I recently shared a video from the intertubes featuring animated dancing. To preface the clip, I stated that I am practically never a fan of animated dancing. In the comments, “someguy” asked me why.

Rather than write a quick response in the comments I figured I could make a post out of it. I have no intentions for this post to be a personal rant. It is designed to be more of an informative, discussion-inspiring post, albeit peppered with my own opinions.

Dance is a wonderful medium. It is an excellent form of individual expression; it’s beautiful, it’s touching, it’s very personal and meaningful.

Also, it’s incredibly hard to do well.

Seeing someone perform something elegant and beautiful with their body somehow entrances us.



“Someguy” also suggested that you can learn a lot about weight and balance from watching animated dancing. Perhaps, but I promise you will learn far more by watching real dance. If education is what you’re after, watch some live action.

There’s something very tempting about dance to an animator. Just grab that hip controller and start rotating it; suddenly your character is almost dancing already. It also seems to test well with kids, which gets the attention of studios. For a while there was a HUGE trend in animated dancing on the big screen. Especially during credit sequences. I just got tired of seeing it everywhere. While I understand its draw, I have two major problems with it. Both stem from the core of what dance really is, and how animation usually fails to meet it.

First, it’s really cool to see people create interesting movements with their bodies. However, once it’s translated into animation – in my opinion – it usually loses what it had in real life.



If you were to animate the above video would it be an awesome animation? In my opinion, no. You can do anything in animation anyway, so why would anyone care that you can ‘break’ the character and move it in an unnatural way. But when you see a person actually do it – wow.

Secondly, most dance is about personal expression. The dancer is expressing a part of themselves, and getting an emotional response from the viewer. It is truly an art form. When we animate dancing it’s usually because it’s fun to animate, but it rarely comes from a place of personal expression. It’s fun to show off our dance animations (since it’s so hard to do), but we rarely ever get any sort of emotional connection between the viewer and the character. For example, which of these two videos elicit more of a reaction from you?

Video 1:



Video 2: