12 Fundamentals of Animation

12 Animation Fundamentals.

　1. Squash and Stretch:
Notice the Bulldog stretching his body out and it becomes larger at the top, squashing the lower body.

2. Timing and Motion:
This image shows the delay between the character falling to the ground.

3. Anticipation:
The moment before the action, will she kiss him, will she not?

4. Staging:
When a character or object is placed in a way which will maximise viewing quality.

5. Follow Through and Overlapping:
The moment in which anticipation is completed and the end of the action happens. Also, the usage of repeated frames to make the overall animation seem more fluid.

6. Straight Ahead action and Pose-to-Pose:
Straight ahead is animation just drawn at once, pose-to-pose is planned before drawn; example in this link:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/03/curly-fleece-poodle-straight-ahead-vs.html

7. Slow in and out:
Placing of a certain amount of same frames to make the movement slower or faster.

8. Arcs:
Natural motion for a human or ‘living’ thing, making things more visually pleasant.

9. Exaggeration:
When a characters features are distorted to show emphasis.

10. Secondary Action:
The Primary action is the legs moving the secondary action supports the first action, in this case, the mane and tail are the secondary action.


11. Appeal:
Characters have to be appealing to the audience, no matter what the role they play, in this case the sub character, is made to look fat and cute, the same way a villain is normally dark and scary.

12. Personality:
L is an introverted detective with a taste for sweet things and tea. The animators/ mangaka portray this through his hunched body and dark bags under the eyes. This gives him a hard worked look typical of serious detectives. This is just one example of creating personality in an animated character.