Disney Animation Rules for Procedural Animation

Design motion for readable intent, weight, rhythm, and personality. Treat physical simulation and interpolation as inputs, not as the final animation.

Do not force all 12 principles into every shot. Select the smallest set that fixes the perceptual problem.

Workflow

1. Inspect the scene, code, inputs, renderer, and project constraints before changing motion.
2. State the action in one sentence: subject, intention, force, destination, and desired feeling.
3. Identify the primary action and rank all secondary actions beneath it.
4. Block semantic phases and event poses before selecting easing curves.
5. Select relevant principles from references/twelve-principles.md.
6. Define one deterministic state evaluator from frame or time plus explicit inputs.
7. Derive deformation, overlap, accents, and effects from primary motion or semantic events.
8. Tune timing and spacing at representative frames, then review the full motion.
9. Remove effects that hide weak posing, unclear timing, broken contacts, or poor silhouettes.

For detailed engineering patterns, read references/implementation-patterns.md. For the motivating jump comparison, read references/clawd-jump-case-study.md.

Block the Action

Define event poses such as:

• Rest or setup
• Anticipation
• Commitment or launch
• Passing pose
• Apex, hold, or decision point
• Contact or impact
• Overshoot
• Settle or recovery

Adapt the vocabulary to the action. A button press may use rest, press, contact, overshoot, and settle. A camera move may use establish, accelerate, reveal, brake, and settle.

For each phase, specify:

• Duration or duration ratio
• Position and path
• Velocity at each boundary
• Scale, rotation, and pivot
• Contact constraints
• Silhouette or readability goal
• Secondary-action lag
• Optional accent such as smear, blink, particles, or camera shake

Prefer a phase table or explicit constants over one opaque easing expression.