"The best way for a beginner to write for animation is to closely watch animated films, then read the screenplays for them afterwards"
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Wood’s advice sounds almost boringly practical, which is exactly why it lands. Writing for animation has a perennial beginner problem: people assume the form is just live-action with drawn faces. His prescription corrects that delusion with a two-step discipline that trains the eye before it indulges the pen.
“Closely watch” is the operative phrase. Animation is choreography of intention: timing, exaggeration, visual causality, and the way a gag, a gesture, or a cut carries narrative weight without dialogue doing all the lifting. Wood is steering novices toward the medium’s real grammar: rhythm, staging, and the elasticity of physics that lets character become action. You don’t learn that from a blank page; you learn it from the screen, where you can feel why a beat holds for half a second longer, why a reaction shot is the punchline, why silence is often the joke.
Then comes the subtextual trapdoor: “read the screenplays… afterwards.” Only after you’ve experienced the film as an audience member do you get to peek behind the curtain. That sequencing matters. If you start with the script, you’re tempted to fetishize dialogue and plot mechanics. By watching first, you internalize the finished effect; by reading after, you study the blueprint and see what’s missing on the page. Animation scripts often look deceptively sparse because so much storytelling is delegated to boards, layout, and performance. Wood is implicitly telling beginners to stop trying to write every pencil stroke and start learning how to write intentions that a visual pipeline can amplify.
Contextually, it’s apprenticeship logic in an era of infinite access: the canon is available, and so are the receipts.
“Closely watch” is the operative phrase. Animation is choreography of intention: timing, exaggeration, visual causality, and the way a gag, a gesture, or a cut carries narrative weight without dialogue doing all the lifting. Wood is steering novices toward the medium’s real grammar: rhythm, staging, and the elasticity of physics that lets character become action. You don’t learn that from a blank page; you learn it from the screen, where you can feel why a beat holds for half a second longer, why a reaction shot is the punchline, why silence is often the joke.
Then comes the subtextual trapdoor: “read the screenplays… afterwards.” Only after you’ve experienced the film as an audience member do you get to peek behind the curtain. That sequencing matters. If you start with the script, you’re tempted to fetishize dialogue and plot mechanics. By watching first, you internalize the finished effect; by reading after, you study the blueprint and see what’s missing on the page. Animation scripts often look deceptively sparse because so much storytelling is delegated to boards, layout, and performance. Wood is implicitly telling beginners to stop trying to write every pencil stroke and start learning how to write intentions that a visual pipeline can amplify.
Contextually, it’s apprenticeship logic in an era of infinite access: the canon is available, and so are the receipts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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