-01-16]
Another product for my artistic daughter and son. They both love it!

It is very basic, with pre-made drawings and characters, but still some flexibility in free-style cartoon making and drawing.

If you have a young budding cartoonist who likes Disney, and is learning the computer, you can't go wrong with this software!

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