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When I presented the first animation I had created with a computer, The Adventures of André and Wally B., at SIGGRAPH 84, a number of people asked me what cool new software I had used to achieve such believable characters. I explained to them that the software was a keyframe animation system, not much different in theory than other systems that were around then. What was different was that I was using basic animation principles that I had learned as a traditional animator. It was not the software that gave life to the characters, it was these principles of animation, these tricks of the trade that animators had developed over 50 years ago. I was surprised at how few people in the computer animation community were aware of these principles.Traditional animation is basically one trick after another. Whatever it takes to get it working right on the screen is fair game. It should be the same in computer animation. At Pixar, we constantly use tricks, old and new, to get what we need on the screen. In this talk, I will give away a few trade secrets that will be useful to anyone attempting to animate characters with computers, regardless of the software they are using.

This paper describes the basic principles of traditional 2D hand drawn animation and their application to 3D computer animation. After describing how these principles evolved, the individual principles are detailed, addressing their meanings in 2D hand drawn animation and their application to 3D computer animation. This should demonstrate the importance of these principles to quality 3D computer animation.