Animation - Principles 1 - 3: Squash/Stretch, Anticipation and Staging

Squashing and stretching: Having something you're animating squash or stretch isn't just a nice way of creating fluid motions between poses, it's a nice way of conveying the weight/ mass of the entity as well as what it's made of. An example of this is how a rubber ball squashes a lot more than a ball made of metal which, due to its mass, would bounce and squash less (if at all).

Anticipation: Adding a few frames beforehand gives the viewer time to react to a more powerful action. This keeps punches and kicks (some common examples) from looking stiff and artificial. Another example from old cartoons is how before a character breaks into a sprint, they either run on the spot or strike a pose beforehand to emphasize how their next action is going to be rather extreme.

Staging: Similar to how a theatre performance is staged, the point of staging is to aid audiences between the points of interest to keep them engaged and allow them to understand what’s going on. To have several animations trying to capture the audience’s attention all playing at once, causing them to frantically switch between focal elements, is considered poor staging.