Communicate before you draw

      Life is animation but....animation isn’t real, right? If animation were real it would be live action. Yet animation is real. Animation is life in the sense that it is based on realism and emotion in real life. This is what I have learned about animation. The real life aspect of animation comes from the communication to the audience of real life attitudes and situations. An animated sequence, film, or series does not take so long to complete to get the drawing right rather it is to get the communication right. 

      To get the right communication so many factors I had no idea about have to be put into consideration. To be a good animator one does not necessarily have to be the best drawer or know how to work the software. Walt Disney had animators animate his films for him but he understood how to capitative an audience, tell a story, and present “real” characters. 

      Animated characters become real to the audience because they can relate to the character and situation they are in. Their expressions evoke emotion that one can relate to or makes one feel a certain way toward a character. One feels emotion toward an animated character as if they were a real person. A fish can not talk in real life yet the audience feels bad for Nemo in Finding Nemo. He is a young fish who is lost and separated from his father. The real life aspect of family and family values is communicated to the audience throughout this movie. Thus turning Nemo into something real. 

In the following clip in another part of Finding Nemo family is seen through sea turtles:

In the clip Nemo’s father is with a sea turtle and his son. His son just swam back into current by himself. This scene shows family again and communicates it to the audience through the little turtle’s actions. Coming back to his dad saying “did u see that, did u see me, did u see what I did” is a very relatable situation. It is a familiar situation to the audience. Whenever a child, boy or girl, does something on their own they want their parents to see it and they want them to know they did it. For example like riding a bike for the first time.

      Animation is not successful unless it communicates something. Then it is reduced to a mere drawing. To give that drawing life, aspects of real life must be added. It is not about whether a character exists in real life. It is about how to make a character exist in the minds of the audience by giving that character a mind of its own. The mind of the character communicates to the mind of the audience.