Animation Principles - Expert

Animation Principles - Expert is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from dylantarre/animation-principles. It costs 29 tokens per session (557 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Advanced guidance on using and deliberately breaking the 12 classic principles of animation. It treats rule-breaking as a creative choice for changing mood, style, tension, or meaning.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore stylistic experiments, intentional violations, unusual timing, constrained animation methods, and movement designed to create unease or emphasis.
Why use it?
It helps experienced animators avoid applying familiar rules mechanically when a rigid, confusing, abrupt, or frozen movement may better fit the intended effect.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to explore stylistic experiments, intentional violations, unusual timing, constrained animation methods, and movement designed to create unease or emphasis.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/dylantarre/animation-principles/expert
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add dylantarre/animation-principles --skill expert
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dylantarre/animation-principles

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for Animation Principles - Expert

README.md
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Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for Animation Principles - Expert

Your own site · 80×15
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Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 557 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00029 $0.00557
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00279
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00111
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00056

Measured 9d ago against content hash 8322d62b1a90, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Animation Principles - Expert scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/04-by-skill-level/expert/SKILL.md · 57 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 57 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Transcending the Principles

Mastery means knowing when to break rules. The principles are training wheels for intuition. Here's how experts leverage, subvert, and transcend them.

Intentional Violations

Anti-Squash/Stretch

Rigid motion creates uncanny, mechanical, or ethereal qualities. Spirited Away's gods move without squash - otherworldly presence. Perfect volume preservation can feel more alien than violations.

Omitted Anticipation

Into the Spider-Verse removes anticipation for snap cuts that feel like comic panels. Absence of anticipation = visual punctuation. Anticipation's removal is a choice, not an error.

Anti-Staging

David Lynch deliberately obscures important elements. Burying the point creates unease, mystery, viewer work. Strategic confusion can be the goal.

Pure Methods

Some masters work exclusively straight ahead (James Baxter's creature animation) or purely pose-to-pose (limited animation's stylized precision). Constraint breeds innovation.

Stopped Follow Through

Freezing follow through mid-motion creates held tension. Anime uses this for impact frames. The principle's interruption is the effect.

Linear Timing

Removing ease creates robotic precision or dreamlike float. Linear spacing isn't wrong - it's a vocabulary choice for specific effects.

Broken Arcs

Jerky, angular paths for insects, robots, or psychological breaks. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse uses broken arcs for Miles vs. smooth arcs for Peter.

Conflicting Secondary Action

Body language contradicting primary action reveals character complexity. Smiling while clenching fists. Agreement words with disagreement gestures.

Wrong Timing

Comedy often uses "incorrect" timing. Delayed reactions, impossibly fast actions, freeze frames - timing violations for comic effect.

Reduced Exaggeration

Hyperrealism in animation (rotoscope, mo-cap) deliberately minimizes exaggeration. The uncanny valley is sometimes the destination.

Flat Drawing

UPA style, Samurai Jack - intentional flatness as graphic design. Solid drawing exists so you can meaningfully reject dimension.

Read the full file on GitHub · 57 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 57 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A 8322d62b1a90

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Animation Principles - Expert is a skill published in the GitHub repository dylantarre/animation-principles (80 stars, last pushed 8mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 557 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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