Acting and Flash Animation 1

"An animator is an actor with a pencil", goes the oldest and truest Flash Animations cliché. Not "a draftsman that acts", but first and foremost - an actor. If you're trying to tell a story through a character, inevitably you're an actor. The only question is whether you are a good actor or a bad one.

My feeling is that in the past few years, while there's been great progress technology-wise, the art of acting in animation has been abandoned. Compared with the acting quality of characters such as Shere-Khan (The Jungle Book), Captain Hook (Peter Pan) and others, today's characters are pale, dull, and lack personality. In better cases, an exceptionally interesting voice-talent saves the day (Robin Williams as the genie in Aladdin); but usually the script alone is responsible for providing the characters with some sort of personality.

In the various internet forums one can find threads concerning software, Design Tutorials, textures - some even talk about movement - but it's rare to read something about acting. I haven't yet seen a comment saying something like "the animation is good, but the character has no personality". It seems that the level of expectations is so low, that it's enough for an animator not to make technical errors. Would you consider praising a writer simply because he made no spelling mistakes?

In the following article I have put on paper my thoughts considering acting in animation, which apply to any form of character animation - including 3D. The article is not meant to provide a "good acting in animation" formula - simply because such a formula does not exist. Every animator has his personal attitude, every film has needs of its own, and undoubtedly there are other ways of getting good acting. The goal is to propose a "toolbox" for the actor/animator, and maybe raise - even a little - the animators' awareness of acting in Flash Animations.

What is good acting?

When I ask my students what they think good acting is, the first answer is usually "believable acting". But credibility is only one side of the story. Good acting is believable and interesting. In my opinion, these two attributes wholly define good acting. With this idea as an axiom, we will try to separately analyze what makes acting believable, and what makes it interesting.

I. Believable acting

In the life of an animator there are short and rare moments of true magic. Those moments are the reason I became an animator, and they are the reason I still am one. I'm talking about a moment in which you look at the animation you've just created, and suddenly you believe your own character. Suddenly it's alive, it's there in its own right. Those are the moments of believable acting.

Believable acting holds a great power over the viewers, because the character they're watching gets a sort of meaning. Every man has meaning to us - even if we don't always think about it: If a total stranger sitting next to you on the bus suddenly collapses, you will not be indifferent - because the very fact that he is a flash and blood human earns him that meaning. This is why we feel sorry when Bambi's mother dies: we believe her and we believe Bambi, and both of them mean something to us. On the other hand, the characters in South Park are anything but believable, which is why there's no problem killing Kenny in each chapter.

Believable acting means that the audience feels that the character's actions are the result of its own inner motives, and not the Flash Animations inner motives; that the character feels, thinks and reacts consistently according to its personality and mood. I emphasized the last sentence since it encapsulates many of the ingredients of convincing acting: