Timing

Time is the first thing you must learn to understand as an animator in order to create realistic work, this is where excessive study of behavioural movement in nature is essential. Unfortunately there is no set guideline as to the amount of frames needed to create a particular movement as all character movement is different. You need to be able to master it in such a way that you can portray your characters as self-entities, they are gaining their own individual personality and transform into actors. Even the most basic of moves need to represent the importance of timing in order to be deemed believable. In fact you could argue that in some cases the timing of such moves is in fact more important than other more complex ones, for if you get the timing wrong it could even portray a completely different emotion and therefore a mixed multitude of ideas. Yet to get any of this right can take a lifetime of practice.
The way to control time in animation is simple, the closer the distance between frames the slower an object moves, the further apart these frames are the faster it moves. The best way to demonstrate this is when a heavy and a light object are dropped at the same height, as gravity pulls them down it will act faster on the heavy object as opposed to the light one. This is easy to learn the hard part is learning when to put the theory into practice, especially when it comes to character animation. Animators not only need to show the shifting of weight, balance and possible clothing movement but in addition need to any separate overlapping movements that may need to be included. In order for animation to be believable it must adhere to the same laws of nature for real life.

Live action = recorded time, animation = constructed time

Cartoon animation in some small way can get away with being a lot more flexible because those types of animators have the ability to stretch the boundaries of the believabl ‘The everyday becomes magical and the impossible becomes plausible’ (C. Webster, 2005 p.3)
Frames per second (fps) is important as images any longer than one tenth of a second displayed will appear jerky, due to the retention rate of the retina of the eye. It was this that brought about the 24 frames per second, and resulted in the breakthrough, which taught animators that they didn’t have to alter every single frame in order to create a realistic movement. This allowed for pauses within animation that are now used a lot for anticipation and suspense.
Physical conditions of the scene also need to be taken into consideration, such as natural forces (i.e. Weather), facial expressions, materials and dynamics of the characters physique (i.e. young, old, fat, thin, healthy, or sick.) This is where the simplest way to deal with this animation is to categorise them into sections, Pacing, Phrasing and Timing.
Pacing – this is most simply put as the speed of each limb within the animation; this is used to create action, drama or tension. The faster the pace the more tension and drama the animation has, and the longer this goes on for the longer the suspense lasts. ‘Pacing relates much more to filmmaking and storytelling than the animation of individual elements within the film,’ (C. Webster, 2005 p.12).
Phrasing – this is more to do with character animation and the speed of which a person would move usually dependent on their mood, and circumstances. Such as when their in a rush or if they are agitated, ecstatic or relieved. The most impressive animating has a variety of different lively actions throughout to make the animation more interesting. Phrasing is the terminology used to describe the process of making sure these changes happen.
Timing – this process is what covers the very fine action detail that you may never really notice in live action, but are essential to making realistic animation. Such as arm and leg movement whilst a character is running, the leaves of a tree blowing in the wind, or any background animation altogether. Timing is the speed of which these intricate little details happen. It is these little details that animators must learn to analyse by judging how long they take to happen.
‘All animators, irrespective of what discipline they work in all use the same raw material to create their work – time’ (C. Webster, 2005 p.5) It is the use and manipulation of this time that defines what genre and persona an animators work is to be.

Newton's Laws of Motion

Inertia – no inanimate object can be moved unless a force is applied to it. Once this force has been applied the object will continue to move in a straight line until an external force such as gravity is applied to it, making the object’s speed or direction change.
Constant Acceleration - the greater the force applied to the object the greater the acceleration of the object. This rule also applies if the object is very large in mass; a greater force is needed to move the object at all.
Momentum – the force that builds up that causes an object to begin to accelerate, the greater the momentum the faster and further an object will travel and the greater the opposing force needs be in order for the object to slow down or stop. If the object is travelling along a rough surface it will come to a stop a lot sooner due to friction, instead of a slippery one which may aid it to accelerate further. ‘If it meets an obstacle it may, depending on its speed, [may] crash straight through,’ (H. Whitaker and J. Halas, 1981 p.31)
Equal and Opposite action – if a force is applied to a character the character will retaliate with exactly the same amount of force and an opposite force.
Gravity – when you throw a ball directly up into the air, the force that will slow it down and bring it back down is gravity. What animators have to take into consideration is that the object will always accelerate then slow down first before coming back down, making a fairly distinctive arc. The height it reaches depends on how large the initial force was that was applied to it. The same goes for bounces the higher the drop and the heavier the ball the faster and higher it will bounce. If a force was absolutely phenomenal then an object could be bounced so far out that it will end up in earths orbit. This ruling doesn’t always apply such as in outer space. When you drop items at the same time from the same distance yet one weighs more than the other, on Earth the one that weighed more would fall and land on the ground faster. Not on much smaller orbital masses such as our own moon, as they have less inertia and therefore far less of a gravitational pull.

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Squash and Stretch

This principle is usually exaggerated the most within cartoons and is usually used for added comedic affects. That does not mean to say that it is not essential for more dramatic animation, as it is still relevant in most cases and can enhance any animation. It gives a feeling of weight to the object that is being animated and therefore a misapprehension of mass. It is where the physical form of any character or object is altered to look more malleable than it actually is to enhance the illusion of movement when animated. For example fast moving objects may seem slightly elongated when travelling past and falling objects when landing may also seem slightly squashed. It works on the apprehension that a squash provides an anticipation of thrust and stretch shows the power of that thrust, as it appears to accelerate. Some animators took this one step further by making characters appear to twist and double-over and drawing stripes on objects so that you can see them spin as they fly through the air from pure momentum.
‘Eisenstein effectively equates the apparent freedom of the animated form with personal and ideological freedom,’ (P. Wells, 2006 p.22) such freedom of expression deemed as an attractive thought towards audiences, as the ability to show your own utopia on page was extremely desirable. Without squash and stretch a drawing when animated would appear very rigid and lifeless, even in real life this only happens to the most inflexible objects, such as wooden furniture. Even humans squash and stretch when it comes to our muscles expanding and contracting, such as when we breathe. This is more than relevant when it comes to facial expressions as we have the largest amount of muscles, out of all our limbs, in our faces.
Even if the animation is supposed to be extremely exaggerated it can never seem as if the subject is gaining or loosing mass, you just have to draw the object scarily thin in the direction of the force applied. However if you want realistic animation you cannot take this into such extremes especially if the object is supposed to resemble a very dense mass, and be sure to emulate any material animation. ‘The best advice for keeping the distended drawings from looking bloated or withered, was to consider that the shape or volume was like a half- filled flour sack,’ (F. Thomas and O. Johnston, 1981 p.49). Squash and stretch is an extremely useful tool to create character and personality, as nearly no organic forms are rigid. It can work well when applied to an object that you want to add character to such as say a car or a book.

Anticipation

This is essential to learn how to create this affect as it attracts the audience’s attention to the right part of the screen that the animator wants them to focus on. Although the audience will essentially be individuals the human brain works in the same predictable way in this circumstance. If there are a variety of objects on the screen all moving at the same pace accept one the human eye will be drawn to the exception. This makes it important for anticipation to occur, especially an action passes very quickly as they may miss it. In some cases only the anticipation action can be enough to create the sense of what is about to happen for an audience to accept it. It is ok for them to wonder why an action is happening but there should be no shadow of a doubt as to what action is being carried out.
Almost all actions begin with suspense of that action, such as a character pulling back and throwing something, and therefore strengthen that movement. Sometimes this is initiated by a pause, or is a necessity for the action to be able to happen. This is not always the case though, as sometimes it may be a person’s mannerisms. It prepares the audience for what is about to happen in the scene. If you over do this anticipation, it could result in a very cartoon-like animation piece, especially if it is exaggerated. This is clearly shown in films before sound, where the animators had to exaggerate all the movement to make the storylines and emotions easier to read by adding extra clarity.
Almost all movement follows these rules – Anticipation, Action and Reaction. This basically means once you have grabbed the audience’s attention enough for them to gather what may happen next, the main ‘Action’ that you are trying to achieve needs to be animated, and a reaction needs to be considered afterwards. In the final reaction stage it is useful to always ask the question: what should happen in a situation like this as a consequence of this movement? And how can I animate this?
Anticipation always travels in the opposite direction in which the main action needs to occur in order to involve balance in the movement, before we travel in one direction we must first travel in another. ‘Any action is strengthened by being preceded by its opposite,’ (R. Williams, 2006 p.274,) slow anticipation = more powerful fast action and vice versa: weak anticipation = weak action. There are many examples in which to demonstrate this, for instance, a pen may rise up before writing on a piece of paper to indicate the writer’s thought process. It can be used as a tool to increase curvature and femininity in a very sexualised female character and its most popular use is it can be used in exaggerated hyperactive cartoons in something as simple as a finger point. Nowadays when it comes to animating physical combat, the frames that include the point of contact are erased so that the animation works on anticipation and reaction basis only and this proves to have a much larger impact.
The way to perfect this technique is to simply observe and research live action; life drawing can be a useful tool for this. All an animator needs to do is to understand how things move, behave and perform; performance is key to showing emotion within animation. This is why it is almost essential to plan your animation down to each detail in order to create realistic movement before you even begin animating. This is where the skill comes in as the audience; with practice, will eventually believe that it was the characters decision to make such intentional movement, and the motivation came from them. This will help towards achieving characters, which seem to have personalities and lives of their own.
There is only one disadvantage to using this technique and that is that it can become corny and boring. If the anticipation is overly obvious the audience will eventually tire of it, so the key is to mix it up a bit and do something that the audience may not expect. This can result in quite a funny or shocking piece of animation. This is actually the opposite of anticipation (“Surprise Action”) as you are leading the audience astray on purpose. However ‘Snap’ anticipation does not fall into this cheesy category and yet it is almost essential to all animations yet still very hard to achieve. It only occurs for a minute amount of frames and for this reason is almost invisible to the eye but the audience when watching it can feel it. The way it works is to add an extra spark to a speed action to make it seem more realistic, such as someone looking around in shock. The key with anticipation is to try and keep it as simple as possible and to try and show the idea behind the movement in such a way to the audience as well.

Staging

This principle goes as far back as early theatre, and simply put, is basically presenting a set and therefore an idea as clearly and unmistakeably as possible. This is so that the audience can tell what is going on within the first few seconds, even from a distance. The reason that this is so crucial is because it directs the audience’s attention to focus them on the most relevant action within a scene. This is especially crucial when it comes to highlighting someone’s reaction or expression in a particularly emotional scene. Dream state has been the terms used to describe classical animation, as because of its very surreal feel, ‘the dream-framing device, one of the most important animation codes, acts to establish the limits of rational thought.’ ((Donald Crafton) P. Wells, 2006 p.21.)
It could be argued that this stage comes mostly into play when it comes down to storyboard design, as it is down to the camera angles and movement to create the relevant staging. If a character is doing something with his feet you do not waste the time on a mid-shot, you need to make sure that the camera is the right distance away from the subject. Camerawork has got a large part to do with this but it isn’t purely the camera that determines this. If a scene needs to be spooky the set possibly needs to be filmed on a stormy night, kitted out with the right props, and if a character is overly masculine they need to have the correct attributes in order to portray this, either through his movements or through his clothing style or physique. The actual animation must be clearly seen movement wise too; you cannot have characters masked by drapery, props, other characters or the set, especially if their movement is key to the scene. Sound also comes into it, as the right sound affects and music must be considered carefully and placed in the correct timing point. You can’t have a threatening ear-piercing scream in the middle of a romance film if it doesn’t fit, just as you can’t have death metal playing on the radio in an old people’s home.
That said contrast is good in some ways as it makes the animation more interesting and adds conflict, which brings about change. Staging is possibly one of the easiest of the principles for animators to notice if it goes wrong, as the problem is so easy to tell within a camera angle. Yet at the same time it is one of the hardest to correct for it can sometimes be very difficult to pinpoint where the problem is coming from. You also have to consider the placement and composition of the characters, scene, props and how the action is to be portrayed (at what angle?) in order to achieve the right effect.
It was this exact principle that helped Walt Disney discover that it was actually better to show action in silhouette, so that the animators could see exactly where expressions and other keys bits of action were being covered. ‘Work in silhouette so that everything can be seen clearly. Don’t have a hand come over a face so that you can’t see what’s happening. Put it away from the face and make it clear,’ ((Walt Disney) F. Thomas and O. Johnston, 1981 p.56.)

Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose

These are the two different ways in which animator’s work, whilst being the reason that some animation processes are limited in the way that they work. For instance stop motion can only ever work in straight ahead animation. This basically means that their work has to be made frame by frame by frame, in chronological order. Different from pose to pose animation, which is what CGI, tends to work in. Pose to pose is where the animator works on the main key frames (the place at which an action is about to change or has changed,) first and then they add all the frames in-between later.
Both forms are still used today and are sometimes combined with each other to make sure that straight ahead animating doesn’t lose its rag. There may need to be some guidance as to maintaining mass, positions, personality and interaction with other characters and props within the scene. It is the key to getting this balance between the two styles that will allow you to achieve the quirky surprises, unexpected timings and smooth flow of an animated piece. 2D animators tend to have the advantage of having to choice to be able to work in either way, but usually it depends on the animator, as they both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Straight Ahead
Advantages – it can add more personality and liveliness to an animation, as it is a far more relaxed technique compared to the over structured approach that pose to pose can prelude. It usually tends to have a classically fresh wacky feel to it for it can be quite spontaneous.
Disadvantages – corrections cannot be as easily made, and a large amount of concentration is necessary to avoid such mistakes. Some of the most common and hard to avoid mistakes is sometimes the timings can be a little off, as this animation style can be difficult to hit key frames dead on, due to being unable to plan in any way near as much detail. This is why stop-motion artists tend to capture far more frames than needed as it is always better to subtract then add. You also have to look out for your animated figure gaining and loosing invisible inertia. Animators can get away with this if it is just a small amount of frames that this happens to instead of a whole selection and the movement is very slight, as otherwise the audience will pick up on it.

Pose to Pose
Advantages – Regarded as the more commercial way to animate, as it can be much faster and far less time wasting. Once the key frames are drawn up by a singular animator other animators can then step in and take over drawing the in-between frames, instead of relying on one singular animator to do the whole action. It is much easier to get the timings and sizes right, easier to synchronise other actions that may be happening on the screen (this makes dialogue a lot easier to animate.) It also means that the animator can carefully consider all of the principles in each of the key frames before passing it on, as more time can be spent on improving them and therefore that makes this style of animating a lot easier to follow.
Disadvantages – unfortunately even though you can plan and structure your animation far more easily, if you go too far with the planning your animation can seem pretty stiff and too organised at times. This will make it look structured and unnatural, therefore eventually boring your audience with its predictability, especially if there are a lot of individual elements to animate, as they won’t synchronise with anything else on screen.

Follow through and Overlapping Action

The title describes all types of animation that are interlaced, yet they do not affect each other or occur at the same moments. To put it simply this is where not all movement on a singular structure or screen happens at the same time, which animators have to take into careful consideration especially if they are trying to emulate real life (Overlapping Action). When it comes to animating people; in the words of Richard Williams ‘most of our body actions start from the hips,’ (R. Williams, 2006 p.227) this indicates that everything else must then follow (Follow Through animation), however long it takes. This needs to be done as otherwise the motion can become robotic and stiff, as it is usually only mechanical objects that start up, follow in synch and end at exactly the same moment. In some cases it may be the eyes that move first or at the same time as the hips, but in this case the hips usually tend to follow a close second. This is why it is useful to break the body up into sections starting from the top with the head the shoulders then the chest. Moving onto the arms the pelvis and the clothing, and finally finishing with the legs and the feet. These sections are broken up even further in some cases to include such things as fingers, toes and eyes etc. This is how normal movements such as walking can be made interesting, change one small thing about the movement like say the characters drunk and therefore waving his arms all over the place and it can change the whole outlook of the animation.

Overlapping Action
This is the mismatch of different timings of movement occurring on different parts of the same figure or structure. On a person it could mean that the head reaches its full turn before the body spins fully round, or the skirt that hasn’t quite settled yet after the body has finished turning. All of these actions happen at different times but all occur on the same character, the way of figuring out how they would occur is to take certain aspects into consideration. Materials included, complexity, number of different animations, forces (natural and manmade) and what do all these factors affect? If you move a limb or object in a certain direction will any other animation be needed to follow on to further exaggerate the movement? For instance quadrupeds and bipeds are more likely to have to include overlapping action because of their complex dynamics, especially when compared to say an animal such as a fish. Even when there are many organic things travelling in exactly the same way on screen it is usually a good idea to have overlapping action on a few of them to create variety. As it makes the animation feel alive by not having it appear very mechanical by such unison movement.
Character animation drawn in this way is instantly given a lease of life even without the need for facial expressions. Using overlapping action means that there are extreme amounts of ways to achieve a small movement; the types of movement you can achieve are limited only by inspiration. This is how very skilled animators show characters personalities in these mundane everyday tasks. Examples - any body part movement, facial expressions, weather and animal movement (‘Animals had to move like real animals but it was important that the complexity of the movement remained unnoticeable,’ (P. Wells, 2006 p.23)).

Follow through
This is animation added after a motion has occurred. It is basically any animation which continues on from the main instigating force that was applied to it after that force has come to a rest, changed direction or is simply no longer influencing any primary or secondary action. This is most obvious when it comes to things like tails on animals, hair, fur or clothing, as it is the technique that contains drag. Drag is any separate spots in areas of primary or secondary action, and has been described as ‘friction resistance’ (C. Webster, 2005 p.48) it is where flab is delayed slightly using ‘Squash and Stretch’ techniques catching up to the main limb that they are connected to, such as someone who drags their feet when they walk.
Sometimes extreme detail in animation can be difficult to time alongside the other actions that may be happening in a scene, as it is difficult to work out how it will look in the next key-frame. It is in situations like these that mean animators have to work in a straight ahead, frame by frame technique, depending on the action, weight, flexibility and opposing force. It is this extra out of synch animation that classes as follow through and overlapping action. The key is learning what aspects of a character or objects physique may need this treatment. This is why ‘it is usually a good idea in animation to have a time lag between the movements of different parts of the figure… as this helps to give fluidity’ (H. Whitaker and J. Halas, 1981 p.61). Examples - Drapery, slow moving body fat stretching to catch up with moving body parts (drag) and weight.

Slow in and Slow out

These are necessary in order to create a spirited feel as it involves planning out the timings of in-between extreme key frames in order for them to appear to flow naturally.

Slow In
This describes an action decelerating into a key-frame. This normally occurs at the end of a sequence when the opposing force begins to effectively act upon an object and it is slowing down to a rest, a lighter object will do this more quickly than a heavier one.

Slow Out
This describes an action accelerating out of a key-frame. This normally occurs at the beginning of an animation as this is usually when enough force is applied to overcome the object or figures inertia. The heavier the object the longer it will take to build up the momentum.
The in-between frames needed in these techniques are named cushions. The more cushioning there is the longer the acceleration and deceleration periods. Sometimes these processes can be referred to as ease in and ease out, and can be described in some texts as being the opposite way round.

Arcs

In the natural world things rarely tend to move in a completely linear fashion, and the easiest way to avoid animation that looks like this is to draw in all the series of arcs that the animation follows in. obviously there are some exceptions like this such as the head movement of an owl or a few insects, yet the majority of living organisms tend to move in a slightly circular path due to the structure of their skeletons. You can avoid this technique if you wish to create really cartoon-like animation, but in doing so you have to make sure that a lot of emphasis is highlighted on the key/action frames, which as a result must be very strong and intriguing. However you have to make sure that you are very careful as too much avoidance can result in slaughtering the essence of the action.
Usually these arcs either follow a wave like path or a figure 8. This was the only basis needed for the animator to draw guidelines circular from each of the key frames so that the in-betweens can follow the right path of movement. However this can be somewhat difficult to achieve sometimes ‘it is only as a series of drawings is “rolled” on the pegs that the proper location for drawing becomes evident,’ (F. Thomas and O. Johnston, 1981 p.63) has been the way to explain how to attempt to avoid any taboos in this area. All limbs when they move must arc instead of moving in a straight line as otherwise they will not maintain their length and will appear to grow and shrink. A good tool to use (especially for animals) to get say a realistic walk cycle from a side view, using arcs to plot out the eye position for each stage of a walk can make it flow that little bit better.
The straighter the movement the more power the movement has behind it. This is why once objects with no continuous momentum are fired from a long distance they begin to lose power as gravity begins to pull them to the ground, thus creating an arc. The more complex the object and the larger the amount of separate actions included, the more arcs there will be. The key is to treat each of the elements separately, and adding arcs to each of them as so.

Secondary Action

This follows on from primary action, which is the main large movement that creates secondary and possibly tertiary action. It usually follows a particular limb like going to catch a ball; the primary action would be to throw your arms forward. The secondary action would probably include the preparing the legs for jumping to catch it. Secondary action mainly covers action like this by which I mean helping the characters efficiency by supporting the previous action and this is something that should be carefully planned. It can also be used to add a fuller dimension and extra personality through ways of making the character discreetly flick their hair bite their nails or add clumsy traits. Tertiary action is anything that follows from both primary and secondary action and is usually saved for appendages, such as lip synch, hair or clothing ruffles. It goes along the same theory as overlapping action by encouraging the animator to ask him or herself; what else is affected if I move this?
Secondary action should not be more interesting or more dominant that the main action that is moving, if this is the case than it is either the wrong movement to use or it needs to be much more subtle in its composition. ‘All your choices will be wrapped up in the reason why you are making animation, the type of audiences you wish to reach and how you intend to distribute your work,’ (C. Webster, 2005 p.3) The principle ‘Staging’ has a close relationship to this principle for this very reason, as the audience will be very confused if any secondary or tertiary action masks any of the major action that is necessary to the animated story. Yet at the same time this cannot be taken so literally to the point where the secondary action is barely noticeable at all, as it will seem far too constricted. All these actions must be planned so well that they can be animated in an extremely interlaced natural way. The easiest way discovered to help with this process was to use the primary action as a starting point, by animating that part first. Then going through that action again move onto consider any secondary and tertiary animation that may compliment this natural movement and adding that in. finally the animator must critically analyse and review this movement and tweak it in points to ensure that it flows correctly and is unmistakably convincing.
Sometimes expressions (usually the secondary or even tertiary actions) will need to be the main focus on the screen, this means that large body movements need to compliment them. This can prove quite an arduous task especially if the zoom shot is in particularly close, the solution is to make the expression very obvious, almost to an excessive exaggerated point so that the audience gets a clean clear message or its value will be lost.

Exaggeration

Realism in animation is a very skilful thing to have knowledge of, yet sometimes even when an animator has done extreme amounts of research they still cannot get the movement they want to achieve quite right. The area that will usually be at fault in this situation would be the exaggeration of the piece. Exaggeration is needed to add an extra edge to a movement to make it evermore unquestionably clear what movement, emotion, storyline etc. is trying to be shown to the audience. If a character was scared animate him so that his shivering appears to shake the screen, if they’re smart design him with huge glasses that make their eyes look ten times as big, if they’re angry paint their face bright red and have fire burning behind them in the background.
Some animators originally misunderstood the point of this technique and tended to take things a little too far and instead of thinking outside the box about other ideas that may enhance the animation the simply distorted the characters in question more or thought up ideas that were simply disturbing. ‘Disney’s dominance of the medium places the issue of “realism” at the centre of discussion of animation,’ (P. Wells, 2006 p.24.) The best way I have discovered of describing this technique is that it is a ‘caricature of realism’ (F. Thomas and O. Johnston, 1981 p.65/66) and in many ways it is. For in some situations as an animator you have to dive completely off the deep end and create something so maddeningly distorted and embellished in order to achieve exactly the right affect.

Solid Drawing

In the beginning at the birth of animation they stated that you needed to be a true expert artist, whom could understand anatomical movement almost as much as Leonardo de Vinci. This is still true today, although not to as much of an extent. It is useful to know such things in order to demonstrate weight, depth and balance (the basics of solid, 3 dimensional drawing,) within your work, and other smaller issues such as tone, shadows and colour palette. This is why life drawing lessons and constant practice of sketchbook drawing should be of great importance in an animator’s life, so that they can truly study outside movement first hand with a pencil as their mentor. Even so no object or figure in animation will ever truly resemble that object, no matter how beautifully drawn if it doesn’t move how it is supposed to.
Constant practice of such analysis will prohibit an animator from accidentally drawing “twins” which is the unfortunate situation where arms and legs are moving in exactly the same way completely parallel to each other with no change this would not occur in real time. Solid drawing’s will help animators not only discover this mistake far more quickly (as the majority of the time they do not realise they have done it,) but also aid them in how to correct it afterwards. Solid drawing eventually will help an artist loosen up and establish that all animated forms even though have mass; it is not a dense mass and therefore has a level of flexibility that it must ascertain. ‘We used the term “plastic” (antonym: Static,) and just the definition of the word seemed to convey the feeling of potential activity in the drawing,’ (F. Thomas and O. Johnston, 1981 p.68)

Life drawing: 1min16 from Karl Armen on Vimeo.

Appeal

Often misconstrued as cutesy, appeal to an animator plainly means anything that an audience finds attractive and likes watching. This could mean a number of things such as a characters charm, looks, minimalism, charisma, fascination, or behaviour. Appeal is something that any animated piece must have arguably more than any of the other principles for it to be a success. Otherwise audiences will not be interested at all, for people do not wish to stare at vulgar shocking animation. It may capture their gaze through sheer morbid curiosity but beyond that (delving into areas such as back-story,) their level of interest will end. It is nothing to do with personal interests; the simple reason is just that most audiences will not enjoy it otherwise. ‘Animation was developing its own aesthetic language, and seeking new technologies to facilitate its future progress as both an industry and an art form,’ (P. Wells, 2006 p.23)
This is why strong drawings are necessary as well. Poor drawings in terms of poor design, and awkward moves may suggest a lack of effort, and complicated composition is hard to read animation involves the audience to have to try and figure out what exactly is happening from scene to scene. It is for this reason that refining animation in this area is ill advised, animation needs to remain simple and direct or something as small as an expression may be misinterpreted and be deemed as having little appeal. It is for this reason that there is a constant battle between discovering aspects that look the most appealing and getting them to work alongside the staging of a piece. Things such as outlines and colour gradients on characters may need to be taken into consideration in terms of line-thickness when appearing on the big screen. It is yet just another proof that animation is an art form. ‘While the live actor has charisma, the animated drawing has appeal,’ (F. Thomas and O. Johnston, 1981 p.68)

(Start at 2minutes 45 seconds)

References

Books
WEBSTER, Chris. Animation; the mechanics of motion Focal Press; 1st Ed. 2005
WELLS, Paul. Fundamentals of animation AVA publishing; 1st ed. 2006
LASSETER, John. Timing for Animation 1981 Focal Press; 9th ed. Oxford 2005
ROBERTS, Steve. Character animation in 3D Focal Press; 2nd ed. Oxford 2005
WELLS, Paul. Understanding animation, Routledge; 12th ed. 2010
STANCHFIELD, Walt. Drawn to Life, Focal press; 1st ed. 2010
WILLIAMS, Richard. The animators Survival Kit Faber and Faber; 2nd ed. 2006
THOMAS, Frank and JOHNSTON, Ollie The Illusion of life, Disney Animation Disney Editions; 3rd ed. 1981

Websites
http://craigbowman.com/animation/principles-of-animation-part-iii
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_basic_principles_of_animation#Solid_drawing
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~karan/courses/csc2529/principles.pdf
http://craigbowman.com/animation/principles-of-animation-part-ii

Film