The 12 Principles of Animation, With Examples

Anyone learning animation, whether 2D or 3D, will meet the 12 principles of animation. They are the foundation of believable, appealing movement, and they apply as much to a game character's attack as to a film shot.

The principles grew out of the work of animators at Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston later set them out in their book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (1981). The aim was to make characters obey basic physics while still showing emotion and personality.

Although they were written for hand-drawn animation, they matter just as much in 3D. This guide explains each of the 12 principles with a short example, plus how it applies to game animation, where moves have to loop, blend and respond to a player. If you want to apply them to game characters with regular feedback, Animation in Maya is one of the four specialisations in CADA's Certificate in 3D for Games.

The 12 principles at a glance

Squash and stretch
Anticipation
Staging
Straight ahead action and pose to pose
Follow through and overlapping action
Slow in and slow out
Arcs
Secondary action
Timing
Exaggeration
Solid drawing
Appeal

The 12 principles explained with examples

1. Squash and stretch

Concept: Gives objects a sense of weight, flexibility and mass. As an object moves, its volume stays constant, but its shape distorts: squashing on impact or stretching when it accelerates or moves fast.
Purpose: Adds elasticity and impact to movement. It can also be used for comedy.
Example: A bouncing rubber ball squashes flat and wide as it hits the ground and stretches tall as it rebounds. The volume should look consistent: wider means shorter, taller means thinner. A bowling ball, being rigid, would barely squash at all, which tells you it is heavy and hard.
In games: On realistic characters you rarely deform the body, but the idea survives in poses: a compressed crouch before a jump and a fully extended body at take-off. Stylised games can push real squash and stretch on characters and pickups.

2. Anticipation

Concept: Preparing the audience for a major action with a smaller, often opposite, movement first.
Purpose: Makes the main action clearer and more powerful, and tells the viewer where to look.
Example: Before a character jumps, they bend their knees. Before throwing a punch, they pull their arm back.
In games: Keep anticipation short on player moves, often only a few frames, or the controls feel sluggish. Enemies are the opposite: a clear, longer wind-up on an enemy attack gives the player time to read it and dodge.

3. Staging

Concept: Presenting an idea (an action, emotion or mood) so that it is unmistakably clear. Camera angle, composition, lighting and posing all work together.
Example: A sad character in a clear pose (slumped shoulders, head down), framed slightly off-centre with muted lighting and nothing in the background pulling focus.
In games: You often do not control the camera, so staging comes down to silhouette. Check every key pose from the gameplay camera: if you cannot tell what the character is doing from its outline alone, push the pose.

4. Straight ahead action and pose to pose

Concept: Two approaches to animating.
- Straight ahead: animating frame by frame from start to finish. Good for unpredictable motion like fire, water or explosions.
- Pose to pose: planning the key poses first, then adding the in-betweens (the frames between key poses).
Purpose: Straight ahead gives fluid, spontaneous movement but can lose consistency. Pose to pose gives more control over structure and timing, which suits character acting.
Example: A character walking across a room, sitting down and picking up a cup would use pose to pose: the walk pose, the sit pose, the reach and the cup hold come first.
In games: Most game animation is pose to pose, because you need exact start and end poses that blend into other moves (the engine cross-fades from one animation to the next over a few frames). In 3D this is the blocking stage: key poses first, in stepped mode, before any smoothing. Stepped mode holds each pose until the next one, so you judge poses and timing without the software filling the gaps.

5. Follow through and overlapping action

Concept: Different parts of a body move at different rates. Follow through means loosely attached parts keep moving after the main body stops. Overlapping action means parts move at different times: the arm moves, then the wrist, then the hand.
Example: When a character with long hair stops running, the hair swings forward before settling. When they raise an arm, the shoulder leads, then the upper arm, forearm and hand.
In games: This is what keeps idles and loops alive: a slight delay in the head and arms as the chest breathes, a sword belt that settles a beat after a landing. In a loop, make sure the overlapping parts also match at the first and last frame, or the cycle will hitch.

6. Slow in and slow out (ease in and ease out)

Concept: Most natural movements start slowly, accelerate, then slow down before stopping. In practice you place more frames near the start and end of an action and fewer in the middle. This distribution of movement across frames is called spacing.
Example: A character reaching for an object starts slowly, speeds up, then slows as the hand arrives.
In games: Be careful with eases at the start of a player action. A slow out on the first frames of an attack delays the moment the player sees a reaction. Fast, snappy starts with a slower settle at the end usually feel better in the hands.

7. Arcs

Concept: Living beings and many objects move in curved paths, not straight lines. Limbs rotate around joints, so they naturally create arcs.
Example: A swinging arm, a turning head and a thrown ball all follow arcs. Straight paths look robotic.
In games: Weapon swings read best on a clean, wide arc. Track the tip of the weapon in your 3D application and smooth any wobble in its path, since that arc is often what the player sees most clearly.

8. Secondary action

Concept: An extra action that supports the main action and adds personality.
Example: While walking, a character swings their arms, their hair bounces, or they nervously fiddle with their keys.
In games: Secondary action gives idles character, such as checking a weapon or rolling the shoulders. Keep it subtle in looping animations: a big gesture that repeats every few seconds quickly looks mechanical.

9. Timing

Concept: The number of frames an action takes, which sets its speed on screen. More frames, slower action; fewer frames, faster action.
Purpose: Controls mood, weight and realism. Timing decides whether an action feels heavy, light, urgent, lazy, comic or dramatic.
Example: A character reacting in surprise might snap into a pose in two or three frames, while a character sadly thinking might move very slowly.
In games: Timing is also gameplay. An attack is often split into wind-up, active frames (when it can hit) and recovery. Designers may ask for exact frame counts, so you learn to sell weight inside a fixed window, mainly through spacing and strong poses rather than extra frames.

10. Exaggeration

Concept: Pushing movements, poses and expressions beyond reality to increase impact and clarity, while staying believable within the style.
Purpose: Makes actions clearer and emphasises emotion or effort. It is less about making things bigger and more about making them convincing.
Example: A character straining to lift something heavy bends and contorts more than a real person would, to sell the effort.
In games: Characters are often seen small on screen, from behind, at gameplay distance. Subtle poses disappear, so even realistic games push key poses and hit reactions further than real life so they read.

11. Solid drawing

Concept: Making forms feel like they exist in three-dimensional space, with volume, weight and balance.
Example: In 3D this becomes solid posing. Avoid "twinning", where both sides of the body mirror each other and look unnatural, and keep the centre of gravity over the feet in a balanced pose.
In games: The player can often rotate the camera, so a pose has to work from every angle, not just one. Check your key poses from the front, side and above.

12. Appeal

Concept: Creating characters the audience enjoys watching. Appeal is not only cute or heroic: villains and monsters can have appeal through strong design and personality.
Example: Two characters with the same rig and the same walk: one walks with even, symmetrical steps; the other leads with the chest, swings the arms slightly out of sync and tilts the head on each step. The second has appeal. It comes from clear shapes, a strong silhouette and posing with personality.
In games: Players spend hours with a character's idle, run and jump. Moves that are clear, responsive and full of personality are a big part of why a character feels good to play.

Where to start

Do not try to learn all 12 at once. Start with timing and spacing on a bouncing ball: it has no rig to fight, and it teaches you to read the graph editor. Then add arcs, then overlap with a pendulum or a tail, and only then move on to a full character. Squash and stretch and slow in and slow out show up in the bouncing ball along the way; anticipation comes in once you animate a jump.

The mistakes beginners make most often: every part of the body moving at once with no overlap, even, floaty easing on every key, symmetrical "twinned" poses, and long anticipations that make game moves feel slow. Remember too that these are principles, not rigid rules. Learn them well enough to break them on purpose. For how they fit into the full 3D workflow, from blocking to polish, read our guide to what 3D animation is and how it works.

Start learning animation

If you are new to 3D altogether, start with the free Blender 3D Bootcamp: six live one-hour online sessions over three weeks, recorded, moving from Blender into Unreal Engine, with no experience needed. To practise the principles with structure, our online 3D animation course for beginners, 3D Animation Essentials, is a self-paced Blender course where the bouncing ball is your first animation assignment, with mentorship options that add 1:1 sessions with experienced industry artists. If you are ready to commit to games, the Certificate in 3D for Games is a 60-week online programme where Animation (in Maya) is one of four specialisations.