The Body That Moves: A Narrative Review of Character Animation from Lasseter's Principles to Motion Matching
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Character animation---making digital bodies move believably under interactive control---is games' hardest realism problem: the body must be expressive at rest and responsive at play, and the two demands fight. This article presents a narrative review of that arc's canonical line: Lasseter's 1987 principles, Hodgins and colleagues' 1995 athletics, Perlin's 1995 personality animation, Rose and colleagues' 1998 verbs and adverbs, Menache's 2000 motion capture, Lee and colleagues' 2002 interactive avatars, Kovar and colleagues' 2002 motion graphs, Arikan and Forsyth's 2002 motion generation, Clavet, Beaudoin, and Poulin's 2004 motion pudding, Parent's 2012 algorithms synthesis, Geijtenbeek and Pronost's 2012 physics survey, and Clavet's 2016 motion matching. The synthesis is organized around three themes: craft, in which animation's principles---squash, timing, anticipation---were translated from drawn to interactive bodies; data, in which motion capture, blending, and graphs made real human motion a database; and control, in which example-driven state machines and motion matching put the body under the player's hand without losing its life. It is concluded that character animation is interactive realism's compromise engine---between authored life and player authority---and that motion matching's lesson is structural: the body's believability lives in transitions, not poses.
Authors: Revista, Zen, GAME, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Topic: Human Motion and Animation
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204708587