The techniques of character animation are rooted in storytelling and narrative skill. The nature of character animation is the telling of a story using the principles common to film, but in a fully malleable art form.
Telling the Story
Character animation is about story. Either in a short or a feature-length animation, as soon as you have characters you have a story. Every motion and gesture illuminates character and story together. The core elements of storytelling are to know what your character(s) want and need, what they are trying to accomplish, what blocks them (and why), and how they overcome the difficulties they face.
Character design.
You also want to know your characters. In the first stages you can play and experiment.. Is your lead a boy or girl? Try it both ways. Tall or short? Spiky hair or funky braids? Design is more than just look, also: Wall-E isn't just a robot. He is a particular robot with his very own history, past, and needs. Bugs Bunny has a personality so powerful that it has survived multiple visual re-imaginings. Designing a character is the art of not only what is seen, but of all the unseen details of life and personality and motive that your animation will illustrate to the viewer. An animator is an actor and director before he or she is anything else.
Storyboard.
A storyboard is a technique for story analysis used by comic artists, screen writers, directors, animators, and even the occasional novelist. Using simple thumbnail sketches, the story is told from beginning to end. The end result is very much like a rough comic strip. Each drawn frame is a key image of a stretch of story, breaking down the way the story is told visually.
From a first long view of an African plain through close-ups, sweeping images of characters in combat, images of a single gesture shared between two characters, or the blocking out of a bit of comic slapstick, the story is sorted out into major actions, images, angles, and moods. A storyboard helps you find what bits you may have left out, or failed to work through fully. It allows you to study the patterns of the animation.
Keyframes.
Keyframes are the navigational tools of frame-by-frame animation. Keyframes take different forms in manually created and computer-generated animation, but they always identify the landmark postures and gestures of a sequence of animation. Then the transitional frames, called inbetweens, can be filled in with less difficulty.
Using keyframes can allow an animator to create a very rough first-draft animation. Keyframes can be run in order to produce a jerky but recognizable sequence, allowing the animator to judge how effective movement and timing are, as well as the quality of the character's "acting."
Using lines, circles, arcs, and points and joints.
Certain tricks help the artist visualize the movement of the body and its parts in three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Creating a stick man is a powerful tool, not just a child's trick. A stick figure keeps the various parts of the body moving in smooth relation to the other parts. Add circles, ovals, and squares to represent the mass of the body, and you have something your mind can manipulate through the twists and turns of complex motions.
Using arcs makes a "stick figure" of a motion. By sketching out the arcs, you are creating a guide for your own animation, marking the imaginary air with the tracks along which your characters will move.
Points and joints are the typical features of a character that you track along the arcs. Certain points on the body act almost like "keyframes" for the whole figure. If you know where the knee and ankle and other joints are, the rest of the limbs and body all fall into line naturally. And no matter how a face moves, if you can plot the eyes and nose and chin, you can correctly place the rest of the facial features.
