Cartoon Animation

By Preston Blair

Walter Foster publishing, 1994

10¼" x 9" , 224 pages

This book is the re-edition of 4 previous large fascicules that were published by Walter T. Foster long time ago. It is not only a re-edition but a reorganization of the content too to make it more logical to follow. This is a "How-To" book. All the basic principles of drawing and animation are presented in this book.

There is a fairly large section on character design and drawing principles. The part about drawing techniques will feel alien to the exclusive 3D animators but the character design principles, such as the "cute", "screwball", "goofy" and "pugnatious" characters, are still applicable to 3D character design. Most character design in this book are of antropomorphized animal type and there is another section on "animal" design which are non-antropomorphized characters.

Then the rest of the book is about animation techniques. Those techniques can be used for 3D animation as well as for 2D animation. The animation section starts with the principle of "line of action". I think that this is a very, very important principle in drawing but also very important for 3D animation even though it may not seem to apply at first. Same appreciation for the concepts of rhythm and design, motion of body masses, balance and tilt, anticipation, action and reaction, arcs, curves and waves, delayed action, impact and speed, weight and recoil, overlaping action and follow through, etc. All those concepts are very well explained. Those are concepts that don't come for free with 3D softwares and they must be designed just as well as in 2D animation, like the concepts of squash and stretch and ease-in and ease-out which are also covered in the book

There is a section on walk and run cycles that can serve as an introduction. IMO, "The Animator's Survival Kit" covers those aspects in much more details and variety but "The Animator's Survival Kit" and Blair introduction to walk and runs are two very good complements. Then there is a section about animal anatomy and animation that covers 4 legged animals to bird flights. Those are good introductory material but need to be complemented with other reference books as well.

On the character animation side, the body language, the emotion and gesture, the expression and attitude and the "take" and "surprise" are covered in details. The section about "Dialogues" covers the use of famous "Blair Phonemes", including an intriguing pronunciation chart. Personally, I believe that the phoneme based animation is not very well suited to 3D animation. Techniques similar to the ones presented in "Stop Staring" are much more suitable for 3D animation. But this material is still, again, a very good introduction to the difficulties of handling dialogues in animation

Finally, the last section of this book covers the technical aspects. There we learn about timing and spacing, accents and beats, and cycling and planing. All the usual planing sheets are quickly explained as well as cell painting and limited animation techniques. While those usual sheets and the pipelining of the animation process that goes with them are interesting, I also think that it is time to seriously think about new ways of planing and distributing animation steps and tasks. I think that too many books are focusing too much on those old tools that were designed for the industrial age. We need to think outside those boxes today.

While "The Illusion of life" mentions those famous 12 animation principles with great pride and anecdotes, "Cartoon Animation" clearly shows what those principles mean and how they are animated. The kind of animation that follows those 12 principles is not done often anymore, though, given the time and budget constraints of contemporary cartoon production, the so called "limited animation". So those principles are good references and nice to acquire but apart from personal animation project and practice exercises, there is not much hope of eventually being able to apply those principles in commercial animation jobs or studios. This said, anybody truly interested in perfecting his/her own animation techniques should get this book.

There is one disapointment I have with this re-edition. The original fascicules had illustrations that came from original drawing that Mr Blair had made while working at Disney and MGM. Those were drawings of characters that we all know because we saw them on TV. Later, when Walter T. Foster re-edited the four fascicules, most of those original drawings were replaced by more generic characters and the book re-edition is based on the re-drawn characters. Although the new generic characters are faithfull in their representation of the animation principles and concepts, they are still less dynamic than the originals. We can guess that there were some copyright issues. Only some Disney's original are still there with the Disney copyright mentioned. That is minor gripe though because the animation principles that are demonstrated in this book are still valid and well presented.