TABLE OF CONTENTS 
When animating you need look no further than the human figure for inspiration and challenge. If you can master the human figure in all its forms you can master anything.
In the first chapter we covered some of the basic principles of animation which we will be dealing with during this chapter on figurative animation. At this point it might be useful to place these into context before going further by looking at the nature of animation. I have broken animation down into four categories of movement in an attempt to understand animated movement more fully.
Acting
Animation
Action
Activity.
This hierarchical system describes the various levels of animation that can be achieved with the lowest at the bottom and the highest at the top. I have set out below an explanation of each of these categories, starting with the lowest, activity, and moving to the highest, acting.
This category simply describes the most basic form of movement we may witness and is the lowest form of animation. These movements are not associated with anything in nature at all and in this regard are completely abstract. An example of this would be of an image being at a particular point on the screen at any given moment and subsequently at another point on the screen the following moment. We can see examples of this in text rolling across a screen in a title sequence. Even though some...
