In a high quality feature film you would rarely, if ever see a run cycle. So why even bother doing it? It’s the principles and application that are important. While you may not actually do a run cycle it is important to understand how a character will act and react under these circumstances. You may have to animate a character running in full animation using 70 drawings instead of 8.
In this run cycle, although there seems to be no upper body movement, there actually is. On each step, the arms overlap the body action up and down by one frame. It actually adds a very nice effect to the run cycle. I could have kept everything rigid but it only took a little adjustment on the arms and it made a huge difference. This is another one of those secondary action things.
The legs here are only off the ground for one drawing in this cycle.
This is the type of cycle where you could have the character talking while they are running simply by putting the head on a separate level. This would be typical in a ‘Saturday Morning’ cartoon from the late 1960’s and 70’s. The Saturday Morning cartoons of today don’t use this nearly as much as they used to.
