Animation: The mechanics of Motion

By Chris Webster

Focal press, 2005

7½" x 9¾", 260 pages

This is a book that I had on my shelves for a long time before I forced myself in reading it. I never had the incentive to read it because of some glaring drawing errors I found in the book by just flipping through its pages. However, at some point, I wrote a rather long negative appreciation of the book on a forum without really having read it, just on my impression from flipping through the pages. So I felt compelled to truely read it and write a better informed review rather than just an impression.

I must say that my final impression of the book, after I read it, is more mitigated than my first negative impression but, unfortunately, not very much better. The first impression I wrote was based on the books illustrations so I'll clear that immediately.

The author thanks 3 persons that helped with the illustrations in the book. I have the strong impression that the first 90 pages of the book were illustrated by mostly one of those illustrators who made several glaring mistakes of all sorts. Some of those mistakes are inexcusable considering that they are essentially copies of illustrations that we find in other books like Richard Williams' "The Animator's survival kit". The whole section about perspective is identical in its goal and examples used to Williams book, yet manages to get it completely wrong. The manikin characters that are used throughout the book suffers from what I call "the Botticelli syndrome" where the artist have learned to draw heads and body parts exclusively in face, side and 3/4 views and any other views are just one of those 3 views tilted on the side. This makes for break-neck postures that are impossible to hold for a real person. In some places the manikin is dismembered in an impossible posture and in some other places, the manikin changes proportions from frame to frame. This was so painfull to see that it kept on distracting me during my reading of those pages. Someone with no experience in drawing will probably not notice anything about that. But I think this is even more dangerous in those circumstances. I read on other user's reviews of the book that this person was learning to draw by copying the illustrations from that book. If you buy this book, don't try to learn to draw by copying the illustrations from the first 90 pages or so of that book. They are all wrong in some way or another and you will only learn mistakes. Past those first 90 pages, however, things starts to look much better and can be relied on for learning to draw but IMO, there are still much better books for someone who want to learn to draw.

This is one of those books where the author tries to cover every aspects of doing an animated film. Most of the material covered can be found in some other books with better descriptions and examples. I think of "Animation from Pencils to Pixels" by Tony White coupled with "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams for examples. "Mechanics of motion" is all geared toward traditional 2D drawing animation although the author mentions that most of those principles applies equally well to 3D puppet and CGI animations.

The author, a University teacher, likes to breakdown topics into sub topics, sometime, it seems, just for the fun of it. For instance, he breaks down the "Cycle Animation" topic into "Wave cycle" and "Flag cycle". That's it. And the whole text that explains the "wave cycle" is "The principle behind the wave cycle is really very simple and may be applied to a wide range of animations. If done well it can create some elaborate actions to very good effect". That's it and this is followed by the next topic. I found that rather thin and I invite you to reread that a couple more time to help me figure if I missed the point completely. And the text describing "flag cycle" is not more informative. Granted there are illustrations that can help convey the information but this is very sketchy. There again, Williams' book is a better source for that sort of things. The whole book is not all that bad though.

There are a few sections in this book that covers animation issues that I did not find in another animation book yet (this said, I haven't read them all). For nstance, the section on weight balance and animationg actions like throwing, pushing and pulling are short, and relatively well done but covers only 10 pages. But really, the sections that distinguish this book is the section on animals in motion where he describes horse walk, trot and run cycles and bird flying, take-off and landing. This covers only 20 pages though. That makes it for about 30 pages of original topics.

The rest of the book is really filled with material that can be found elsewhere.

I should not have bought this book.