Disney's Twelve Principles of Animation

So, as you may or may not know, the Disney convention, D23 Expo, is this weekend. I did some research on Disney for my senior thesis, so I figured I would share some of what I learned. 

The Real-Life Models Behind Your Favorite Disney Characters 

During the early years of animation most cartoon shorts depended on pantomime and gag humor. But, just as audiences began to grow weary of this formula, Walt Disney entered the animation industry with a passion for more than visual gimmicks. He focused on narrative and character development with an energy that inspired his animators. They competed against each other, but also shared their struggles and successes. In the early 1930s, the trials of the animators developed into the Twelve Principles of Animation, which would become the industry standard for superior animation.

The Twelve Principles of Animation are outlined in The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. Here is my quick interpretation of the principles:

1. Squash and stretch
Addresses the effects of movement on fleshy objects. Any non-rigid object will squash on impact, bunch up in preparation for a movement, and extend or stretch while in action.

2. Anticipation
States that an audience must be able to expect an upcoming action in order to enjoy and understand its execution.

3. Staging

Actions and characters must be staged to provide an understandable story. In Disney’s earliest black and white animations, all of the action had to be staged in profile because if Mickey’s black arm moved in front of his black body, it would disappear. Even after the addition of color, animators learned that silhouetted profile actions were the most clearly understood, and thus visually preferred over frontal action.

4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
A Straight-ahead Action is drawn frame by frame from beginning to end. In Pose to Pose, the animator first draws the key poses and then fills in the frames needed to connect the poses.

5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
Considers that the parts of a character need to catch up to the main body after it has stopped moving. For example - the way loose jowls flap after a character finishes shaking its head.

6. Slow In and Slow Out
Alters the speed at which the frames change in order to create more lively action.

7. Arcs
Arcing motions appear more natural than movements along a linear path.

8. Secondary Action
A smaller action that helps to support or accentuate the main action. For example - the quiver of a lip before a frown.

9. Timing
Often used to convey emotional meaning or environmental characteristics, such as the resistance of a body to the wind on a windy day.

10. Exaggeration
Developed when the animators realized that a caricature or stylistic rendering of reality was more believable in animation than trying to 100% copy reality.

11. Solid Drawing
Refers to the technical skills of portraying weight and volume, which is just as important in animation as it is in observation drawing. Without solid drawing, none of the other principles would be possible.

12. Appeal
The likability or interest of a character which is often achieved through the combination of visual character design and the personality created through voice and body language

If you are interested in a more detailed explanation of the Twelve Principles of Animation, check out these tutorial videos by Alan Becker. The first video is embedded below, and you can navigate to the rest from there.

Resources:

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1981)
Bob Thomas, Disney's Art of Animation #1: From Mickey Mouse, To Beauty and the Beast (New York, NY: Hyperion, 1991)

Movie Day!

You walk into 7^th grade Biology and at the front of the room is a big tube TV on a black rolling cart. A buzzed excitement fills the classroom – you know what that TV means – it’s a movie day! Whether it’s because you have a substitute, or because your teacher just really isn’t feeling it, you don’t care, because today’s curriculum is going to be taught by Bill Nye.

Well, this teacher is getting overwhelmed with preparing to sell at the Corn Hill Arts Festival, so a movie day it is!

Today I am presenting to you the German film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) by Lotte Reiniger. There are lots of reasons that this movie is really cool:

1. Lotte Reiniger is a lady. 

2. Her animation studio only had five staff members!¹

3. Lots of people think Disney’s Snow White is the first full length animated movie, but The Adventures of Prince Achmed came out 11 YEARS before Snow White! (1926)²

4. The movie is a great example of Neo-platonic beliefs. The villain is boney and hook-nosed while the protagonists are the most realistic – humanizing them in comparison to the stylized supporting characters.

5. I wrote about Reiniger’s film in my senior thesis as a bridge between Wayang Kulit shadow plays and modern animation. She used stop-motion photography and cut paper on a backlight screen to produce an animation very similar to shadow puppet performances. While you watch the movie, try to imagine the meticulous work that had to go into constructing each frame.

P.S. this is a silent film and the caption screens are in German, but, you should still have no problem following the narrative and there are tons of plot summaries online.

Enjoy!

(1926) Lotte Reiniger - 'The Adventures of... by FILMandCLIPS

Notes:

1. Rachel Palfreyman, "Life and Death in the Shadows: Lotte Reiniger's Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Ahmed," German Life and Letters 64, no. 1 (January 2011): 13.
2. Palfreyman, "Life and Death in the Shadows," 6-11.