Mashable Choice is a badge of honor, reserved for the absolute best stuff you can see, use, or do. If it’s Choice, it’s worth your time.

We’re all pretty good animation consumers. The CGI you find in The Hobbit and Toy Story is a rarefied version for of it, Cartoon Network is full of it and the social platform Vine hosts a significant amount of DIY stop-motion action. But for most of us, we’re not animators. The process is difficult, time consuming and confusing.

Zing’s new StikBot, though, aims to put animation in the hands of everyone — especially kids, ages four and up — and all for a starting price of $9.99.

The starter kit includes two plastic, posable figures and a tripod. You combine these physical tools with a simple, free animation app (iOS and android) and you’re ready to animate.

StikBot is a perfect example of “you get what you pay for.” The roughly 2.5-inch figures' plastic segments are held together by elastic string. They are highly poseable, but have the maddening habit of slipping back into their original position. Thank goodness Zing put suction cups on each of their hands and feet. This little stroke of brilliance helps keep the figures steady and posed — provided you have a non-porous surface to work on. At home, I have a tile counter, which was half good news: I could stick the figures to the tile, but not the grout. In the office, I was often forced to try balancing the figures – a virtually impossible task.

The key to making smooth animations is small, incremental changes per frame shot, but these figures were often best for gross movements, unless you could move them very, very carefully. StikBot’s target market could grow frustrated.

As for the included tripod: it’s mostly plastic, with a spring-loaded clamp system for holding your smartphone in place (landscape mode only). There’s some rubber on the base to help hold the phone in place, but it was fraying within a few uses. Even so, the tripod did the job and even offered some adjustability — you could angle and raise the phone by adjusting one or all of the three legs.

Basic App

StikBot’s app is about as simple as it gets and should appeal to 4-year-olds, though I suspect their parents may get a little frustrated. There are virtually no instructions and many of the icons insist that you intuit their meaning. I stupidly shot a whole movie in photo mode and had to redo it when I realized that the animation mode looked like a film strip and the still camera looked like a camera. I know, that makes sense, but for an animation app, you would think that these icons would not be the exact same size. Why not emphasize the animation one by making it a lot bigger?

StikBot's Animation interface (foreground) is the picture of simplicity. Image: Mashable, Lance Ulanof

Once inside the animation studio, there’s an easy-to-use interface where, if the animator chooses, he or she can simply press the animate button (a large image of one of the animation figure heads) and the app will capture the screen. It has built in ghosting so you can see the last captured frame faintly overlaid on top of the new one. Also known as “onion-skinning,” this is an easy way to make sure you haven’t moved the camera (unless you want to) and also keep track of just how much you’re moving your characters from frame-to-frame.

Also on-screen are options for flipping to the front-facing camera, a timer so you can set a delay before capturing frames, a very useful help button which identifies all the on-screen options and a settings button that contains advanced options like “White Balance” and “Auto Exposure.” It might be smart to hide those options for a “Kids’ Mode” in future StikBot app updates.

On the right side of the screen, there’s a zoom control, the frame grab button, and a hamburger-style menu hidden, oddly, under the zoom. It took me a little while to realize that that’s how I access my finished animation.

Easy peasy

In that finalization area, StikBot let me add voice-over (under a menu item that looks like an image – go figure). Sound effects include a "Campfire,” “Candy Bag,” “Cartoon Laser,” “Girlfriend Laugh” (whatever that is), “Knife Sharpen” and “Robot Ding.” You can even set where, on a frame-by-frame basis, the sound effects happen and for how long they last, though, with its sound-wave graphic and total lack of instruction, I think this interface may be too advanced for young children.

Trying a little animation fun with #Stikbot Studio. Think I need more practice. A video posted by Lance Ulanoff (@lanceulanoff) on Aug 15, 2015 at 11:34am PDT

StikBot encourages young animators to share their work on social media, but offers no direct connections to any of the social media platforms. All you can do is add a #stikbot hashtag. You can save the video in qualities ranging from 360p all the way up to 1080p, and there's a square for Instagram option.

Despite the pitfalls – slightly cheesy quality, the needs for suction-cup-friendly surfaces, guess-work-rich interface – I was pleased with my first animation and realized that I was eager to try again – especially now that I knew how to handle the figures. I’m especially pleased that the whole set is so cheap; you could afford to buy more than one set to have a backup tripod and two extra figures. If you just want one more figure (they come in different colors), they cost just $4.99 a piece. All-in-all a good deal, a little frustration and a lot of fun. I am totally ready to get back to animating.