If you ever leave the realm of hobby animation and become serious about animating as a career,
The Animator’s Survival Kit is the book I recommend.
When people ask me if there are any animation books they should read, this is the one I
say every time.
In light of that, I’m going to talk about what you can expect from the book so you can
figure out if it’s right for you.
The Animator’s Survival Kit is so famous that you should be able to borrow it from
your library.
I bought my copy used for $15 without the DVDs.
There are sixteen DVDs.
They contain Richard Williams’ animation master classes and they are hella expensive:
a thousand dollars.
Yep.
Education is not cheap.
But you can see useful clips from each DVD for free on the website.
Other than that I haven’t taken the class and can’t vouch for it, so let’s just
stick to the book for today.
The author Richard Williams is an animator who’s won a hoard of awards, and the movie
he’s done that you should be familiar with if you animate (and even if you don’t) is
Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
You’ll learn a lot more about Williams from The Animator’s Survival Kit, since the beginning
of the book is about his twisty life’s journey to becoming an animator, and it’s my favorite
part of the book.
But then I’ve always been a lady of stories.
One of the key points to take away from the first section is that it wasn’t until Richard
was forty that he started to animate well.
Forty.
Before that point he made many successful award-winning animations, and he did it without
being a god tier animator.
The other lesson here is that to animate well you must learn to draw from life.
Real people, places, things.
Classic and fine art and figure drawing.
If you learn how to draw, how to capture the expression of reality instead of just copying
what you see, you will leave other animators in the dust.
Especially those who do nothing but draw cartoons.
Learn.
To.
Draw.
The book transitions smoothly from an autobiography into the very basics of animation, timing
and spacing.
Easing.
How to make and read those little timing charts you might have noticed if you study a pro’s
work.
What all of the industry words like inbetween, key frame, breakdown, passing position, straight
ahead, pose to pose, x-sheet, la la la la.
If you’ve been trying to figure out what it all means, The Animator's Survival Kit
is the place to start.
Or to second I suppose, since you’re here and this whole time I’ve been slowly, episode
by episode, poisoning your tea with animation terminology.
I appreciate that all of the technical information in the book is peppered with the author’s
animation stories, tales of industry geniuses he’s talked with.
It’s MUCH more appealing than reading pure jargon.
The diagrams show how to do the thing.
The stories tell us why it is important.
I’ve also found that the book gets better the more experience you have.
So you can pick it up and read up to the page you get in over your head: probably around
page 100, and then come back in a few months and go, “Oh, I get it now,” and be able
to read further.
Don’t expect to read it all in one go and understand everything.
It’s going to take a bit.
The next big section of the book is all about walking, and on a higher level, characterizing
your animation.
Making it move in a way that tells you what the character’s mood is.
Breaking the rules, and bones, to make a motion believable.
That is followed by formulas for sneaking, running, jumping, and variations thereof.
A whole chapter on flexibility.
One way to do this is by choosing anything other than the perfect middle between extremes.
That’s just one of the tricks in this section.
There is not much text when you get to this part of the Animator’s Survival Kit.
The content is in diagrams, notes, and drawings, so there’s not much point in me talking
further since you’ll benefit more by sorting out what topics are most important to you.
The rest of the chapters cover weight, anticipation, effects, lip sync, acting, and even a few
pages on directing, though if you are aiming to direct you should look elsewhere since
the information here is only a teaser.
That’s it.
It’s all there.
Everything you need to know.
Now all you have to do is draw.