The illusion of life

What Hacker News says

1. vunderbaApr 2026
   From the article:

   > The simplest solution is to use CSS transitions, but unfortunately, transitions on <path> elements aren’t supported in Safari.

   Sigh. Regular Safari and iOS WebKit are the bane of my existence. I've recently been fighting with the lowered memory allowances for a mobile-friendly site which uses WASM and it has not been a pleasant experience.

   Related there was a really good article back in the days of Smashing Magazine [1] that I read connecting web animation with the famous Disney animation book "Illusion of Life", but it's nice to have an article with actual interactive examples!

   https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/the-guide-to-css-an...

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2. ijkMay 2025
   Hollywood has the particular problem that the executives would really like a formula to follow to make people like the films, the screenwriters would really like a formula to follow to write something that they can sell, and so on. There's a lot of commercial pressure for a factory to mass-produce plot and stamp it out into films. People liked a film? Make the exact same thing and see if they'll buy it again. Franchises help, because at least there's some incentive to shuffle around some different characters and plot elements.

   Though the never-ending soap-opera of comics aren't really that great a fit for wrapping everything up in a three-act structure. (I'm still confused by why the Marvel films felt the need to kill off 90% of their villains in the same movie they debuted.) But the hero's journey is an attempt to answer to "how can we make a film as popular as Star Wars?" So we just follow that pattern, I guess.

   Not that there weren't other patterns--the Disney animators independently arrived at their own storytelling rules, for example. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston ) has a discussion of what they found worked for them and what didn't. It's worth comparing what they say there with the actual films and reflect on how the rules bore out in practice, of course. But it's another attempt at codifying a formula for appealing stories.

   There's lots of attempts to try to describe the universal appealing story pattern. Whether narrative actually works that way has become bifurcated into separate questions: "what kind of stories are effective for humans?" and "what kind of story can we produce reliably as a commercial success?" are subtly different but have become conflated.

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3. mrtksnFeb 2022
   "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" is also a great read. Here is short video demonstrating 12 basic principles of animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiGY0qiy8fY
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4. chadcmulliganAug 2020
   Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull - the history of Pixar

   The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation - a very beautiful book the history of Disney animation (pre computer though), discusses the foundations of animation used in software everywhere today.

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5. egypturnashDec 2018
   Survival Kit is an advanced book that dives into the deep end, The Illusion Of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson [1] (two of the guys on a bunch of the early Disney features) and Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair [2] (countless MGM shorts) will give you a solid grounding in the basics.

   The whole article focuses on expanding a list of principles of animation from Illusion.

   1: https://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Life-Disney-Animation/dp/078...

   2: https://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Animation-Collectors-Preston-...

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6. commienekoOct 2018
   Not exhaustive, or in any particular order:

   _Animator's Survival Kit_, by Richard Williams.

   _Illusion of Life_, by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

   _Animation from Script to Screen_, by Shamus Culhane.

   _Natural Way to Draw_, by Kimon Nicolaïdes.

   _Creative Illustration_, by Andrew Loomis.

   _Timing for Animation_, by Harold Whitaker and John Halas.

   _Drawn to Life_, vols. 1 & 2, by Walt Stanchfield.

   _Character Animation Crash Course!_, by Eric Goldberg.

   _Simplified Drawing for Planning Animation, by Wayne Gilbert.

   _The Noble Approach: Maurice Noble and the Zen of Animation Design_, by Tod Polson.

   _Elemental Magic: The Art of Effects Animation_, vols. 1 & 2, by Joseph Gilland.

   _Story Boarding Essentials_, byDavid Harland Rousseau.

   _Directing the Story_, by Francis Glebas.

   _Animated Storytelling_, by Liz Blazer.

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