Animator's combination of twenty tools multiplied by twenty inks, 3D 'optics,' unparalleled palette handling, custom fonts and many other useful features (such as its own internal scripting language POCO), put it many years ahead of better known animation tools of the time.

In July 1991, the successor Animator Pro was released, with the significant improvement of allowing almost any resolution and color depth.

[4][6] The 1995 released Animator Studio was a complete re-write for Windows 95, but was not anymore developed by the Yost Group.

[7] Jim Kent kept copyrights to the 300,000 lines source code base of Animator Pro, and allowed it to be made available publicly under the open-source BSD license in 2009.

It also lost the ergonomic fluidity that the DOS versions had and was overshadowed by Toonz in terms of features and functionality.

[citation needed] The program worked so well and had enough of an impact, that it convinced James Cameron that CGI can create a character in his next film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Autodesk did advertisement with this.