Anticipation and Exaggeration

In today’s podcast I will be talking about anticipation and exaggeration and how they affect animation.

Anticipation – is the preparation of an action.

For anticipation think of Newton’s third law of motion, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  This can be seen in many Warner Brothers and Disney animations.

Anticipation is used “…to catch the audience’s eye, to prepare them the next movement and lead them to expect it before [the action] actually occurs.” [1]

For example:

TeachPe.com 2009 ©

A real life example is a track runner. The runner gets into position then goes low and explodes into the run. The dip that the runner does is the anticipation.

Exaggeration – accentuating the essence of an idea.

“If a character is sad make him sadder; if he is bright, make him shine; worried, make him fret; wild, make him frantic.”[2]

Exaggeration is not only used in actions. It can be used in “…the design, the shape of objects, …the emotion, the color [and], the sound.” [3]

Exaggeration adds a bit more life to the animation or can make it even silly.

Lesseter, J. (1987). Principles of animation applied to 3d computer animation. Proceedings of the Siggraph 87 (pp. 35 - 44). Anahiem:

[1] (Lesseter, 1987) P38
[2] (Lesseter, 1987) P41
[3] (Lesseter, 1987) P42