Character animation crash course

Attitude Poses
Attitude poses are those succinct drawings in your scene that convey what your character
is feeling while he's moving. If you can develop the ability to encapsulate an
expression or attitude in a single drawing, then you've already gone some distance
toward successfully communicating to your audience. By using strong attitudes,
you can animate into, out of, or around, them -thus making your animation more
dynamic and more readable. They also define who your characters are by the specific
way they are posed for their particular personalities. One of my favorite examples
of this is from Tex Avery's Little Rural Riding Hood. Upon entering the nightclub, City
Wolf walks in, nose high in the air, his concave back leading in a supple way down
the back of his smoothly dragging legs. His hand grips that of Country Wolf, a flailing
compendium of disjointed angles and frenetic movement that define him as .. . well,
an idiot. Classic stuff.
When you start working, imagine yourself as a comic strip artist: the great ones all
had the ability to express action and emotion in a single drawing. (Charles Schulz,
Walt Kelly, Bill Watterson, and Johnny Hart immediately spring to mind .)