The same person also a great article about Body Language in Animations. Hope it's useful to you.
STAGING
Two contrasting examples of staging...
- Buzz fills up a large part of the screen and the camera is placed at his feet and tilted up to make him dominate the scene.
- The toy soldiers occupy a very small part of the screen. Even when a soldier comes in close to the camera the scene is set up so that he takes up less than a quarter of the screen space. This scene was probably set up this way to show the magnitude of their task.
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ANTICIPATION
- The animators use an exaggerated anticipation even for the simple scene of woody lifting himself up from the bed
- Where Mr.Potatohead accuses woody, the anticipation is followed by a follow through in the camera movement
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FOLLOW-THROUGH
The follow-through is also exaggerated a lot in most scenes. The hands and head "drag" behind the body and take longer to settle down
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LINE OF ACTION
A curve can often be drawn through the characters pose. Carefully planning the line of action can make the scene more dramatic.This is similar to the characteristic curves that is often used while designing and modeling a character.
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ASSYMETRY
The animators make sure that the characters always strike a pose with some kind of asymmetry. Its more lifelike to have the character put its weight on one foot or to bend one arm a little more than the other.
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SQUASH AND STRETCH
There's a very subtle use of squash and stretch in "Toy Story". Squash and stretch is often seen in scenes where the toys land onto a surface. I couldn't find any squashing and stretching by means of scaling.
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SLOW IN / SLOW OUT
Careful manipulation of the animation curves can make the scene look believable
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ARCS
- The characters hands and head in particular always move around in arcs. There are no sharp movements
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EXAGGERATION
- A lot of woody's scenes are wildly exaggerated. The hands and the head are animated using a lot of secondary motion.
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TIMING
- I initially thought of classifying this scene under the title "appeal". But actually the beauty of this scene comes from timing. The sudden movements interrupted by graceful slow movements is what makes this scene appealing.
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WEIGHT
- Weight is conveyed mainly using timing. The use of sudden movements after the character has put in some effort gives it weight. The animators also make the characters shiver slightly to make it seem like they're puting in a lot of effort.
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DIALOG ANTICIPATION
- The characters anticipate dialog delivery by about 3 to 5 frames.
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DIALOG FOLLOW-THROUGH
- The characters follow-through with their dialog by holding the last expression for sometimes as much as 10 frames.
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MOVING HOLD
- This isn't exactly a moving hold but it makes use of the principle of "hitting the same pose, then drifting to an even stronger pose and so on". Woody "hits" four different variations of the same pose to make this scene dramatic.
- This is the more traditional moving hold where the character holds the same pose but keeps moving a little so that it doesn't look inorganic
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EYES LEADING
- Every head-turn in "Toy Story" is preceded by an eye movement in that direction. When the eye leads the head, the character blinks
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BLINKS
- Eyeblinks in "Toy Story" are almost always like this. The two eyes blink about a frame or two apart.
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BALANCE / CENTRE OF GRAVITY
- The centre of gravity of the character is always right above the foot planted on the ground. Complicated scenes are made believable by making use of convenient camera-angles.
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Well that's it for this subject. I hope you have found it as useful as I did. Feel free to bookmark this page and refer to it everytime you want to remind yourself of these principles; the pictures with Toy Story examples are great!
Soundtrack: Animal Collective
