Good Examples of Body Acting

The body can convey character, emotion and environment. Then, the body itself can work in harmony with the dialog, or in contrast, the body itself can tell a story without any dialog at all.

Concerning animation, the animators first of all, should focus on the acting, while making the characters think. When creating a character, the actor and the animator may resemble the process of giving life to a character in a similar way, but while actors picture themselves as the character, the animators have the biggest challenge of all – maintaining a subjective, as well as an objective approach to characterization.

For instance, the horse named Maximus extracted from Tangled animation represents a good example of body acting. At first sight the final character from the animation embodies a horse as there are respected all the principles and elements of a horse’s anatomy; behaving like a horse, looking like a horse. However, from the extract it can be assumed that Maximus, the horse, has been animated to copy the movements of a dog. Therefore, the horse becomes a substitute of the “ man’s best friend”, now becoming Rapunzel’s “best friend”, cooperating even with Flynn, whom he doesn’t stand.

Another good example of body acting is represented by the Pixar’s little dog named Dug who apparently has a special mission. The animal is made using the basic anatomy of a dog, but this time the animal behaves according to its nature:  it moves like a dog, it looks like a dog and given to its body acting it is happy, friendly and ready for adventure as any dog. However, when he is told that he is a bad dog, from his body acting it can be understood that he becomes sad and feels guilty. The voice devices attached supply the information given by the body acting.