Flare is a free, open-source 2D animation studio — a community-driven fork of
OpenToonz reworked to feel like Adobe Animate
and to open the Flash/Animate file formats Adobe left behind (.fla, .xfl,
.swf, and friends).
The goal is simple: give the Flash/Animate community a modern, actively maintained, cross-platform home that reads their existing projects — without a subscription and without a dead runtime.
➡️ Website: https://flare-animate.github.io/website/ · Discord: https://discord.com/invite/JpeScW8Awa
Adobe Animate is proprietary, subscription-only, and Flash is end-of-life — yet
huge amounts of animation, games, and educational content still live in .fla
and .swf files. OpenToonz is a powerful production tool but its UI is
unfamiliar to Flash/Animate artists. Flare bridges the two:
- Familiar UI — the default workspace is laid out like Adobe Animate (Drawing / Animation / Rigging / Compositing rooms), with an Adobe-style theme.
- Open your old work — built-in import for the Flash/Animate file family.
- OpenToonz power underneath — vector + raster levels, a full xsheet/timeline, plastic/skeleton rigging, FX, and the OpenToonz rendering pipeline.
Flare ships with the Adobe Animate workspace selected out of the box — no configuration needed. Prefer the classic layout? Open Preferences → Interface → Rooms and switch to OpenToonz (or StudioGhibli).
Built-in, native C++ import — no Java, JPEXS, or external runtime required.
| Format | Extension | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Flash project (ZIP) | .fla |
Import (XFL extraction + parse) |
| XFL project | .xfl |
Import (directory or ZIP) |
| Compiled Flash | .swf |
Header + embedded bitmap extraction |
| Component library | .swc |
Catalog + embedded bitmaps |
| Flash Video | .flv / .f4v |
Raster level via FFmpeg |
| ActionScript | .as |
Imported as reference text |
⚠️ Flash import is actively being developed and not yet production-ready — complex documents will not round-trip cleanly. Seedoc/FLASH_SUPPORT.mdfor the architecture and current limitations, and please file bugs with a sample file. Tracking issues: #16, #47.
Flare keeps the OpenToonz feature set and continues to pull improvements from OpenToonz and the Tahoma2D community fork: vector & raster drawing, the xsheet and timeline, plastic & skeleton rigging, the GTS scanning tools, the effects (FX) schematic, motion tracking, and the script console.
The Flare-Animate org is consolidating its Flash tooling by merging
Next2Flash — an MIT-licensed
SWF round-trip editor with a native AS3 decompiler — into Flare. The native SWF
reader/writer pieces are being ported, while AS3 round-tripping is bridged as an
optional helper. See doc/NEXT2FLASH_INTEGRATION.md.
Pre-built nightly binaries for Windows, Linux (AppImage + tarball), and
macOS (DMG) are published automatically on every push to master:
| Platform | Asset | Requirements |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Flare-Windows-Portable-nightly.zip |
Windows 10/11, 64-bit |
| Linux | Flare-x86_64.AppImage |
x86_64, glibc 2.35+ (Ubuntu 22.04+) |
| macOS | Flare.dmg |
macOS 13+ Intel (Apple Silicon via Rosetta 2) |
These are pre-release builds and may be unstable.
To enable FFmpeg-based .swf/.flv/.f4v playback, install FFmpeg and make
sure it is on your PATH. The Flash import commands themselves need no external
tools.
Building requires CMake 3.10+ on your PATH. Install it via the official
installer or Chocolatey on Windows, Homebrew
(brew install cmake) on macOS, or your package manager on Linux.
⚠️ Building Flare is memory-intensive. On systems with < 8 GB RAM, limit parallel jobs to avoid freezes.
cmake -S flare/sources -B build -G "Ninja" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
# < 4GB RAM: -j1 | 4-8GB RAM: -j2 | > 8GB RAM: --parallel
cmake --build build -j2Platform-specific guides:
- 💬 Discord: https://discord.com/invite/JpeScW8Awa — the fastest way to ask questions, report bugs, and follow development.
- 🌐 Website: https://flare-animate.github.io/website/
- 🗳️ Discussions: GitHub Discussions for proposals and ideas.
- 🐛 Issues: GitHub Issues.
Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Flare aims to stay compatible with OpenToonz where possible; please keep the original project's licensing and attribution in mind.
Files outside thirdparty/ and stuff/library/mypaint brushes/ are under the
Modified BSD License. Third-party components retain their
original licenses — see thirdparty/ and
stuff/library/mypaint brushes/Licenses.txt.
Flare is a fork of OpenToonz (© DWANGO, based on Toonz © Digital Video / Studio Ghibli) and retains its licensing and attribution.
scripts/log_watcher.py watches *.log files under the build directory and
prints the tail whenever they change (also wired to the "watch logs" task in
VS Code, Ctrl+Shift+B):
python scripts/log_watcher.py # defaults to flare/build