Our Creative Director Watched the Cavalry x Canva Motion Mondays Episode. Here’s His Take.

I spent some time watching the recent Motion Mondays episode covering Cavalry going free following its acquisition by Canva, and I came away thinking this could be a much bigger moment than the headline first suggests.

On the surface, “Cavalry is now free” sounds like good news for motion designers. Another powerful tool becoming more accessible. Lower barriers to entry. More people experimenting with procedural animation. All of that is genuinely exciting.

But the more I listened to the conversation, the more I found myself thinking less about what this means for designers, and more about what it could mean for the teams and brands we work with every day at Studio Magenta.

Because if Canva gets this right, this could be a pretty significant shift.

“Cavalry Going Free Changes Who Gets Access to Powerful Motion Tools”

One of the biggest points raised in the video is that this isn’t a stripped-back version of Cavalry or a time-limited trial. They’ve made the full platform available.

That’s a bold move, and from a creative perspective, I think it’s a smart one.

Anyone who’s spent time with Cavalry will know it doesn’t really think like Adobe After Effects. It’s far more procedural, far more system-led, and in many ways closer to how a lot of us are already thinking when we build motion identities or scalable content systems for clients.

Instead of animating every asset individually, you’re building rules, behaviours, relationships, and repeatable logic. For anyone creating motion at scale, that’s incredibly powerful.

Removing the cost barrier means more creatives are going to start exploring that way of thinking, and I think that’s good for the industry as a whole.

“But What Interested Me Most Was Canva’s Bigger Play”

The real story for me wasn’t just Cavalry becoming free. It was what Canva appears to be building around it.

Over the past few years, Canva has gone from being seen as a quick social content tool to quietly assembling something that’s starting to look like a serious creative ecosystem, with tools like Affinity now part of the picture as well.

A few years ago, I don’t think many people in the creative industry would’ve looked at Canva as a platform that might influence professional motion workflows. Now, I’m not so sure.

And from the perspective of the clients we work with, that’s really interesting.

A lot of our clients already use Canva every day. Their marketing teams are in it. Their internal comms teams are in it. Their regional teams, HR teams, and social teams are in it.

The reality is, Canva is already embedded in a lot of organisations, whether agencies like it or not.

The problem has always been that when it comes to motion, Canva’s capabilities have felt pretty limited. Useful for simple social content, yes, but not always robust enough for brands trying to create consistent motion across multiple teams, platforms, and formats.

If Cavalry integrates properly into that ecosystem, that could genuinely change things.

“What I Think This Could Mean for Clients”

I don't think that clients will suddenly become motion designers. I think it will allow us as creatives to open up the gates for clients and let them do so much more within Canva. It's almost as if Canva are giving us free rein through Cavalry to remove the restrictions that are currently in place.

A lot of what we do is help brands build motion systems that don’t just look good, but actually work in the hands of real teams. Marketing managers, content creators, internal comms teams, social teams. People who aren’t motion specialists but still need to create moving content that feels like the brand.

That’s often where things start to drift and, over time, consistency starts to disappear.

If platforms like Canva become genuinely capable of supporting more sophisticated motion workflows, and if tools like Cavalry can bring procedural thinking into environments clients are already comfortable using, that opens up some really interesting possibilities.

“Should Adobe Be Worried?”

The video also touched on the obvious question. Should Adobe be worried?

I think “worried” might be strong. Adobe still has decades of workflows, plugins, muscle memory, and entire studios built around its ecosystem.

That kind of inertia doesn’t disappear overnight.

But for the first time in a while, it does feel like there’s genuine movement happening around the edges.

And as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about where motion is heading, I think that’s a very good thing.

Because better tools are exciting. But better systems, and getting those systems into the hands of the people who actually use them every day, is where things get really interesting.