The most difficult thing in animation is, quite ironically, mastering the basics. Young animators often have an urge to do "complicated" things such as complex dialogues and action scenes, but fail to understand aspects such as timing, spacing, asymmetry, or squash and stretch.

Following the principle of working in layers of refinement, covered in the previous chapter we must take care to make the basic underlying layers first, and make them well. Before attempting the fancy stuff, we need to make sure we have a good foundation. This foundation must work on its own: you should be able to communicate the actions and its motivations without all the polish.