The political season is in full swing in the U.S. and, as expected, the cartoons, sketches, and late night jokes, are all in full swing as well. Although some of these humorous pieces are meant to be critical, the majority of them help to lighten the somber mood of politics, which is exactly what GoAnimate intended to do when it announced its new features.

GoAnimate, a company that creates free Web apps, rolled out new characters and backgrounds to allow anyone to create animated videos. The character depictions include all the Republican frontrunners, President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Speaker of the House John Boehner, and some political media figures.

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Gary Lipkowitz, the VP of Corporate Development at GoAnimate, spoke with WebProNews and said that the company wanted to allow consumers to express their own opinions. As he explained, even though consumers can jump up and down and yell at the TV, their voice is not really heard. For this reason, GoAnimate wanted to give them a fun, easy way to express their opinions.

“We wanted to create a tool that allowed people to make rich media commentary and to share that with people they know in their networks who they might actually have a chance to affect,” he said. “Maybe, just maybe, it might go viral and spark something in the world.”

The videos are very easy to make since they don’t require any drawing or downloading. Users simply choose a background, characters, and then type or record the dialogue for each of their characters. The entire process takes only a matter of minutes.

Users can then share their creations with the friends through their own blog or website as well as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Here’s a video that one user created in a debate setting:

Next Media Animation (NMA) is another animations company that is getting a lot of attention of late for its productions related to news topics. In a recent interview with WebProNews, Emily Wu of NMA told us that it would like to see more conventional news outlets embrace animations in the telling of stories.

Lipkowitz told us that GoAnimate would like to see this as well but that it thinks animated videos can serve in a variety of purposes. In addition to political, humorous, and news-oriented videos, the company also encourages businesses to embrace their tools for marketing, training, and even internal videos.

Incidentally, GoAnimate’s new features were rolled out just in time for the Republican primary debate taking place on CNN tonight, so it’s probably safe to say that we’ll see a lot of videos created as a result.

Lipkowitz also told us that the company would continue to release new characters and backgrounds throughout the election season.