Moho Animation Forum

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I can recommend only three books:
Preston Blair: Cartoon Animation.
This is the standard book containing everything you need to know for drawing "cartoony" animation much like in the Golden Age. Covers all the basics of drawn animation. You can get most of its contents online at the Animation Archive http://www.animationarchive.org/.

Richard Williams: Animator's Survival Kit.
This is the next step in drawing animation on a very professional level.

Maureen Furniss: Art in Motion - Animation Aesthetics.
This is the only book I know which asks all the important questions in making an animated film. It doesn't give you any tips about drawing, timing, or pressing the right buttons of your software. But it covers the whole field of "artistic decisions" as I call them: style, technique, target audience, and so on. It is quite academic, but I like it.

Nice to have:
Frank Thomas/Ollie Johnston: The Illusion of Life.
The history of handdrawn animation technique told by example of Disney. Lots of stories, many useful tips, much great artwork, but restricted to Disney.

Jerry Beck (Ed.): Animation Art.
An overview about 100 years of animation worldwide, with lots of pictures to inspire you.

Overall the theory of animation is still an unknown land. There's lots of technical advice, some even useful, but most of it hidden in software manuals or animation history books. There's a lot of discussion about drawing style, but only a few sources talk about styles of animation in deep. One of those rare sources is John Krikfalusi's blog. You don't have to share any of his opinions or read all of his rants, but if he discusses technical stuff, like background painting (with Art Lozzi!) or where to apply which kind of line in clean-up, he's unsurpassed in accuracy.

Unfortunately all those useful snippets of wisdom are splattered over the net, and no book exists which collects them all.

For only one book I'd get Richard Williams'. It's the one book no animator should be without.

As ST hints at, there's no particular one book that has it all, but the Williams' book contains so many indispensable pieces of information that aren't duplicated elsewhere you'd be foolish not to have it.

Richard Williams: Animator's Survival Kit.

Is the one book that you will find in almost every animation studio in the world - those that are serious that is.

There's also The Animators Workbook by Tony White - it was published a good few years before RW's book and also has a good, solid bases for animation. Tony has also updated it with digital animation.

GK

theres also a set of 16 dvd of the course material of Richard Williams: around 900€, but it is as good as the book, if not better
you can really learn some old school stuff from it, i dont know if the dvd is out yet, but the book you can get from amazon.

http://www.theanimatorssurvivalkit.com/volumes_1_4.html

Yea!

My wife got me Richard Williams Survival Kit
for Christmas, and Preston Blair!

Preston Blair's and Richard Williams' are must-haves for any animator.

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Today I happened to stumble across another book by Maureen Furniss:
The Animation Bible: A Practical Guide to the Art of Animating from Flipbooks to Flash. It's a more hands-on approach to nearly every possible animation technique, with lots of examples from actual films.

ST,

Can you elaborate a little on who might benefit from it?

Not that I mind buying more books, but other than Williams' (and some of Blair's) most animation books I come across nowadays just aren't worth the buy -- they either cover the obvious or talk about theory.

As the other book by her, this covers all possible animation techniques. It is not an introduction to Flash nor a manual to any other software, nor does it contain all the nifty little tricks like Williams, or teach you how to draw.

I've noticed that quite a lot of "animators" never leave their little box (most often the one box their only piece of animation software came in). And I'm really fed up with questions like "how i make background like anime in AS". People need to train their imagination, need to get more inventive, have an idea first - IMO. Maureen's books are great to see how large that area is which we call animation - and to realize how small the spot is we really work in.

Of course, if people are not interested in widening their horizon, they just as well stick to "cartoon animation" - it can be a comfortable little ghetto, and some are actually getting really good at it.

Hello all

Of course the Preston Blair series which brought me into the wonderfull world of animation sooo many years ago, but the best, for me at least, The illusion Of Life, from Disney, best I've seen for the Disney type of animation and also animator survival kit.

I think you'll see that most of those come on and over most of the time!

GC

Anything Preston Blair and the Survival kit for animation are must haves....then for character drawing and design Christopher Hart.

Cheers
D.K

I just was asked by a professional dog trainer which books she should to take to a new customer who's dog she didn't know. My answer:
You just need 3 books. 1 small enough to throw, 1 large and handy to spank with, and 1 very thick to chew on.

I think this answer applies to animation as well. I don't know which dog you want to train, i.e. which animation style you like to work in. Williams and Blair are very good but limited to their style, but a good artist should be able to transfer the principles to whatever style he's working in.