12 Basic Principles of Animation (Wikipedia)
An encyclopedia article on the twelve principles of hand-drawn character animation. Wikipedia articles are continuously edited, so year above reflects the access date (2026-08-18), not a fixed publication year.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- Squash and stretch gives a moving object weight and flexibility: it compresses along the direction of impact and stretches when accelerating, while its apparent volume stays constant throughout — a ball stretching vertically must narrow horizontally to match. See Motion Design.
- Anticipation prepares the eye for an action before it happens, via a small counter-movement in the opposite direction — a dancer bending their knees before a jump, or a character looking off-screen before someone arrives.
- Follow through and overlapping action keeps a body part moving briefly after the rest of it has stopped, obeying its own inertia rather than halting all at once; a related technique, “drag,” has a trailing part lag behind and catch up afterward. Without this, motion reads as stiff and lifeless.
- Slow in and slow out places more drawn frames near the start and end of a movement and fewer in the middle, since a real object takes time to accelerate and decelerate — the resulting timing also emphasizes the movement’s extreme poses.
- Arcs: most natural motion — a swinging limb, a thrown object — follows a curved, roughly parabolic path rather than a straight line; only rigid mechanical motion moves in a genuine straight line.
- Exaggeration pushes a motion or pose further than strict realism would, in proportion to the desired style, since a perfectly realistic rendering of a motion can read as static and dull by comparison.