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Hansoo Kim

Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston’s 12 Principles of Animation

1. Squash and Stretch:

Objects’ images become distorted by being longer or wider in order to emphasize their
speed, momentum, and mass. An object that has a certain level of distortion implies one
of its properties. For example, an illustrated ball more squash and stretch shows that it is
soft like a water balloon. A ball with little distortion shows it is a stiff ball, like a bowling
ball. While distorting an image, it is important to maintain its area/volume. If an object
gets taller, it must get skinnier. Conversely, if an object gets shorter, it must get wider.
2. Anticipation:
Before characters perform an action, characters must prepare said action not only to hint
to the audience what will happen, but also to make the action appear more realistic. For
example, if a person is going to leap into the air, he must prepare the action by crouching
down to build energy.
3. Staging:
Staging is the presentation of any idea so that it is completely and unmistakably clear.
Staging is a broad concept; it applies to acting, timing, camera, position and setting. This
principle is the key of where the audience is looking. Elements must be presented such
that the audience looks at one element at a time; they must have proper timing. In a scene
with bad staging, elements inadvertently compete for stage presence, which ultimately
confuses the audience.
As previously mentioned, camera also contributes to staging. It is important to know
when to be close-up and when to be far away; far away is good for big actions while
close-up is good for personal expressions. The main action must always be either in the
center of the screen, or in one of the thirds of the screen. If a character is facing sideways,
the camera must show more empty space in the direction that the character is facing.
Sometimes when elements are consecutively presented in a scene, there needs to be
pauses in between elements to let the audience process what is happening. Moreover, if
there’s a text on screen, it should be kept on screen for as long as it takes to read it out
loud three times.
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Staging also applies to conveying ideas. For example, if someone’s house is supposed to
be very poor and decrepit, exaggerate the setting and remove any objects that detract that
idea: broken windows, dusty shelves, worn down wallpapers, creaky floorboards, et
cetera.
4. Straight-ahead/Pose-to-Pose:
This describes two methods used to animate drawings. The first method, Straight-ahead,
describes where you draw the first frame, then the second frame, the third and so on. The
second method, Pose-to-pose, describes where you draw the key frames and then going
back to fill in the drawings in between each key frame.
Pose-to-pose is better for most actions because it has the most control; you have a good
idea of what the action is going to look like early in the process. If you were to animate
straight ahead, you’d often end up worrying if a character and/or element will end up in
the right place. Moreover, if you animated a sequence straight ahead and noticed one
frame is off, then you’d have to change several frames to fix that one error.
Straight-ahead isn’t entirely useless though; it’s effective for animation that is
unpredictable, such as fire, water, dust clouds, and appendages.
5. Overlapping Action
This describes having body parts and appendages dragged behind the rest of the body and
continue moving when the main body stops. In general, when the main body moves, the
tip of the appendage should be the last to catch up. And when the body stops, the tip
should follow through the farthest before settling back.
6. Slow-in and Slow-out:
This principle refers to the way that most movements start slowly, speed up, and then
finish slowly. This is one of the most important principles to achieving lifelike motion.
The trick of applying this principles is to draw the key frames, draw a frame in between,
and draw another frame between the key frame and the aforementioned between-frame.
7. Arcs:
This principle is more of an extension to the Slow-in and Slow-out principle, where the
A lot of motion have a circular path. Very few living organisms are capable with
mechanical movement.
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8. Secondary Action:
According to Thomas and Johnston, Secondary Action describes gestures that support the
main action to add more dimension to the character animation. For example, if we want
to express emotions from a guy eating a burger, then the primary action is the mouth
eating the burger, and the secondary action is the closed eyes and raised eyebrows to
describe the guy’s disbelief of how delicious the burger is.
9. Timing:
This principle states that the personality and nature of an animation is greatly affected by
the number of frames inserted between each main action. In other words, if you have
many frames close together in between two main poses, the action will feel slow. Having
few frames in between two main poses will feel fast.
Pretty much: less drawings means fast, more drawings means slow.
The standard frame rate for films is 24 frames per second, which means every frame is
0.0416 seconds long. It’s common have each drawing to be 2 frames (.0833 seconds)
long, not only because it cuts the work in half, but it also conveys a certain art style.
10. Exaggeration
Every action, pose, and expression can be taken to the next level to add more impact on
the audience. Stanley Kubrick said “You don’t try to photograph the reality, you
photograph the photograph of reality” meaning that elements must be exaggerated to
make the idea feel real.
For example: if a person was sad, make him morose. If they were happy, make them
ecstatic. If worried, make them anxious. Exaggeration doesn’t have to mean distorted, it
can also mean convincing.
In quick motions, exaggerations must be bigger in order to be noticed. This is because a
lot of the frames that your eye perceives in a short time interval appear less extreme.
11. Solid Drawing
This principle is about making sure that forms feel like they are in three-dimensional
space. This principle requires general knowledge of three-dimensional drawing.
For example, when drawing a line on a sphere, it must follow the contour on the sphere’s
surface; straight lines immediately make them appear flat.
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When drawing a rough sketch of a character, use basic solid shapes like spheres, cubes
and cylinders to construct the character instead of circles, squares and rectangles.
12. Appeal
This is my favorite principle, where it describes that characters should have a charismatic
aspect to like about them. This doesn’t only apply to the protagonist of the story, but also
the antagonist and supporting characters.
Appeal doesn’t mean a character looks like Prince Charming, it only means they look
interesting; villains should be likeable in the sense that they are interesting to look at.
The tricky thing about this principle is that everyone has a different standard for what is
appealing. However, a character can boost its appeal by giving it a dynamic design. There
are three ways:
First, use a variety of shapes. Instead of using the same rectangle for every character,
experiment on different shapes on each character. To describe a muscular life guard, have
his upper body shaped like an upside-down triangle. For an overweight character, have its
fundamental shape circular.
Secondly, mess with proportions. This is often associated with exaggeration, because
cartoonists magnify the things we find interesting, and shrink the things we find ugly or
boring. For a wicked witch, hunch their back even more, enlarge their nose, and wrinkle
their face.
Thirdly, and most importantly, keep it simple. This is what modern animators struggle
with. Too much information can not only over complicate the character, but also make it
harder and more restraining to animate. A drawing for illustration is different than a
drawing for animation where animated characters need to have less details, because those
details are going to be drawn hundreds of times.