12 Principles of Animation

  1. Squash and Stretch: Establishes flexibility and elasticity on an animated object. When an object is stretched or squashed, it’s important that its total volume doesn’t change.
  2. Anticipation: A visual clue as to what an animated object will do next. Examples of this include winding up before throwing a punch or, even simpler, turning a character’s head towards another character before making him/her actually speak.
  3. Staging: This is all about establishing your idea as clearly as possible so that the audience knows exactly what is going on in a scene. This is done through proper pacing and exaggerating certain features of the animation.
  4. Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose: These are two methods of animating an action. Straight ahead is when you animate simply by drawing one frame after another in sequence. Pose to pose is when you draw a starting frame and an ending frame and then draw the frames in between.
  5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action: This principle is all about establishing physics and realistic movement in animation. “Follow through” has to do with loose appendages on objects which continue moving slightly after the main object has stopped moving. “Overlapping action” has to do with loose appendages lagging behind a main object once that object begins to move.
  6. Slow In and Slow Out: This is about objects accelerating or slowing down at the beginning or the end of their motion. This principle achieves realistic and non-robotic movement.
  7. Arc: I order to portray realistic physics in animation, one must take into account trajectory of moving, suspended object. An example of this is a ball moving parabolic trajectory when thrown into the air.
  8. Secondary Action: When animating a character performing an important action, secondary actions are used to further establish the character’s mood or attitude. An example of this would be a character who has descriptive facial expressions while performing an action.
  9. Timing: This has to do with the number of frames between the beginning and the end of an object’s motion. Many frames in between the start and end positions translates to slower movement, and few frames translates to fast movement. Many different ideas can be portrayed depending on the number of frames between the start and end of a movement.
  10. Exaggeration: Adding exaggeration to a character’s expression is done in order to create a greater impact on the audience. It is important to keep some level of realism while exaggerating a character’s action.
  11. Solid Drawing: It is important to understand the space that a character takes up before animating him/her. In order to establish a character’s volume, it’s important to draw him/her using three-dimensional shapes and then “flattening it out” by cleaning up the drawing.
  12. Appeal: In animation, it is important to make your characters appealing so that the viewer will like them more. Appeal is achieved by making your character interesting to look at. This can be done by exaggerating certain important features of a character or by keeping a character’s design simple and easy to read.