Character Animation

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What Does Character Animation Mean?

Character animation is generally defined as the art of making a particular character move in a two- or three-dimensional context. It is a process central to the concept of animation.

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Techopedia Explains Character Animation

The idea of character animation has evolved through various types of animation techniques.

Many associate early character animation with Walt Disney Studios, where cartoon artists created particular characters and presented them with particular traits and characteristics on screen. This requires combining a lot of technical drawing or animation with some top-level ideas about how the character moves, “thinks,” behaves and otherwise appears consistently on screen.

As primitive cartoon animation gave way to modern three-dimensional animation, character animation has evolved along with it. Today’s character animation involves elements like character rigging and the creation of object-oriented frameworks for creating character sequences. At the same time, processes like voice dubbing by celebrities and advanced character profiles are doing the conceptual work of building that character’s persona and background. One example is the early CGI Toy Story movies, where the careful creation of specialized on-screen characters has sold lots of merchandise and driven the films to legacy blockbuster status.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.