12 Principles of Animation

The 12 Principles of animation are the corner stone to any strong successful animation, without theses animation would not be animation as it is today.

The word itself means to bring something to life, to define the word it means liveliness or the condition of being alive. www.thefreedictionary.com/animation

 

Some animation uses all 12 principles at some stage during the animation and some only concentrate on specific one, depending on what style and type of animation will be portrayed.

 

To go into some detail of a few of these principles like exaggeration or anticipation. With the below image which shows a clear cut case of an exaggerated facial expression, also containing some hand animated exaggeration.

You can see from the two poses that they are at polar opposites, from one extreme to another.

Instead of the character having a subtle facial expression, it is really exaggerated as mostly the animator will have little time to get this point across, or the case could be like the word says to really exaggerate a emotion

sigggraph paper online

www.evl.uic.edu/ralph/508S99/exaggera.html

Timing is everything, but can be said to go hand in hand with anticipation. If the animation has bad timing i.e. a ball no bouncing right with the looking on of other characters, it will lock very artificial, which is the very thing animators are trying to get away from, so with other principles like anticipation, secondary actions, this bounce can be made to look much more realistic.

 

Done