Step into the golden age of animation and meet 'The Nine Old Men,' the core group of animators who shaped the Disney style. This story explores their development of the 12 basic principles of animation, from 'squash and stretch' to 'anticipation.' Discover how their collaborative genius and artistic discipline turned animation from a novelty into a powerful art form, culminating in masterpieces like 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.'
Walt Disney had a particular sense of humor, dry and affectionate in equal measure. In the 1970s, when his core group of master animators were still working at the studio—men who had been with him since the experimental days of the 1930s—he started calling them "the Nine Old Men." The reference was political, a wink at Franklin Roosevelt's Supreme Court, which conservatives had dubbed "the nine old men" during the New Deal era. But Disney's version carried no criticism. These were his trusted veterans, the artists who had transformed his vision of animation from flickering novelty into something that could make audiences weep. The name caught on, and it stuck even after Walt's death. Les Clark, Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Frank Thomas—these nine animators became synonymous with the Disney style itself. They weren't the only talented artists at the studio, not by far. But they formed the creative nucleus, the group that developed, refined, and codified the principles that would govern character animation for generations. What's remarkable is that they didn't arrive at the studio as masters. Most joined Disney in the early 1930s as young men, some barely out of their teens, stepping into a medium that was still finding its vocabulary. Animation was crude then—rubbery characters bouncing through gag sequences, movement without weight or consequence. The Nine Old Men, working alongside Walt and dozens of other artists, would spend the next decade solving problems that no one had quite articulated yet. How do you make a drawing feel like it has mass? How do you convey thought before action? How do you create the illusion not just of movement, but of life? Their answers became the twelve basic principles of animation, a framework so fundamental that it's still taught in every animation school today, whether students are working with pencils or pixels.
Before we dive into the principles themselves, it helps to understand the problem these animators faced. In the early 1930s, animation was wildly popular but artistically limited. Mickey Mouse cartoons packed theaters, but they were essentially moving comic strips—flat, energetic, concerned more with gags than with character. This worked fine for seven-minute shorts, but Walt Disney had grander ambitions. He wanted to make a feature-length animated film. Not just a compilation of shorts, but a real movie with stakes, emotion, and characters the audience would care about. His staff thought he was insane. The industry dubbed his secret project "Disney's Folly." How could audiences sit still for seventy minutes of cartoons? More importantly, how could cartoon characters sustain that kind of emotional investment? The technical problem was believability. Not realism, exactly—Disney never wanted his characters to look photographic—but believability in the sense that audiences would accept them as living beings with thoughts, feelings, and physical presence. A character who simply slides from point A to point B doesn't convince us of anything. But a character who leans into a run, whose cheeks ripple with impact, whose eyes widen a split second before jumping—that character starts to feel real. The Disney animators began studying everything. They brought in art instructors to teach drawing fundamentals. They filmed live-action reference footage of actors and athletes, studying the mechanics of human movement frame by frame. They screened films obsessively, analyzing how great actors conveyed emotion and how directors staged action. Ward Kimball kept a full skeleton in his office. They drew and drew and drew, filling sketchbooks with studies of weight, balance, timing, and expression. Out of this intensive period of experimentation and analysis, patterns emerged. Certain techniques consistently made animation more convincing, more alive. These techniques were eventually formalized into principles—not rules exactly, but essential concepts that animators could apply and combine to achieve their effects. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of the Nine Old Men who became particularly close collaborators and friends, would eventually write these principles down in their 1981 book "The Illusion of Life," creating the definitive text on classical Disney animation.
The first and most fundamental principle is squash and stretch. Imagine a rubber ball dropping to the ground. As it falls, it elongates slightly—this is stretch. When it hits the ground, it compresses—this is squash. Then it springs back up, stretching again as it rises. This distortion feels right to us because it mimics how flexible objects behave in the real world, even exaggerating those properties slightly. Now apply this to a character. When a character jumps, their body stretches in the air, conveying speed and the extension of effort. When they land, their body squashes, absorbing the impact. These distortions happen too quickly for us to consciously register, but we feel them. They give the character weight and flexibility. Without squash and stretch, animated characters move like stiff paper cutouts. With it, they become flesh and bone—or at least the cartoon version of it. The crucial insight is that squash and stretch isn't about realism; it's about perception. Real human bodies don't compress and elongate nearly as much as animated characters do. But our perception of movement includes motion blur and the psychological impression of force and energy. Squash and stretch translates these perceptions into clear, readable drawings. The Disney animators discovered they could push squash and stretch to wildly different degrees depending on the character and situation. A character made of something bouncy and elastic, like Goofy, could squash and stretch dramatically, almost absurdly. More solid or dignified characters, like Snow White herself, used subtler applications—a slight compression in the legs when landing, a gentle elongation in a reaching arm. The principle scaled to fit the need. But there's a critical rule: maintain volume. When a character squashes down, they should widen proportionally. When they stretch up, they should narrow. If you simply shrink a character down or pull them tall without adjusting their other dimensions, they seem to be inflating or deflating rather than moving with physical consistency. This attention to volume preservation helps maintain the illusion that we're watching something with physical presence, not just arbitrary shape-shifting.
Watch someone throw a ball. Before their arm whips forward, it draws back. Before a dancer leaps, they crouch. Before a character's eyes widen in shock, they might briefly narrow. This is anticipation—the movement that prepares for the main action. Anticipation serves two crucial functions. First, it's physically truthful. Nearly all significant actions require some preparation, some gathering of energy or shift of weight. Second, and perhaps more importantly for animation, anticipation directs the audience's attention. It says: something is about to happen, watch this spot. The Disney animators realized that without anticipation, actions could be confusing or invisible. If a character simply disappears off the left side of the screen, the audience might miss the action entirely. But if the character first crouches and looks left, gathering themselves for a running start, we know where to look and what to expect. When they finally spring into their run, we're ready for it. The action reads clearly. Anticipation also allows for comedy and expression. A character might anticipate a fall with wild arm-wheeling, drawing out the moment and building the gag. A villain might narrow their eyes and draw back before striking, making the attack more menacing. The amount and style of anticipation becomes part of character definition. Some characters, like the jittery White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, have quick, nervous anticipations. Others, like the villainous Maleficent, use slow, deliberate anticipations that convey power and control. One of the subtler applications involves eye direction. Before a character moves, their eyes often look toward where they're going. This tiny anticipation—sometimes just a few frames—makes the subsequent movement feel intentional rather than mechanical. It suggests thought preceding action, which is one of the essential tricks for creating the illusion of a thinking, living being rather than a puppet being pulled by strings.
Staging is the principle most directly borrowed from theater. It's about presenting an action so that it's unmistakably clear what's happening and what the audience should focus on. In live-action film, you can use focus, lighting, and camera movement to direct attention. In animation, you must plan everything from scratch, building clarity into every frame. The Disney approach to staging emphasized silhouette. If you can understand a character's action by looking only at their silhouette—a solid black shape against white—then the staging is probably working. Arms and legs positioned so they read clearly against the body and background, facial features composed so the expression is evident, the overall pose telling the story at a glance. This sounds simple, but it requires constant discipline. Animators would regularly check their drawings by filling them in as solid shapes to test whether the poses still communicated. Staging also governs camera angle and composition. Should we see this action from the side, the front, or a three-quarter view? Which angle makes the emotion or action most clear? The Nine Old Men thought carefully about where to position characters within the frame. They understood negative space—the empty areas around characters—and how it could emphasize isolation, create dynamic tension, or simply make the character's movements easier to read. One fascinating aspect is staging for emotional clarity. The animators learned that characters should generally face the camera for important emotional moments. A character who delivers a sad line while facing away from us might seem like they're hiding their emotions, which could be interesting, but might also rob the moment of impact. For maximum emotional connection, we need to see the face. Similarly, action sequences were staged so that multiple characters wouldn't obscure each other at crucial moments. If Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are having an argument, they're positioned so we can see both of their expressions, watching the conflict play across two faces simultaneously. This principle might seem obvious, but in practice it demands rigorous editing instincts. Every frame is a choice about what to emphasize and what to subordinate, ensuring that the story flows without confusion or visual clutter.
Here's where animation becomes music. Timing is about how many frames you devote to an action—and those frames determine weight, speed, mood, and personality. Traditional Disney animation ran at twenty-four frames per second. An action that takes twelve frames unfolds in half a second. One that takes forty-eight frames takes two full seconds. These numbers might seem technical, but they translate directly into feeling. A hand wave that takes four frames feels snappy and energetic. The same wave stretched to sixteen frames feels languid or sad. The Nine Old Men spent enormous energy on timing because it dictated so much. A heavy character—say, a elephant—needs more frames to start moving and more frames to stop. Their actions have weight, inertia. A light, bouncy character like Jiminy Cricket can change direction almost instantly, with just a frame or two of transition. The timing tells us what characters are made of before we consciously think about it. Timing also conveys emotion and state of mind. A depressed character moves slowly, their actions stretched out over many frames. An excited character has quick, sharp timing with rapid transitions. A drunk character might have inconsistent timing—some actions too fast, others too slow—creating that sense of impaired control. The relationship between drawings matters as much as the drawings themselves. If you have a character raising an arm from down to up, you could space the in-between drawings evenly, creating a mechanical, robotic movement. Or you could cluster the drawings at the beginning (slow start) and space them out at the end (fast finish), creating acceleration. Or reverse it—fast start, slow finish—for deceleration. These spacing decisions are timing, and they're everything. What made the Disney animators so skilled was their ability to choreograph complex actions across multiple characters with musical precision. Watch the "Heigh-Ho" sequence from Snow White, where the Seven Dwarfs march home from the mine. Each dwarf has distinct timing—Doc walks with confident, even steps; Dopey stumbles with irregular timing; Grumpy moves with gruff, deliberate beats. Yet they all mesh together into a unified rhythm. This required animators to think like conductors, feeling the tempo and orchestrating movement accordingly.
The human body doesn't move as a single unit. When you stop walking, your torso might stop first, but your arms swing through a bit more before settling. Your hair keeps moving. Your coat takes even longer to catch up. This is follow-through and overlapping action, and it's essential for creating movement that feels organic rather than robotic. Follow-through is what happens after the main action completes. A character throws a punch, and even after the fist stops, the shoulder settles, the body rocks slightly back, and loose elements like hair or clothing continue moving for a few frames before everything comes to rest. Nothing in nature stops on a dime. Overlapping action is closely related but slightly different—it's when different parts of the body move at different rates during a single action. A character starts running. Their legs pump first, then their arms get going, then their torso rotates into the rhythm, and maybe a floppy hat or long ears start bouncing in counterpoint. These staggered beginnings create a layered, complex sense of movement. The Nine Old Men paid special attention to secondary elements—hair, tails, clothing, jewelry, anything not rigidly attached to the main body. These elements almost always move on a delay, dragging behind the main action. When Pinocchio turns his head, his oversized wooden nose leads the movement, but his collar and the feather in his hat follow a few frames later. This delay, this looseness, makes him feel subject to physical forces rather than simply rotated by an animator's hand. There's a related concept called "drag," where parts of the body or costume literally drag behind. Picture a character running: their head and torso lean forward, but their arms and legs extend behind them mid-stride. Or a character stopping suddenly: their body plants, but their hair and coat whip forward, dragging through the momentum. Drag creates dynamic lines and curves that trace the energy of movement through space. Masters like Milt Kahl could orchestrate incredibly complex follow-through. He'd animate a character with multiple layers—the main body action, the clothing, the hair, and any props or accessories, each moving with slightly different timing. The result was movement so rich and natural that audiences never questioned it, never saw the construction. They simply believed.
Living things move in arcs. Watch your hand as you reach for something—it traces a curve through space, not a straight line. This happens because our joints create natural pivots, and pivoting motion generates curves. Arms swing in arcs from the shoulder. Heads turn in arcs from the neck. Even walking creates a subtle arc as your hips and shoulders rotate. The Disney animators discovered that when movement follows natural arcs, it feels effortless and alive. When movement happens in straight lines or mechanical paths, it feels stiff and artificial. This seems like a small detail, but it's fundamental to the illusion of life. They developed techniques to ensure accurate arcs. An animator might lightly sketch the path of a hand through space across multiple drawings, making sure it traces a smooth curve. Or they'd check that a turning head maintains a consistent distance from its pivot point—the neck—so it doesn't wobble unnaturally. Different characters have different arc qualities. A graceful character like Cinderella moves in smooth, flowing arcs—her gestures are elegant curves that never feel choppy. A mechanical character like a robot might move in straighter paths with sharp corners, emphasizing their artificial nature. A wild character like the Tasmanian Devil has exaggerated, looping arcs that spin and spiral chaotically. Arcs apply to more than just body parts. When animating a bouncing ball, the ball itself follows an arc through space—a parabola, actually, matching the physics of gravity. When a character's eyes track movement across the screen, they shouldn't dart in a straight line from left to right; they should follow a slight arc, either dipping down or curving up, because that's how our eyes actually move. There's something almost meditative about this principle. It reminds us that animation is about observing life deeply enough to understand its hidden geometry. The animators weren't trying to trace reality exactly but to understand its underlying patterns so thoroughly that they could reproduce the feeling of reality with just pencil and paper.
We've reached two principles that are more artistic than technical, harder to quantify but absolutely essential: exaggeration and appeal. Exaggeration doesn't mean making everything bigger or more extreme. It means pushing the truth of something to make it more clear and more emotionally resonant. A sad character doesn't just look down; their whole body wilts, their shoulders curve inward, maybe their head hangs lower than reality would strictly allow. A shocked character doesn't just widen their eyes; their jaw drops absurdly far, their hair might stand on end, their entire body language amplifies the emotion. The principle works because animation is inherently interpretive. You're not capturing reality; you're communicating an idea of reality. And communication benefits from emphasis. If a character is angry, showing them with a slightly furrowed brow might be realistic, but having their face turn red, steam shoot from their ears, and their fists clench so hard they shake—this exaggeration makes the emotion instantly clear, even to children, even across language barriers. Ward Kimball, perhaps the wildest and most experimental of the Nine Old Men, pushed exaggeration further than anyone. His characters—like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland or the crows in Dumbo—move with rubber-hose elasticity and surreal distortions. Yet they still feel grounded because the exaggeration served expression. Every wild distortion communicated something about the character's mental state or personality. Appeal is even more elusive. It doesn't mean "pretty" or "cute"—villains need appeal too. Appeal means a design and movement that's pleasant to watch, that has charisma and clarity. A character with appeal draws your eye. They're designed with clean lines, clear silhouettes, and a balance of simple and complex shapes. They move with confidence and flow. Frank Thomas often said that appeal was about avoiding ugly, awkward positions and confusing tangents where lines accidentally merge. It was about keeping the character's design consistent and appealing from frame to frame, never letting them distort into something confusing or unpleasant unless it served a specific purpose. Cruella de Vil has appeal despite being cruel and frightening. Her angular design, her flowing coat, her dramatic gestures—they're all captivating to watch. Dopey has appeal through roundness and innocent movement. Both work because the animators understood that audiences need to want to watch these characters, even when they're supposed to be repulsive or frightening. Appeal keeps us engaged.
Two more principles complete the framework, both technical but laden with artistic implications. Solid drawing is the animator's foundation—the ability to draw characters with accurate volume, weight, and three-dimensionality. This seems obvious, but early animation often featured flat, inconsistent drawings. Characters would lose volume from frame to frame, their limbs would change length, their heads would accidentally flatten. Solid drawing meant understanding perspective, anatomy (even cartoon anatomy), light and shadow, and how to maintain a character's construction through extreme angles and positions. The Disney studio's emphasis on solid drawing came from their art training programs. They brought in Don Graham from the Chouinard Art Institute to teach life drawing classes. Animators sketched from live models, learning how bodies twist and bend, how clothing folds, how weight distributes. They studied animal anatomy for films like Bambi and The Jungle Book. This rigorous training gave them the skills to draw Pinocchio from any angle while keeping his proportions consistent, or to animate Shere Khan the tiger with muscular authenticity beneath the stylization. Milt Kahl was renowned for his draftsmanship—his ability to construct characters with architectural precision. Every drawing felt solid, like you could reach out and touch it. This solidity made even fantastical characters like Prince Phillip fighting the dragon convincing. We believe in the physicality because the drawing convinces us of form and weight. The final principle, straight ahead versus pose to pose, describes two different animation approaches. Straight ahead means drawing frame by frame from the beginning of an action to the end, letting the movement evolve spontaneously. Pose to pose means planning key poses first—the extremes of an action—then filling in the drawings between them. Each approach has strengths. Straight ahead creates fluid, spontaneous movement with wonderful surprises—it's great for wild, unpredictable action like fire, water, or chaotic slapstick. Ward Kimball loved this approach for its freedom. Pose to pose offers more control—you can perfect the key storytelling moments, ensure clear staging, and maintain consistent timing. Milt Kahl preferred this method for its precision. The Nine Old Men realized that the best animation often combined both approaches. You might pose out the main storytelling beats, then animate certain sections straight ahead for looseness and energy. A character planning a sneaky escape might be carefully posed to capture their scheming expression and body language, but when they actually make their chaotic getaway, straight ahead animation captures the wild energy.
All these principles were developed through the 1930s, crystallizing in preparation for and during the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The film, released in 1937, was the laboratory where everything came together. Consider the dwarfs themselves. Each needed distinct personality expressed through movement—Doc's flustered authority, Grumpy's perpetual irritation, Bashful's shy charm, Dopey's innocent chaos. The animators used timing differently for each: Doc moves with quick, nervous energy; Grumpy has heavy, deliberate timing; Dopey has loose, floppy follow-through. These weren't arbitrary choices but careful applications of the principles to create character through motion. The scene where Snow White discovers the dwarfs' cottage shows staging at its finest. As she explores the messy interior, every shot is composed to direct our attention—to the tiny chairs that make her wonder who lives here, to the names carved on the beds, to the dust and cobwebs that motivate her to clean. The camera angles and character positioning tell the story visually, requiring no dialogue. When the Evil Queen transforms into the old hag, the animation uses exaggeration and timing to create horror. Her hands gnarl with arthritic squash and stretch, her face distorts with exaggerated age and malevolence, and the timing—slow and deliberate—makes the transformation feel genuinely frightening. It's not realistic, but it's utterly convincing because the principles make us believe in the physical reality of the transformation. The film's most impressive achievement might be Snow White herself. Animating a believable human heroine was the ultimate test. She couldn't be too cartoony or the romance and drama wouldn't work. But she couldn't be too realistic or she'd fall into the uncanny valley, seeming stiff and dead-eyed. The animators, particularly Hamilton Luske (though not one of the Nine Old Men, his contributions to Snow White were foundational), used subtle squash and stretch, gentle arcs, and careful timing to keep her movements graceful and alive. They rotoscoped live-action footage of actress Marge Champion as reference, not to trace, but to study—to understand how a human body moves and then translate that understanding into appealing animation. Snow White proved the principles worked. The film was a massive critical and commercial success, making audiences laugh and cry over drawings that moved. It wasn't just technical achievement; it was emotional alchemy. The principles had transformed animation from entertaining curiosity into legitimate art form.
What made the Nine Old Men remarkable wasn't just individual brilliance but their collaborative culture. Disney animation in its golden age was intensely communal. Animators would gather in "sweatbox" sessions, screening their pencil tests together while Walt and their peers critiqued the work. These sessions could be brutal—Walt had exacting standards—but they pushed everyone toward excellence. The animators developed specializations. Milt Kahl became the master of elegant, precise human characters—he animated most of the heroic princes and sophisticated villains. Marc Davis excelled at female characters, animating Cruella, Maleficent, and Tinker Bell with incredible charisma. Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, who became lifelong friends, were the emotion specialists, particularly skilled at tender, subtle character moments. Ward Kimball owned the wild, comedic characters. Each brought distinct strengths, and Walt orchestrated them like instruments in an orchestra. But they also learned from each other constantly. Animators would pass by each other's desks, watching drawings take shape, asking questions, offering suggestions. If someone solved a particularly tricky problem—how to animate a character getting dressed, or a convincing galloping horse—that knowledge spread through the studio. The principles themselves emerged from this collective wisdom, refined through thousands of conversations and experiments. There was competition, certainly. Milt Kahl had a notorious ego and could be cutting toward other animators' work. But even the rivalries pushed the work forward. When one animator achieved something impressive, others studied it and tried to match or exceed it. The overall culture valued the work above individual pride. They were all trying to solve the same problems, reach the same goal: animation that transcended its medium. This collaborative spirit extended across departments. Animators worked closely with layout artists who designed the environments, with story men who crafted the narratives, with directors who shaped the overall vision. The Nine Old Men weren't isolated geniuses; they were masters within a system designed for collective creativity. Disney understood that great animation required too many skills, too much work, for any individual to manage alone. So he built an institution around collaboration, training, and shared standards of excellence.
The twelve principles didn't stay locked within Disney's walls. As the Nine Old Men reached their later careers, they became teachers and mentors. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's book, "The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation," published in 1981, laid out the principles explicitly for the first time, becoming the bible of animation education worldwide. Students at CalArts, the California Institute of the Arts that Walt Disney helped establish, learned directly from the Nine Old Men themselves. Eric Larson continued teaching there for years, emphasizing the fundamentals. This next generation would go on to create the Disney Renaissance of the 1980s and 90s—The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King—films that returned Disney to its former glory by reembracing the classical principles. But the influence spread far beyond Disney. Animation studios around the world adopted the principles. When Studio Ghibli in Japan created films like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, they applied principles like squash and stretch, anticipation, and follow-through to distinctly Japanese storytelling and aesthetics. Don Bluth, a Disney animator who left to form his own studio, used the principles to create films like The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail. Then computers arrived. In the 1990s, Pixar was creating the first feature-length computer-animated films, using entirely different tools—software instead of pencils. Yet John Lasseter, Pixar's creative chief, had studied at CalArts under the Nine Old Men. He insisted that the twelve principles applied just as much to 3D computer animation as to hand-drawn. Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature, succeeded not because of technology but because it applied classical animation principles to make digital characters feel alive. Watch a Pixar film closely and you'll see squash and stretch in characters like the Incredibles, anticipation in every action scene, careful staging in every composition, follow-through in hair and clothing simulated by computers but choreographed by animators who understood the principle. The tools changed completely, but the fundamental insights about movement, weight, timing, and appeal remained essential. Today, every major animation studio teaches the twelve principles. They appear in video game animation, in special effects for live-action films, in animated explainer videos and commercials. Animators working in Maya, Blender, Unreal Engine—tools the Nine Old Men couldn't have imagined—still talk about squash and stretch, still plan their animations with anticipation and follow-through. The principles have become the grammar of animation itself, the foundational language that makes motion believable and expressive regardless of medium or technology.
The deeper legacy of the Nine Old Men isn't really about technical principles. It's about their understanding that great art comes from disciplined observation, rigorous craft, and the courage to trust emotion. These men were, in many ways, conservative artists. They studied classical painting and sculpture, they drew from life constantly, they believed in fundamentals like anatomy and perspective. Yet they were also wildly inventive, willing to distort and exaggerate reality in service of feeling. They understood that realism—pure visual accuracy—wasn't the goal. Connection was the goal. Making audiences feel something real through means that were entirely artificial. This required a particular kind of humility. They had to observe the world intensely enough to understand how things actually move, actually feel, actually work. A animator who hasn't studied how fabric folds will draw clothing that looks pasted on rather than worn. An animator who hasn't watched how people shift weight when sitting down will create characters that float into chairs. The Nine Old Men were obsessive observers, always watching, always sketching, always asking: how does this really happen? But observation alone wasn't enough. They had to transform those observations into drawings that worked within animation's constraints and possibilities. This meant simplification, exaggeration, stylization—artistic choices about what to emphasize and what to discard. A real person's face makes hundreds of tiny movements when expressing emotion. Animation must choose the essential few movements that convey the emotion most clearly. This balance—between observation and invention, between realism and style, between discipline and creativity—defined their work. They created a craft that was rigorous enough to teach (hence the twelve principles) but flexible enough for individual expression (hence the distinct personalities and styles within the Nine Old Men themselves). Perhaps most importantly, they trusted that audiences would respond to truth, even in fantastical contexts. A dragon doesn't exist, but it can move with weight and intention. A fairy isn't real, but she can express recognizable emotions. By grounding their fantasies in principles derived from observing reality, they made the impossible believable. And by infusing every action with character and emotion, they made the believable meaningful. This is why their work endures. Technical innovations date quickly—we can create images now that would astound them. But the principles they discovered about movement, timing, and expression remain true because they're based on human perception and emotion, which don't fundamentally change. We still read anticipation as preparation, we still feel squash and stretch as impact, we still connect with characters who move with appeal and personality. The Nine Old Men figured out how drawing meets psychology, how technique serves soul.
On a practical level, the twelve principles of animation are about solving technical problems—how to make a drawing appear to have weight, how to direct an audience's attention, how to convey emotion through motion. But step back and they're about something larger: how to create life where none exists. This was always the grand ambition lurking behind Disney's "Disney's Folly." Not just to entertain for seventy minutes, but to make audiences forget they were watching drawings. To create characters who felt as real as any actor, stories that carried emotional weight equal to live-action drama. The Nine Old Men achieved this not through technology—their tools were simple pencils, paper, and cameras—but through deep understanding of how humans perceive and interpret movement. Every principle addresses a different aspect of the illusion. Squash and stretch gives characters physical substance. Anticipation makes their actions feel intentional. Follow-through subjects them to physical laws. Timing gives them weight and personality. Appeal makes us want to watch them. Together, these principles construct a vocabulary for translation—taking life as we observe it and translating it into drawings that feel equally alive. What's remarkable is how completely this vocabulary succeeded. Watch Snow White today, more than eighty years after its creation, and the dwarfs still feel like distinct personalities, Snow White still conveys innocence and kindness, the Evil Queen still chills. The technology looks archaic, the colors faded, but the characters live. That durability comes from the Nine Old Men's insight that animation isn't really about pictures at all—it's about movement, timing, and emotion. These elements transcend technical limitations because they speak directly to how our minds work. The principles are both strict and liberating. They provide rules that prevent common mistakes and guide animators toward effective choices. But they're flexible enough to express any style, any story, any emotion. You can apply them to realistic humans or abstract shapes, to comedies or tragedies, to action or quiet character moments. They're not a formula that produces identical results but a foundation that supports infinite variation. Perhaps that's why they've outlasted so many other artistic movements and techniques. The Nine Old Men weren't trying to create something zeitgeisty or trend-driven. They were trying to solve fundamental problems about representation and emotion, and their solutions turned out to be genuinely foundational. As long as someone wants to make something drawn or modeled appear to live and move and feel, these principles remain relevant. They're not Disney's principles anymore; they belong to animation itself, to anyone who wants to create the illusion of life.