There are 12 principles of animation each one helps with making the animation look more realistic. 1. Squash and stretch 2. Anticipation 3. Staging 4. Pose-to-pose action 5. Straight ahead action 6. Follow through action 7. overlapping action 8. Slow-in and slow-out 9. Arcs 10. Secondary action 11. Timing 12. Exaggeration. The squash and stretch principle gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as they move. This is done by expanding and compressing the character’s body. To see the principle in action, take a look at this scene from the Pixar short Day and Night. Notice how as the two characters dance around, their shapes compress ever so slightly and then stretch back into shape. As a result, we as an audience actually believe that they are dancing because we see the impact that gravity has on their bodies. Anticipation is used to let the audience know that a major action is about to take place. To do this, animators will often work in a smaller action or two, right before the major action to signal that something is coming. Notice how Thumper draws back his leg before breaking into a run? This is anticipation in action! Staging is the principle that every pose or action that a character makes should convey a clear intention. Take these images of Tinker Bell for instance. If you were to isolate Tink and make a silhouette of each of her poses, you would still be able to get the idea that Tink is overjoyed in the first pic, annoyed in the second pic, and feeling the zzzs in the final. Straight ahead and pose to pose refers to the techniques by which animation is crafted. The pose to pose technique involves drawing the key poses that you’d like the character to take first and then filling in the transitional poses second. The straight ahead technique is more nuanced and involves an animator literally crafting one frame after another, as in this early draft of an iconic Cinderella scene. The follow through principle argues that when a character is in action and stops, nothing stops all at once. So when a character is running and stops, their main body will stop, but the other parts of their body will keep moving for a bit after. For instance, in this scene, Mulan’s head stops first and then her hair. Slow-in and slow-out is another principle designed to add realism to the movement of characters. When characters are performing actions, animators will draw more frames at the start of the action, less frames in the middle, and more frames again at the end of the action to create this slow-in/slow-out effect. (Kind of like a pendulum!) Notice how Snow White’s actions in this scene are slow at the beginning and fast in the middle and then slow at the end. The arc principle is that almost all actions in life have a slightly circular motion. When a head turns or an arm moves, rarely will it thrust straight in and straight out. Often it will have a little curve to it. This Mickey GIF does a great job of illustrating this! A secondary action is an additional action that reinforces and adds more dimension to the main action. The main action in this scene is Bolt’s mouth and the carrot, but the animators also threw in some adorable secondary leg action to reinforce the cuteness of the scene. Timing helps create the illusion that an action is abiding by the laws of physics. By adjusting the timing of a scene, animators can make that scene look either slower and smoother (with more frames) or faster and crisper (with less frames). Exaggeration is all about overstating certain movements in a way that helps evoke a point, yet doesn’t ruin the believability of the scene. As you can probably guess from the previous GIFs, Disney is pretty darn good at this. But just in case you forgot, and also because we can’t help ourselves, here’s another prime example. Each principle helps to make animation look more realistic and flow smoothly from-by-fram.