Exploring “The Illusion of Life” With Disney’s Nine Old Men

From Vincenzo Lodigiani, an Italian graphic artist and animation director working and living in New York, here’s a great little account of the 12 Principles of Animation from Disney’s Nine Old Men™^, ®^{, or} ©^{, pro’lly (or will be soon, if it’s not)}:

The 12 basic principles of animation were developed by the ‘old men’ of Walt Disney Studios, amongst them Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, during the 1930s. Of course they weren’t old men at the time, but young men who were at the forefront of exciting discoveries that were contributing to the development of a new art form. These principles came as a result of reflection about their practice and through Disney’s desire to use animation to express character and personality. This movie is my personal take on those principles, applied to simple shapes. Like a cube.

BONUS: A Tumblr of gifs from this video, courtesy of Lodigiani himself.

BONUS II: A blog post from Hulu illustrating these same principles with images from my beloved Secret of Kells.

Attribution(s): Artwork, publicity images, and stills are the property of Vincenzo Lodigiani, who made this work available via a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.