Introduction

This is an acting book – but with a difference. In my first Routledge book, Acting for Animators (revised third edition, 2011), I presented all the finite acting techniques necessary for animating a strong performance – that scenes begin in the middle, that emotion tends to lead to physical action, the urgency of having your character pursue a provable objective, the purpose of obstacle-conflict in a scene and so on. All of that is indeed essential knowledge, but it is also true that acting is not a craft that exists in isolation. An animator cannot simply master a bag of acting tricks. It is not enough to get the timing right and to make the characters appear to move naturally. Acting is, at root, an affair of the heart, and it has everything in the world to do with story; if the story is sketchy and the characters are underdeveloped, even the most talented character animator cannot fix it.