Hey.
You.
Yeah, you.
I've got a big shock in store for you.
Ready?
Okay.
Animation is all about cheating. Yes, you read that right, and I'll type it again to inflate my wordcount and feel important about myself:
Animation is all about cheating. It's about cheating the human eye. It's about creating the illusion of life, movement, and depth. It's not about actually making things live! Of course it's not, otherwise animators would rule the world and I'd have a pet spider-dragon-snake-chicken. But, alas, no, animators cannot breathe actual life into things. It's all about lies and deceit. Which is why it's so important to understand that - since its inception - animation is all about
cheating, and cheating
successfully.
See, it's a common misconception that there's a "right" or "wrong" way to do - say - 2D animation (let's focus on that, as if we expanded discussion to every form of animation out there, we'd be around until the Second Coming, wouldn't we?). The misconception is that you
must draw every single frame from scratch, you
must use keyframes filled to the brim with in-betweens, you
must have a team of tweeners, colorists, inkers, etc to do your bidding. You
must not cheat, you
must not take shortcuts, lest your product look subpar.
This is a lie! A filthy, filthy lie!
See, since animation is about cheating in the first place, I pose the argument that
it doesn't matter how you cheat the human eye, so long as you do it well enough to trick it. Keep that suspension of disbelief going, and it doesn't matter if you painstakingly hand-drew every frame, or if you used a series of warping techniques to give the illusion fo movement. As long as your audience is immersed, it doesn't matter
how you achieve that end goal.
I've said in the past that I hate anime. Well, I've since reconsidered my stance. It'd be more accurate to say: I dislike the techniques used in Anime, not because they aren't believable (...usually, assuming we don't count the tried and true "two characters talking in one pose for half a minute" situation), it's just that their chosen
style gets to me, and - too frequently - my immersion is broken when I
see how they cheat. If they were repeating backgrounds, holding on keyframes, mouth-flapping, etc., and I didn't notice it, then I'd be fine with it simply because I was tricked and didn't lose immersion in the first place. It's when my brain
notices the tricks that the magic is ruined, so to speak.
Heck, everyone - from Disney to random YouTubers - uses
walk cycles in their animations! Walk cycles - the oldest cheat in the book! And why is that?
Because it doesn't actually matter. It's okay to not re-draw every single step in a shot, as long as the audience buys the fact that a character is walking. Same goes for blinking with the background characters: generally speaking, you'll have one or two characters blink or fidget in a crowd scene, sprinkled throughout the shots, and you'll remain immersed in the scene. But look again! What's that you see? They're
blinking and fidgeting the same way every time. Because it doesn't actually matter. Because cheating is okay at times.
It's not about whether you're cheating the human eye or not.
It's about
cheating well.
