Acting in Animation

I've been intrigued with acting in animation for a long time. It's always been something I've taken into consideration as an animator, because I've always seen it as a major fundamental. They should add it to the 12 fundamentals... make it 13 fundamentals already! Anyway, in a theoretical standpoint, I would consider both the voice-acting and the character animation together to equal that of importance, in conjunction to theatrical and/or live action acting. The voice actors work their well-earned energy into the delivery of their dialogue, the storyboard artists, directors, scene planners, and animators then work out the key-poses for the character animation, using the same exact mindset as any live-action actor would of "how do I convey this emotion" or "how should my body language work in conjunction to this setting" and "does the tone of this voice add or fit in with my actions."

Some animators even use real actors (sometimes the voice actors themselves) to play out a scene so that they know what key poses to draw, like this clip from Alice in Wonderland, where the actors play up the characters rather well in the reference footage, and the audio from that footage was even used for the movie. You can see Walt Disney, presumably, drawing the key poses he's looking at while they are filming.

This is different to rotoscoping, however. When you rotoscope, you draw over the frames, which is different to using footage as reference. Actors will often chew the scenery a little when they are being animated, though. A Scanner Darkly is an example of that happening.

Acting in animation can sometimes work without reference, however. Take the Ren & Stimpy Show for example. There doesn't seem to be much mention of any sort of real-life reference John Kricfalusi used when he was creating the poses for that show. He would normally draw every key pose on a layout sheet, without using a reference, and given the nature of his animation style, it does add a lot to the amount of exaggeration each pose contains. These layout sheets would normally follow a storyboard for the scenes, since they were normally just rough ideas on how the scene would play out. 

This took a lot of work, however, as the layout artists would have to pitch different poses for the layout sheets and they would sometimes go through a tonne of different key poses until they decide which one is funniest, and most unique one. They worked though, and as a result, the acting was always funny and memorable whenever they used this method.

There isn't really anything wrong with either method, since they both convey emotion very well in their own ways. Ren & Stimpy's cartoony style and tone is reflected in the character's acting and is what makes it funny. The acting in Disney films is incredibly exaggerated, in terms of style, but using reference videos prevents them from automatically making something look too silly, which is good for when the films try to be emotional.