Toon Boom Harmony

When you watch a modern 2D animated television show—whether it's *The Simpsons*, *Rick and Morty*, or a high-end Netflix anime—it was almost certainly animated in Toon Boom Harmony. It is the absolute pinnacle of professional 2D animation software, bridging the gap between traditional frame-by-frame hand drawing and modern digital puppetry. Harmony's biggest advantage is its rigging system. Instead of drawing a character's arm 24 times for a single second of animation, an artist can draw the arm once, add digital "bones," and manipulate the limb like a puppet. The software automatically interpolates the movement between the starting pose and the ending pose. It supports complex deformers, meaning you can bend a drawn line realistically without breaking the stroke width. It also operates on a node-based compositing system, allowing artists to add complex lighting, shadows, and camera depth to a 2D scene without needing to export the footage to After Effects. It is highly technical and requires significant training, but for studios focused purely on 2D episodic television or feature films, there is no viable alternative that offers the same level of production pipeline management.