3 Good, 3 Bad Animations According to the 12 Principles of Animation

P 15th October 2021

F 1.2 Design for Animation, Narrative Structures & Film Language

This post is about my personal opinion of three good and three bad animations according to the principles of animations.

The 12 principles of animation are in BOLD.

Three BAD Animations

1. Anonymous Noise

Anonymous Noise (or Fukumenkei Noizu) is a Japanese anime.

The story can be summarised with the female protagonist, Nino, separating from her childhood friends, Momo and Yuzu. She sang with them (individually) as a child, she finds them again in (around the time of) high school. She sings with a popstar group with Yuzu once she finds him and continues to sing in order to find Momo.

For the entire anime there has been an established set style of animation, it follows the generic anime style. This is very cartoon anime-like, using only enough frames to make the action make sense, but apart from that the characters will remain as they are. This is not to say that the frames are lacking, as there is plenty of action, so most of the time there is frame movement. The art style, the characters and the animation is all perfectly acceptable, there are even moments that are very aesthetically pleasing such as the editing in this scene below:

However, the major problem I had with this animation was that within one of the final concert scenes, in the last episode, the animation style completely changed to low quality 3D, (at least it was low quality in my opinion).

In this clip you can see that the animation starts to change styles mid-way and then interchanges between the anime 2D and the 3D. The 3D shots are not appealing to the eye and bring down the quality and professionalism of the entire scene.

While the 2D is easily accepted (since we would have just seen an entire season in this style), the interchanging scenes show just how unrealistic the movements of the 3D are in comparison. The startling inconsistency within the scene is not a great sign of polished work.

Also, the low quality and limited frame rate attempted when replicating someone playing music is quite terrible and not acceptable for the audience.

2. Dragon Ball Super

Within Dragon Ball Super (2015) there are many thing that I can focus on, however, I will use the fight between Goku vs Beerus, that is, if you can even call it a fight. The scene that entirely disregards how form, impact and momentum.

Watch this part in the second link below. This backs up what I mentioned above.

These episodes are packed with anatomically incorrect forms, which contrary to what a lot of people say, do actually matter when it come to animation.

You can separate art to some degree- things in movement or in the distance will often be lower detail and thus excused- but if the form falls apart, well outside of intentional exaggeration, then your animation falls apart too. The movement itself is incredibly clunky, the poses, even if you take them as stills lack any sense of dynamism. In movement they defy the principle of inertia, which leads to very awkward and stiff animation, and with little use of follow-through, the impacts just feel hollow.

The text above was taken from this link:

Examples:

Unappealing visuals, lack of depth of structure.

This is actually a bounce back from an attempted hit, but does not seem like it at all.

There seems to be not power to the hit nor follow-through that leads to an energy transfer that can explain his movements.

There are too little frames for his slide.

He also displays unrealistic body movements. There is very limited follow through.

3. One Punch Man

The Garou vs Metal Bat fight scene pales in comparison to the manga in terms of quality and appeal, it didn’t capture the same hype or impact of the fight. This scene was not necessarily bad, it is just that the quality drop from the first season is painfully obvious, especially when it comes to the hero hunter taking on the big guy with an even bigger swing.

This fight scene was supposed to be one of Metal Bat’s most impactful moments, however, in the reality of the expectation, it most certainly was not. Within this anime sequence you see some poor attempts to produce a fight scene. The impacts and landings from the hits were not realistic, since they didn’t leave sufficient time for the anticipation to show how powerful they were. The landings were also unrealistic since their bodies only moved back slightly once they landed, yet their bodies were mostly still.

An example of this lack of anticipation (the wind up for the impact) is when Garou stomps on the ground and picks up the manhole cover. The impact on the ground is so great that he breaks up the road, and yet there was no wide up of anticipation.

The appeal is lacking, it was a subpar attempt at the intended effect of replicating the scene from the manga. There is a possibility that they tried to maintain a cartoon style of physics from the animation, however, the visual outcome was not very aesthetically pleasing. The same can be said for the part of the scene where there are about 5 hits between opponents a second, it just seems pointless. That shot can be seen below:

Here the individual actions are not perceptible unless you view each frame.

Continuing from this, there does not seem to be a narratively coordinated structure to the scene. While it is correct to say that a fight scene can be spontaneous and unchoreographed, this one simply remains very similar to how the manga presented it. However, to be able to transfer that narrative effectively into an anime is a different case. I believe they should have structured the fight sequence with more organisation with the narrative and environment. This will make it make sense in terms of location of characters and what is happening, and for what purpose. Saying this, I am not sure if the scene maintained the 180 degree rule, it feels too messy. Or at least it changes the character’s positions and locations so often that it is hard to coordinate them, and certainly not easy for the viewer to follow.

Three GOOD Animations

1. ‘Haikyuu’

Haikyuu, an anime series produced by Production I.G in 2014. The story persists around a growing boy infatuated with the sport of volleyball and his and his teammates’, from Karasuno, journey of self improvement. Haikyuu is an anime that uses cartoon animation physics for the comedic parts especially. However, when they get down to hardcore volleyball practice or games then the physics turns into reality or movie style physics.

Within the video above, the anime Haikyuu exercises the use of the 12 principles of animation in various ways. These can mostly be seen during the Volleyball spikes (a volleyball term for hitting the ball) from players such as ‘Mad dog’ or ‘Asahi’. At the video time 0:44, Mad dog’s spike we see that his body contorts, using the exaggeration principle. His body is bent in arches and swings like a whip.

The appeal principle is used to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the characters motion, such as the dynamic perspective and heavy use of action lines to convey the powerful hit. Within the anime Haikyuu the action lines are only used selectively, so this character’s spike is shown to be unique or one of a few chance power shots.

With timing of the frames, character’s body holds at certain moments such as when he is mid-air, or when his body moves almost in slow-motion when he is about to hit the ball. All of these moments portray to the audience each part of the sequence of movements that make up his powerful hit. Contrasting his speed of movement between the pause actions (jump and get ready to hit) and the powerful actions (the run up, the hit and the landing) leads to a greater impactful and dynamic feeling to the movements.

2. A few frames layered on top to show that the limbs are slightly looser rather than reality to show momentum of motion.

3. **Timing**– this shot is held for much longer than the run up to show comparison.

4. Use of exaggeration, arch’s, follow through (clothes) and appeal (action lines and dynamic perspective). This shot lasts 2 seconds.

5. This is the next is portrayed in slow-motion which highlights the powerful spike from an easier-to-see angle with the addition of effects like the ‘sonic boom style’ smoke.

6. The shot shows the entire action from the mid air hit and then sends the ball flying towards the audience to show the great impact the ball made. Usually with a powerful hit, you can see the squash and stretch of the ball hitting the ground and disappearing quickly. Whereas, in this shot, the ball is so fast hat you can barely see it in the frame. Distinguishing variations with the perspective and omitting the ball impact using the focussed perspective on the character rather than the ball exaggerates the different types of power between the hits.

2. ‘Inside out’

With a Disney – Pixar production, Inside Out is a master piece that displays heavy guidance of the principles of animation from professionals with hardly and faults.

These are just a few animation principles that I have noted in this small section. Whilst I could analyse the whole movie, this would take many days to analyse each principle. You still get the idea of the complexity of each animated scene with just this short clip.

Edits show the slow-in and out. Although my editing doesn’t express the slow-in and out very well, you can mostly tell that there are more frames on the right side when she slows.

Within this short clip there are many principles to analyse such as the slow-in and out while skating.

The body always leans in the direction of the movement, with coordinated power and leaning angle. Since the body moves according to appropriate physics and centre of gravity, the movement seems very natural and believable.

The follow-through principle is applies as the clothes are offset from the character’s movements.

Staging of Joy mimicking Riley in the skating dream. Shows that she is a part of Riley’s mindset- literally, and feels the the Joy within the dream/ memory that Riley is currently experiencing. Joy’s movements are slightly offset from Riley’s, this plus her skating speed make her movements feel at ease.

3. ‘Adam’

Adam short film.

Adam demo website: Introducing Adam – A Unity Short Film Rendered in Real Time

More Unity demo’s at: Explore Award-winning Demos Created with Unity’s HDRP

“Adam” is an award-winning real-time-rendered short film, written and directed by Veselin Efremov, and created by the Unity Demo team. The story of Adam is straightforward. The protagonist, Adam, is a prisoner who wakes in a robot body. He finds others in the same situation as him and also finds his Eve. The story continues through 3 short films.

This animation is seemingly simple, however, there are many layers of actions and techniques that help to present the characters movements clearly and draws the audiences attention to certain chosen aesthetic and narrative elements.

The character’s eye-line leads the character’s body forward with minute movements. This use of the **anticipation**, **staging** and acting principle draws the audience’s attention to changes in movements and new subject matter. No. 1 would be the eye-line leading, and the body following, as he reaches his hand up. No. 2 would be his looking at his hand. No. 3 would be him looking at his palm and closing his hand into a fist, exaggerating this action as all attention has already been set up to this subject. No. 4 is him looking away and moving to his next direction.

Another example of the eye line directing the body’s direction. No 1, the eyes move and the head, then body follow. No. 2 the eyes draw the attention of the audience to the character’s eyes, considering he is looking at the audience somewhat. No. 3, the eyes lead the head then body to turn around again.

**Slow-in and slow-out** is applied to the character’s walk cycle as he is stumbling through corridor. This presents a much more life-like action.

Without the **slow-in and out** the body would have felt more mechanical, therefore the directors of this animation want to make these mechanical bodies seem as human as possible. Especially since the narrative presents that these character’ human conscientiousness has been transferred to these mechanical bodies. Therefore they are still freshly human in their minds, it is much more natural for them to have human movements.

Staging is in a key principle within Adam, and it is staged very well. Throughout most of the video above, the subject matter stays in the middle third section of the screen (as can be seen in the screenshots below). That is, apart from when the character stumbles to get up after just ‘being born’. Here the directors used staging and timing with a shaky hand-held camera effect, and a skewed angle to adjusted the audience’s perspective to match the character’s stumbling feeling.