Principles of Animation

I promised myself I'd post this. I've been developing some lesson plans to teach all of these, or at least some of them really well. These 12(11) principles are what separate animation from film or reality and are what separates good and bad animation.

1. Squash and Stretch. In order to make something move fast is has to cover a lot of distance on the screen, but in order for your brain to connect all the dots, its nice to have the object overlap on consecutive frames. If you stretch out the ball when it goes the fastest, it looks better. When it hits something, that something hits back making it deform. Unless it is totally rigid (ceramic, etc) it has to deform.
2. EaseIn/SlowIn, EaseOut/SlowOut. Nothing looks as unnatural as a thing that accelerates and decelerates instantly. The spacing works the same way gravity does.
3. Timing. Animation is done with keyframes- the important poses drawn by important people, and then the in-betweens drawn by less-important people. By altering the number of inbetweens and pose holds you can change the action a lot. You can make something happy or depressed or sad, heavy or light, victorious or defeated.
4. Arcs. Everything moves in arcs. If you don't believe me- look to your right, then look to your left. Your probably didn't notice, but in the middle of the look your face is slightly pointing down and at the extremes your face is slightly pointing up. Everything moves in arcs. The only time something moves linear is when its mechanical.
5. Followthrough and Overlapping. Along with Easing, when something stops not all of it stops at the same time, the torso may stop, but the arms don't and will swing a little. When you start your body will move forward, but your hair and cape (if you have one) won't, they'll move late.
   
6. Anticipation. This goes with timing. You have to spent just the right amount of time on the anticipation, on the action, and the reaction (the action is actually very short compared to the anticipation). If the anticipation is weak or too short the audience isn't going to understand the action and will be confused. Anticipation is the windup before any and all actions.
   
7. Exaggeration. This is the heart of animation. Everything is exaggerated way beyond real limits and constraints. This makes it eye-catching. Your need to exaggerate poses, emotion, actions, anticipation (especially), and character.
8. Secondary Action. There is always a dominant action going on, besides that there are other tweens that make static things move, like the arm swing during the walk, like eye blinking, or anything else that is peripheral motion. Its important not to let the secondary action distract at all from the main important action.
   
9. Staging. This isn't that hard. You show the character from the angle that makes sense. Use the silhouette technique to make sure your animations are making sense without the detail, the silhouette alone should look good and portray the mood and action.
   
10. Personality. This defines everything about how a character should move. This isn't so much a means or a technique, but and ends and a result. If you do everything right, your character should be alive and looks like he is moving on his own accord.
11. There are other things to learn, but I wouldn't put them in with the principles. Everything has and must keep a shape or form (muscle and bone structure), the weight of everything must be apparent, and should be shown in the way it moves. Simplification is a good thing. Miyazaki films have a lot of detail, and it sometimes distracts or is harder to keep it looking natural.

There are the 11 steps. In case you have 11 fingers there is one principle for each finger. If you have 10 then you'll just have to remember the last one. These principles are used by standard in hand drawn animation, but sadly has been largely disregarded in most Flash movies (including by me). I'm posting this to get more people (including me) to use these principles more, so we can stop watching the crappy flash that doesn't look right.