Flight: Meerkat Movement and Expressions

So a while back I created a post centred around birds in flight with heaps of links to potential reference videos.  Today I am doing the same, but this time looking at the movement of my other character, Meerkat.

These clips have some really nice Meerkat moments:





Another consideration in my animation will be creating expressive characters while still maintaining the animal quality- especially as my designs aren't especially stylised in terms of the shapes and appearances of the characters.  Because the forms of the characters are quite true to real life I need to find a good balance between this and the characters expressions.

Disney has approached this issue many times with the large cast of animals in their films, and often solves it by stylizing the characters.  Some good reference I have been looking at are the expression sheets from films like Bambi which has a level of realism in the characters but still makes this work.

Figure 1: Bambi Expressions. 1939. Walt Disney Productions.  Retrieved from http://andreasdeja.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/marc-davis-talkes-about-bambi.html

In this clip, Marc Davis talks about how they manged to create Bambi's expressions by looking at human children, and translating these onto Bambi.  This can be seen in the stylization of Bambi- the shorter snout and bigger forehead mimic that of a baby, whereas a fawn does not have these features.  Strangely enough this is also something I applied to my young Meerkat design without even thinking about it. 




Since I am animating a Meerkat, I obviously can't not look at Timon's expressions from The Lion King.  Timon is a very stylised Meerkat, and constantly walks on two legs.  While my Meerkat isn't as stylised as this it is useful to look at how his expressions were achieved. 

Figure 2: Timon Model Sheet. 1993. The Walt Disney company.  Retrieved from http://blogs.disney.com/insider/2014/06/19/throwback-thursday-modeling-the-lion-king/#banzai