An Animation Studio Essential: The Illusion Of Life: Disney Animation

Pioneers of Disney’s ground-breaking animation developed a fundamental set of guidelines for their work. Refined over the years, these twelve principles were published in what today is still considered the bible of the industry, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation.

In the 1930’s, a group of very skilled animators were hard at work in Walt Disney’s animation studio. These pioneers of the industry developed a set of guidelines for their ground-breaking animation. Refined over the years, these twelve principles were published in 1981, in a book called The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. Today, this book is still considered the “bible” of the animation industry.

The book covers a number of important animation fundamentals, including:

Squash and Stretch is the first principle and dictates that an object’s or character’s overall volume should not change regardless of action. When the length of an object is stretched up, its width must contract in proportion. In 3D, the depth must then also be equally affected.

Anticipation is the second principle and involves the set up before an action. It prepares the audience and though simple it enhances the realism. An example of this principle would be a character looking down at an object before they pick it up.

Staging is a term heard in theater and film, and entails making certain the attention is focused on where it needs to be, and the meaning is crystal clear. Whether it is an action, an expression, or mood, the animator can use placement in a frame, lighting, or other effects to achieve this.

Straight Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose are two methods of creating the animation. Straight ahead action means drawing a scene from beginning to end where pose-to-pose is drawing key moments with the intent to fill it in later. Pose-to-pose is very common with computer animation as technology can fill in the gaps.


Follow Through and Overlapping Action are important as they make it seem as though the objects or characters are real because they obey the laws of physics. For example, “follow through” is when a character has stopped moving and their hair would continue to move for a brief instant then stop. An example of “overlapping action” would be when a character changes direction when moving and their hair continues to move in the original direction for a spilt second.

Similar is the concept of Secondary Action, which is adding any action that, without acting as a distraction, supports the main action.

Slow In and Slow Out refers to the fact that most objects need time to get going or to stop, so this principle is applied to movement. Most action by an animal or human occurs on an arched path, so the principle of Arcs should also be applied to movement.

The ninth principle is that of Timing. Physical timing can help communicate the mass of something, for example if a character picks up an empty glass, he will do so much faster than if the glass were full. The drawing is the exact same, but the timing between frames differs. Timing may also refer to comedic timing and is a way to induce emotion.

Exaggeration can help create more interest in a drawing than an exact imitation of real life.

Solid Drawing really just means ‘good’ drawing and implies that an artist should apply the fundamentals of good drawing to their animation as they would if they were a traditional drawing.

The twelfth and last principle is that of Appeal. This means making the character likable or interesting. This is comparable to charisma or chemistry in live-acting and can be achieved in many ways.

Skilled animators apply these twelve principles to traditional hand drawn animation, or advanced three-dimensional computer generated imagery. These fundamental guidelines are as important today as they were when first developed, and have earned a special place in the library of any animation studio.