From cel animation to stop motion and 3D, the best animation styles can captivate audiences.
(Image credit: Future / Aardman Animations / 20th Century Studios / The Walt Disney Company / SNK / AB Productions / WarnerMedia)
The best animation styles offer powerfully effective ways to tell stories that captivate audiences, whether it's for non-fiction features and shorts, documentaries or corporate explainers. Different animation techniques have emerged at different times, meaning that today there are lots of ways to create animated video.
Animation is essentially the presentation of images in rapid succession to create the illusion of movement, and there are many ways that this can be done, from traditional hand-drawn animation to stop-motion and digital 3D animation. Each has its own look and feel, and the right type of animation for your project will depend on the look and feel that you want to create, as well as the resources and skills you have available.
The best animation styles
To set yourself up with the tools you need to create your own animations, see our guides to the best animation software and best laptops for animation. If you're just getting started, you needn't spend money either, as the best free animation software, which includes Blender and even Stop Motion Studio for this specific style, can introduce you to the basics. In the meantime, let's delve in and explore the best styles of animation with examples of each.
First up, 2D animation, or vector animation, is used in everything from traditional cartoons and anime to video games and explainer videos. You'll have seen plenty of this style on television shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy.
We don't see the world in 2D, so this style of animation isn't aiming for realism, but it's simplicity can create a strong emotional connection with the audience, making it a powerful and effective animation style. It's relatively accessible compared to 3D animation (see below) and it allows a lot of flexibility since almost any style of art can be used.
There are various 2D animation techniques. Traditionally, artists would draw characters and backgrounds by hand, scan them into a computer and then layer them to create the moving image. Drawings don't need to be done for every frame since the same image can be used multiple times. A second of animation is 24 frames, but most 2D animations animate every second frame, resulting in 12 frames per second.
Character Animation Tutorial in After Effects - No Third Party Plugin - YouTube
Today it's possible to draw characters directly on a computer, which speeds up the process. Various software programs allow animators to use rigging to create a character skeleton, avoiding the need to redraw a character for each pose. Once the animation is complete, it is then rendered and composited into a single video. The video above shows the process for creating a simple 2D animation in Adobe After Effects.
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In 2D animation, we see a subject from one angle. But the advances in computers allowed experiments with 3D views to begin in the 1960s. This paved the way for the 3D animation we see today in big-screen blockbusters from the likes of Pixar (Toy Story) and DreamWorks (Shrek).
The advantage of 3D animation is that it's more lifelike since it allows assets to be seen from all angles, allowing them to be rotated and moved like real objects. This makes it useful for scientific and medical videos and also allows allows the addition of more complex visual effects like realistic textures and lighting, which can create a more immersive experience.
To make 3D animation, artists create virtual 3D models and sets and carry out the 3D rigging of characters, which can then be placed in digital scenes. Keyframes are set for key actions and then the 'tweens' or in-between frames are filled by the software using interpolation.
How to Animate 3D Characters in 1 Minute - YouTube
Models are usually created in 3D modelling software like Autodesk Maya, Maxon Cinema 4D or Blender (in the example above). Models can be created from scratch of by scanning real-world objects into a computer. They're then given bones, skin weights and constraints that make them move in the desired way. After modelling, the animation stage is laid out, models are animated and the work has to be rendered. See our roundup for Blender tutorials if you want to get started using free 3D apps.
03. Cel animation
Cel animation is often referred to simply as traditional animation. It's one of the oldest animation techniques, dating back to the 19th century. Every frame is drawn by hand using ink on celluloid sheets, which are then layered to create an illusion of movement.
The process of cel animation takes a huge amount of time since it requires hundreds of drawings for every second of footage. Characters, objects and static backgrounds are all drawn on separate cels, which have to be layered and photographed frame by frame.
Classic Disney films used this technique, as did most animated television series up until the late 1990s, when digital animation was adopted to save time. Spongebob Squarepants, for example, was made using cel animation until it switched to digital in the year 2000.
Due to the complexity and the time it takes, it’s an animation style that's rarely used today, but it does have some advantages. The animator can have more control over the exact timing and spacing of each drawing, which can allow more fluid and expressive movement.
04. Stop motion animation
Stop motion is another classic animation style, and one that can be used to animate any real world object – as demonstrated by its popularity for social media videos. Basically, you take lots of photos of an object in different positions and string them together to create video.
In film and television, the technique is often used with specially made models that are posed and shot in different positions with incremental movements. Models can be made from a wide range of media, from felt and wool (The Clangers) to paper cut outs (Pigeon Street, Monty Python's Flying Circus).
Behind the scenes of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl - BBC - YouTube
Claymation is a popular style of stopmotion animation seen in the likes of Wallace and Gromit (see the making of documentary above), Pingu and even the surprising video game Harold Halibut. Plasticine clay provides great flexibility, allowing for a lot of expressiveness in characters, and it can produce a warm and authentic feel due to the small imperfections that come from moulding by human hands.
The look of traditional stop-motion mediums can now be mimicked digitally. While the first episode of South Park used physical cut-out animation, the style was replicated digitally in subsequent episodes. Digital cut out animation uses textured planes instead of physical paper or cloth for more flexibility and convenience, but many people still use traditional stop motion to produce a more handcrafted feel, which can be difficult to recreate.
What's the difference between anime and animation? In Japan, nothing. 'Anime' is simply 'animation' in Japanese, which borrowed the word from English, so all animated films and series are anime. But outside of Japan, the term 'anime' is used to refer specifically to Japanese animation.
The west's distinction of anime as a specific medium may have to do with the sheer size of the Japanese animation industry but also the distinct visual style of many Japanese animations, with an emphasis on characters, colour and dynamic action sequences. Characters often have exaggerated physical features and expressions. But anime isn't restricted to a particular genre. It ranges from sci-fi (Akira) to dreamlike fantasy (lots of Studio Ghibli films by Hayao Miyazaki and comedy (Nichijou).
06. Pixel art animation
The secrets to good Pixel Art animation! (Animation tutorial) - YouTube
Pixel art animation defined the look of the golden age of arcade video games. It wasn't originally a stylistic choice since it emerged due to the limitations of early computer graphics, but pixel art can be considered a digital version of traditional media like counted-thread embroidery and beadwork in that images are built from many small individual coloured unit.
A 4-bit colour palette and low-resolution displays meant that early pixel animation was pretty abstract, requiring a very selective placement of pixels to create a recognisable shape. From the 1980s, it became possible to import pictures or 3D polygons, and in the 1990s, demoscene competitions expanded the boundaries of pixel animation style, with artists finding ways to overcome technical limitations, using anti-aliasing to smooth out jagged edges and dithering to create more colours.
In the current century, forums like Pixelation and Pixel Joint led to a resurgence in interest in pixel animation as a stylistic choice, partly due to nostalgia value but also the technical challenges of the medium. Pixel artists usually still work with a limited colour palette and apply one colour at a time, either by drawing lines or blocking in simple shapes and clusters. Modern software allows artists to work on multiple layers, which can then be animated.
07. Rotoscope animation
"ALICE IN WONDERLAND" LIVE ACTION REFERENCE - YouTube
Rotoscoping is another animation technique that was developed in the early days of cartoons. It involves tracing human movements from film frame-by-frame to create flowing animations that feel natural. In the early days, the live-action film was projected onto a glass panel so it could be traced onto paper.
Disney used the technique to great effect in many classic movies, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in 1937 to Fantasia 2000, often using live action footage as a guide and adding extra touches. The technique has also been used in video games, including early Mortal Kombat games and Prince of Persia, and it can be used to create VFX, for example the glow of the lightsaber in Star Wars.
Behind the Scenes with Director Hisko Hulsing | Undone | Prime Video - YouTube
Nowadays, computer programs can automatically track movement in live action footage to turn it into an animated style. Digital rotoscoping has its detractors – some considering it 'cheating' and lacking in expression – but it has been used very effectively, including in Richard Linklater's Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly and in Hisko Hulsing's Undone.
08. Motion capture animation
Motion capture is a more-recent animation technique that’s comparable to rotoscoping but uses sensors and markers to capture the movements of an actor more accurately and transfer them to a 3D digital character, which may then be combined with live-action footage.
An actor typically wears a specially designed mocap suit, which is connected to a computer system so that cameras can track the sensors and markers. Notable examples include Avatar, Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Disney's live-action remakes like the Jungle Book, and the technique is also used in gaming and virtual reality.
09. Motion Graphics
Saul Bass: The Art Of The Title Sequence - YouTube
Finally, motion graphics deserves a mention of its own. Although it can use some of the animation techniques we've already looked at, it's more associated with graphic design, and includes things like animated logos, film and TV credits and other overlays on television. It can be 2D or 3D, and it can use a wide variety of styles.
Pioneers included Saul Bass, who designed title sequences of Alfred Hitchcock films, showing how shapes and text that would otherwise be static could used in motion to capture attention and convey emotions. Motion graphics animation can also be used to make presentations and explainer videos more engaging and accessible by using things like kinetic typography.
Nowadays is usually done using computer software such as After Effects. The discipline is often more keenly influenced by trends than other styles of animation, so you may want to keep up on the big graphic design trends for 2025.
How does animation work?
Essentially, animation involves creating many images, or frames, each one very slightly different from the previous. When the images are shown in quick succession, it creates an illusion of movement, like what happens with video recordings. Animation can be created using any technique that allows the required images to be captured and joined together, whether that's by photographing hand-drawn illustrations, puppets or models or by rigging digital models
How did animation develop?
Some consider the history of animation to begin in the early 19th century with the phenakistiscope, a cardboard disc showing images that appear to move when it's spun. In 1868, John Barnes Linnett patented the kineograph – what we now know as a flipbook – which allowed the animation of a linear sequence of drawings. The German film pioneer Max Skladanowsky then employed the same technique using photographs.
Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) is widely considered to be the first example of a cartoon. Some 700 frames were drawn on paper and then shot onto negative film. This is the basic idea of cel animation, which was used from the early days of Disney right up until the 1990s. As early as the 1930s, rotoscoping was used in tandem with cel animation, using live-action footage as a guide for animation artists.
Advances in computer technology in the 1960s and 1970s allowed the development of digital animation techniques, including pixel art animation and 3D animation. The latest technological advance influencing the history of animation is AI, with some AI video models allowing still images to be animated quickly and easily. Whether this will be considered a desirable development remains open to debate.
Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
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