Exaggeration
Exaggeration as we see it by itself. This tool of animation was mostly applied by Warner's. The main point of it is to express something the funnier way. Kinda overacting. To give more energy, and power to the manner.
So it is. By using this tool, you can understand the motivation, the feeling of the character much easily. But as Richard Williams said: " If you think you went far enough, go twice as far" And this what Tex Avery developed the best. Now lets see how far they can go with exaggeration.
You see, there is always a "farer" way to apply it. Isn't it hilarious? And you can see perfectly what's going on. And this is the most important thing to notice when you dealing with exaggeration. To make sure that the people of the audience shall still know what's happening, and won't lose focus. After all, exaggeration is like caricaturing. Make everything much bigger or smaller, faster or slower. Yeah it also can be smaller, and slower.
This is also a really cool sample of using exaggeration. One of my childhood's favorite cartoon tv show. Courage the cowardly dog.
Courage's always sacred of everything, so they often used exaggeration. Make the whole mouth bigger than the body, make the eyes bigger. So make the whole body like there is no bones in it. Kinda stretches.
Another very cool example at Richard Williams's book,
The Animator's Survival Kit. You can break the joints to represent really cool overlapping actions, that can help to make the whole scene overacted.
Actually, film makers don't use to use exaggeration in live action films. But i saw The Mask film, and i was amazed. It's also a part of my childhood, and now i see, yeah it's exaggeration in a live action film. Although it was made by using CG but looks cool.
Obviously the creators of Mask got the reference from Tex Avery's wolf but still awesome.
So i think that's all i can say about exaggeration. It's not very hard to understand but even more important in animation. Another saying: Sometimes less is more. So exaggeration is not just about making stuff bigger or faster, but making much smaller and slower. So for last here is another cool example from the film Mask. See ya all.
-Adam