The 12 Principles of Animation — And Why Every Voice Actor and Puppeteer Needs to Know Them
Before We Talk About the Principles — Let's Talk About the Word Itself
To animate.
We use it constantly in this industry. Animation. Animated. Animator. But do you know what it actually MEANS?
The Latin verb animare — from which every single one of those words descends — means:
"To give breath to. To endow with a particular spirit. To enliven."
From anima. Latin for soul. Breath. Life itself.
The same root that gives us animal — a living creature that breathes and moves. The opposite of inanimate — literally "without soul."
And here's the part that should stop every voice actor and puppeteer reading this cold:
Animare does not mean "to draw." It does not mean "to render in a computer." It does not mean "to create moving images on a screen."
It means to breathe life into something.
Which means — if we're being etymologically precise about this — when a voice actor steps behind a microphone and gives genuine emotional truth to an animated character... they are doing EXACTLY what the word says. Giving breath. Giving soul. Giving life.
And when a puppeteer lifts a puppet and makes it move with intention, weight, and personality... they are animating it. Literally. In the purest, most original sense of the word.
The animator gives the character movement and form. The voice actor gives it breath and soul. The puppeteer gives it both simultaneously, in real time, with their own body.
We are not SUPPORTING animation.
We ARE animation.
All of us — animators, voice actors, puppeteers — are doing the same ancient, profound, slightly ridiculous, completely essential thing:
Breathing life into something that didn't have any before we arrived.
That is what it means to animate.
Now — let's talk about how to do it brilliantly.
Let me introduce you to two people you need to know.
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston — two of Walt Disney's legendary "Nine Old Men," the core group of animators who built Disney's golden age from the inside. Between them, they personally animated some of the most beloved characters in cinema history — Pinocchio, Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and more.
In 1981, they published The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation — a book that laid out 12 fundamental principles of animation developed at Disney since the 1930s, in their quest to produce more realistic animation. It has since been called the "Bible of Animation." In 1999, it was voted the best animation book of all time in an online poll by Animation World Network.
Here's the thing I want every voice actor and puppeteer reading this to understand right now:
These principles are not just for animators.
We are all part of the same machine — bringing animated stories to life from different positions in the process. The animator creates the movement. The voice actor creates the sound and soul. The puppeteer creates both simultaneously, in real time.
The better you understand how animated characters MOVE — the better your performance will be in service of that movement. The more competitive your reads. The more alive your characters.
Puppeteers — I'm looking at you specifically. These principles apply directly to how you move a puppet character. Take notes accordingly.
Let's go through all twelve.
1. Squash and Stretch
The cornerstone technique of animation — squash and stretch involves stretching and compressing a character's shape to create the illusion of weight and volume, making movements realistic and believable. Academy of Animated Art
For voice actors: Your voice does this too. A character landing from a jump — the vocal energy SQUASHES at impact, then STRETCHES as they recover. A character stretching to reach something — the voice elongates. A character hit by something — there's a compressed punch in the sound.
For puppeteers: This is your most physical principle. The squash of a landing, the stretch of a reaching arm — these must be in your puppet's body AND in your voice simultaneously. Practice them as one unified physical action.
2. Anticipation
Anticipation prepares the audience for an action about to happen — imagine a character jumping without bending the knees first. The movement is unrealistic because one cannot jump without moving the joints. New York Film Academy
For voice actors: Anticipation lives in the breath before the line. In the tiny beat before a character reacts. In the intake of air before excitement, or the slight pause before fear. Anticipation IS the phrasing — and we've talked a lot on this blog about phrasing as the foundation of emotional delivery. This is where those two things meet.
For puppeteers: Before ANY movement, there is a wind-up — even a tiny one. A character doesn't just turn their head. They prepare to turn their head. Build that preparation into every puppet movement and it immediately reads as alive.
3. Staging
Staging is the presentation of any idea so that it is completely and unmistakably clear — whether that idea is an action, a personality, an expression, or a mood. It is about directing the audience's attention and making clear what is of greatest importance in a scene. New York Film Academy
For voice actors: Staging in your performance is clarity. Is the most important word in your line landing with the right emphasis? Is the emotional direction of the scene completely clear from your read? Don't make the audience work to find what matters. Serve the story. Stage the moment.
For puppeteers: Where is the audience looking? Is your puppet pointed toward what's important? Even a tiny turn of the head stages the scene. Precision in staging is the difference between a puppet that guides the eye and one that confuses it.
4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
Straight ahead action involves illustrating each frame of an action one after another — spontaneous, fresh, surprising. Pose to pose starts with the extremes at the beginning and end of the action, then fills in the frames between — giving more control, allowing you to see where the character is going early, setting timing precisely. A good animator masters both techniques. Open Culture
For voice actors: Sound familiar? Straight Ahead is improv — alive, spontaneous, discovering thoughts in the moment. Pose to Pose is a planned performance — hitting the specific emotional beats the director needs. We've talked about improv as a foundational tool — and this is WHY. You need BOTH approaches available to you. Know when to discover and know when to deliver exactly what's mapped.
For puppeteers: You usually don't get to plan frame by frame. Live puppetry is almost always Straight Ahead — which is precisely why improv training is essential, and why knowing your character's emotional extremes in advance gives you the Pose to Pose anchor points to return to.
5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
Secondary action refers to the gesture that supports the main action — adding depth and dimension to the character, providing personality and insight. It should never distract nor dominate the scene. Follow through is what happens AFTER the main action — parts of a character continuing to move even when the main body has stopped. Open Culture
For voice actors: When a character lands a big emotional moment — the voice doesn't stop there. There's a follow through. A breath after the line that carries the emotional weight forward. The performance continues even when the words end.
For puppeteers: Nothing in a puppet stops completely at the same time. If the head stops moving, the ears keep swinging. If the body settles, the arms arrive a beat later. This is the principle that makes puppets feel heavy and alive instead of stiff and mechanical.
6. Slow In and Slow Out
The movement of objects in the real world needs time to accelerate and slow down. More pictures are drawn near the beginning and end of an action, creating a slow in and slow out effect to achieve more realistic movements. New York Film Academy
For voice actors: Characters don't arrive at full emotional speed instantly. There is an acceleration into feeling and a deceleration out of it. Anger that erupts at full volume from word one reads as performed. Anger that builds — that starts slightly elevated and ESCALATES — reads as real. Slow in. Slow out.
For puppeteers: Every puppet movement has an ease-in and an ease-out. A head turn starts slow, accelerates through the middle, and slows to a stop at its destination. Without this, puppets look mechanical. With it, they look alive.
7. Secondary Action
A complementary gesture or movement that supports and adds dimension to the primary action — but never overshadows it.
For voice actors: While your character says the main line, what else is happening emotionally underneath? What is the secondary thought running alongside the primary communication? This is the inner dialogue we discussed in The Two Conversations — the secondary action of the performance that makes the primary action richer.
For puppeteers: While the mouth is speaking, what are the hands doing? What is the body doing? Secondary action is what separates a puppeteer who can work a mouth from a puppeteer who creates a fully inhabited character.
8. Timing
How many frames an action takes — directly controlling the character's perceived personality, weight, and mood.
For voice actors: Timing IS the read. A joke lands or doesn't land in a frame. A moment of grief earns its weight or doesn't based entirely on how much time you give it. Timing is why some voice actors can do exactly what another voice actor does and have it feel completely different. This is the principle closest to pure craft — and it's why coaching matters, because timing is almost impossible to self-assess.
For puppeteers: The weight of your puppet is entirely in the timing. A heavy character moves slowly. A light, energetic character moves fast. The emotional content of a scene changes completely based on timing alone — before a single word is spoken.
9. Exaggeration
Not distorting reality completely — but finding a HEIGHTENED version of truth that feels MORE real than reality.
For voice actors: We've talked about this in No Hesitation in Animation — the commitment required to play big animated moments. Exaggeration doesn't mean yelling or going over the top. It means finding the heightened emotional truth of the character and committing to it FULLY. Half-committed exaggeration is worse than no exaggeration at all.
For puppeteers: A puppet's emotions must be larger than a human's to read from a distance. The tilt of a head that conveys curiosity in a human must be significantly MORE pronounced in a puppet to communicate the same thing. Exaggeration is not optional — it's the medium's language.
10. Arc
Most natural action tends to follow an arched trajectory. Animation should adhere to this principle for greater realism — applied to a moving limb by rotating a joint, or a thrown object moving along a parabolic trajectory. Open Culture
For voice actors: Voice arcs are pitch. The way your vocal energy curves through a sentence, a phrase, a word — arcs are the musical shape of the delivery. No arc means flat, robotic, mechanical speech. Natural arcs mean natural, human, believable communication. This is phrasing again, seen through an animator's lens.
For puppeteers: Nothing in nature moves in a straight line. A hand reaching for something curves through the air. A head turning follows a slight arc. Straight-line puppet movement looks wrong to the eye even when the audience can't articulate why. Curve everything.
11. Solid Drawing
The animator needs to be a skilled artist who understands the basics of three-dimensional shapes, anatomy, weight, balance, light and shadow. Johnston and Thomas warned particularly against creating "twins" — characters whose left and right sides mirrored each other, appearing lifeless and dull. New York Film Academy
For voice actors: Your "solid drawing" is your CHARACTER SPECIFICITY. A character built on a solid foundation — a real psychological backstory, specific motivations, genuine emotional architecture — will never be a "twin." Generic, underdeveloped characters are the vocal equivalent of twins. Build solid characters. No mirroring. No stock performances. We covered this extensively in Voice Acting Is NOT About Your Voice.
For puppeteers: Know your puppet's body completely — its weight distribution, its range of motion, its limitations and its strengths. A puppeteer who knows their puppet as intimately as an artist knows their drawing surface will find the character faster and hold it longer.
12. Appeal
Appeal in a cartoon character corresponds to what would be called charisma in an actor. A character who is appealing is not necessarily sympathetic — villains and monsters can also be appealing. New York Film Academy
For voice actors: Appeal is YOUR point of view. It's the specific quality of your performance that makes the listener want to stay with this character — whether they love them or love to hate them. We talked about this in our Villain post — even the most terrifying antagonist needs appeal, or there's nothing to watch. Appeal is not likability. It's watchability. It's listenable-to-ability. And it comes directly from the authenticity and specificity of your performance.
For puppeteers: Every character choice you make in design, movement, and voice contributes to appeal. A puppet that has a clear, specific, committed personality — even an unpleasant one — is more appealing than one that is vague and undefined. Commit to the character. The appeal follows.
The Machine We're All Part Of
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston spent decades inside Disney's animation studio learning these principles from the ground up — frame by frame, pencil by pencil, film by film. Before computer graphics and special effects, the magic of animation flowed from their pencils.
The magic STILL flows — from animators, from voice actors, from puppeteers, from directors, from composers, from every creative person contributing to bringing an animated story to life.
The better you understand the principles driving the visuals — the better your performance serves them.
We are all part of the same machine.
Study the whole machine. 🎙️
Want to Go Deeper on Animation Performance?
Character work, timing, exaggeration, specificity, appeal — these are exactly the things we dig into in animation-focused coaching sessions. If you're ready to bring all twelve of these principles into your voice work...
