What DMs Can Learn from the Art of Animation
This post is a short thought experiment. While looking into the fundamentals of animation, I stumbled across the "12 Principles of Animation" by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. Thomas and Johnston were animators at Walt Disney and worked on films like Cinderella, Bambi, and my beloved Robin Hood.
It's remarkable how well some of these principles translate to running a D&D campaign. In the end, animation is doing something very similar to D&D. It tries to tell stories that feel relatable and, in its own way, realistic. But the more important shared trait is that both art forms live within time, which means everything hinges on which information you convey to the players or the audience, how, and when.
Anticipation
In animation, it's important that actions are set up in advance. The goal isn't to make the outcome predictable, but to create an expectation in the audience's mind that you can later confirm or subvert.
Say the players visit a merchant who is supposed to be stingy. Set him up by having him shoo away a beggar in front of the group, or by having him count his cash register like he's obsessed. Anticipation can also be used to set up actions that aren't even planned yet. You can spontaneously drop in situations the players have to react to, just to see how they respond. Sometimes that grows into a bigger scene on its own. What matters is just that you let your players stumble through your world carrying expectations in their heads. After all, they don't always know all the circumstances, and that lets them form their own expectations beforehand.
Staging
One of the most common mistakes beginners apparently make when animating is having too many plot-driving events happen at the same time. The audience simply can't take in the whole canvas the story plays out on all at once. One event after another. Translated to D&D, this means that as DMs we shouldn't overwhelm our players. If an event matters for the progression of the story, we should give it the stage to itself and resolve it before starting another.
As with most things, the opposite of this rule can also be used deliberately. Maybe we want to put our players under stress in a given situation, and let many things happen at once, all of which have a significant impact on the story. It's just important to master the basics first, before trying to formulate the antithesis to them.
Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose
Explaining this point fully for animation would take a while. In short, it means there isn't just one process for animating. It's not that every frame of an animation is fully planned out ahead of time (Pose to Pose), nor is it always the case that every frame is created one after another, building on the previous one without a clear end goal in sight (Straight Ahead).
It's similar with D&D. Sometimes we want to keep a tight grip on the plot in order to steer our players toward specific milestones in the story. For that, we plan far ahead, designing NPCs weeks in advance who we already know will play an important role in the campaign. But sometimes the right approach is only to plan the next session and simply build on whatever the players got up to in the previous one. This is especially true when you want the story's development to feel natural and the players' influence to be clearly felt.
In animation, this is summed up as use pose to pose for things that you have control of and use straight ahead for things that you don't. The tricky part for DMs is just recognizing when it's better to hand control over to the players.
Slow In & Slow Out
Movements that start and freeze from one second to the next feel mechanical and lifeless. That's the basic idea. The same is true for every event in a D&D campaign. A war doesn't break out from one day to the next. Just as little do former enemies, once that war is over, go share drinks at the tavern to laugh about the old days. There need to be moments of acceleration and deceleration. Foreshadow the war with street brawls, with discord spreading among the population. Let acts of revenge occur, sparked by crimes committed in the shadows of the war.
This might now sound like extra work, but you can also see it as a way to squeeze more out of a single idea, stretch it over a longer period of time, and reap more adventures for your players.
Exaggeration
This is probably the most important point. When Walt Disney reviewed the first drafts of Mickey Mouse, he asked his animators to make the character and its movements more realistic. When they eventually presented him with a photorealistic drawing of a mouse, he made his point clearer. Disney wasn't talking about the style itself, but about the idea behind the action. If a character is sad, make them sadder. If a character is greedy, show them being greedier. Exaggeration shouldn't turn a character abstract or make them read like a caricature. The character, their actions, and their emotions should be more convincing and unmistakable.
Don't just have the merchant shoo the beggar away - have him chase the beggar out of his shop with blows, kicks, and curses on his lips. The rift within society doesn't just result in a street brawl, but in the organized assassination of the town's dissenting magistrate.
Make it unmistakably clear to your players what kind of personalities and circumstances they're dealing with. That makes your life as a DM considerably easier - both because your players will pick up on the important cues, and because you'll have clear levers with which to confirm or subvert the expectations you've built up.
Animation doesn't try to be realistic - it tries to give expression to an action so that its meaning becomes clear. The same is true for stories, and for D&D as well. A story doesn't become relatable by being especially realistic, but by being comprehensible.
I hope this comparison sparked a few flickers of inspiration to help you with your D&D campaigns. These points could just as well be applied to players, but since I sit behind the DM screen 99% of the time, I didn't want to presume to take that perspective myself. Good luck either way!