"The place is surrounded by anime."

This is an idea I had for some time for an animation. It's based on a monty phyton sketch. IF you got the TV series on DVD it comes after the "Blackmail" sketch in series 2.

In a working class-like gentlemen's club, one of the club member's goes outside for a smoke. He's originally drawn in a western cartoon style. When he's outside he appears drawn in an anime-style.

Obama fly camera

What if the fly that US president Obama swatted was, in fact, a disguised camera and microphone sent by an alien news network to get a quick interview with the Earth president.

The animation can start off with an alien news precenter behind a desk announcing (in a mix-up language) the network's first ever interview with the president of rising planet known by the inhabitants as "earth". We cut to a fly-eye's view of the scene before been cut off by Obama's hand.
Cut to real-life newsclip.

Appeal

Appeal is a visual quality that gives an animated creation another demension of realism and attracts the viewer's eyes, making them watch. Just like in a live action performance, an animated character or prop must be "attractive" and able to pass off as "real" to the audenice. What I mean by "real" is real for the animated world it inhabits. For that, the world its in has to appear real, and for that to happen that world has to be appealling to the viewer. If that world is attractive and appealing, the viewer can engage with it, and through that, the animated world seems real to the viewer.
How that is achived by individual artists and animators is what gives the animations they make their individual appeal to certian audenices, for example animations made for young children feature bright colours and cute-looking-child-like characters.

Another way of saying this is to describe appeal is to call it a character's "X-factor". If a character has got the "x-factor" then the audenice will watch the show.

secondary action

To make a primary action of character more life-like, support it by adding secondary actions to the character. These are actions that are usually unnoticable, but without them, the action doesn't look convincing.

For example, when a character is walking, he or she is usually also swinging their arms and doing a facial expression or something verbal (like talking or whistling).

The point of such actions is to empihize the main action that the character is doing. If a secondary action conflicts or becomes more interesting than the main action, then the animation fails.

Facial expressions are generally considered secondary actions, so its best to show changes in expression when a character is stationary or before or after a character moves (not during the movement, otherwise the viewer won't notice the change).

Exaggeration

Tracing an action from live action frame by frame can produce accurate results, but it can make an action appear unnatural in drawn form. Sometimes, an animator has to exaggerate things to make an action look more natural. The degrees of exaggeration mainly depends on the artist's style or taste (does he/she want the animation to be as realistic as possible?).

Exaggeration can be used to empihize an action or an expression, for example, when a character reacts to something.

This is a link to a 1919 Ko-Ko the Clown film "The Tantalizing Fly". In this film, the character was mostly rotoscoped (traced from a live-action film).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-K67eHDKpc&feature=related

This is a link to a later KoKo the Clown film which wasn't rotoscoped (exaggeration was used widely).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlaTYay-vx0&feature=related

Arcs

In nature, objects tend to move in arcs or some form of circular motion.

Its well observed when an object is thrown in the air and falls to the ground. The force of the throw makes the object travel forward, while gravity pulls it down to the ground, making it follow an arc.

The only exception to this is when an heavy object is dropped. It hits the ground in a stright path.

In living organisms, body parts; such as arms, legs, eyes, heads, tails, etc; operate in circular motions.
The drawing below demostrates this fact in the human arm.

Only mechanical devices operate in stright lines.

Slow In and Slow Out

In reallife, a moving object doesn't instantly move from stationary or stop instantly after travelling at speed. For a stationary object to move, a force is required to overcome the force of friction and gravity that is holding it stationary, and that takes a bit of time. To stop a moving object, a force must act against it opposite the direction its going, like stationary object object or friction, and that also takes a bit of time.

For example, a car doesn't go 0-60 in a instant, it takes a bit of time to build up momentum to reach high speed. This is easily seen in the following video of a drag race.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdxo8zmVak0

Here's a simple Flash animation showing this principle.

In the screen shot below, you'll see that in the inital frames of the movie, the sucessive images of the car are very close together, simulating the inital build up of momentum. In the later frames, the sucessive images of the car are far apart, simulating the burst of speed.

The principle is also applied to objects slowing down to a stop. Here's a Flash animation of a car stopping naturally.

As seen in the screenshot below, the sucessive images of the car get closer together near the end of the moive, creating the illusion of slowing down.

Sometimes, this principle is ignored for comedic effect. The most famous example of this is when Road Runner stops instantly.