ABSTRACT
The acting principles this chapter discusses are essential and inflexible. The animation art form has reached such a lofty plateau, and audiences are so much more cinematically sophisticated than they were in Walt Disney's day, it is obviously time for animators to pull alongside live-action films when it comes to performance. The only reason there are actors at all is because the tribe responds to mimesis. The important things in acting are intention, objectives, motivation and emotion. In other words, acting is more about what is underneath the words. Stanislavsky taught that characters have actual rhythms—slow, medium and fast. The study of psychological gesture is typically included in strong acting training programs. The ability to animate is akin to the ability to act. An animator must pay close attention to the actual physical movement involved in a character's gesture.
