Smears in animation - starring Beowulf from Skullgirls! (Patreon)

It's time for some more fun Skullgirls animation! This time we've got Beowulf's crouching hard "kick" animation starring his signature fold-up chair. This animation is full of smears - essentially animation's replacement for motion blur. 

Smears look a little something like this: 

The purpose of a smear is to show an extreme amount of motion in a very short amount of time. A smear can be the same object drawn multiple times in the same frame over its movement path, or if you took the drawing and literally smeared the edges of it, as if you could pull it like dough. This is done for a couple reasons in 2D animation, but partially because the use of motion blur is difficult to achieve in a 2D environment. In 3D, motion blur can be added automatically by the computer if so desired, based on the movement speed of the camera or the objects on it.

Image courtesy of Cartoon Brew

Motion blur is the quick & dirty way of fixing strobing in animation - when the illusion of movement is broken by quickly moving objects. This happens when in one frame the object has traveled a great distance from where it previously was. If nothing is done to counteract this extreme movement speed, the viewer's persistence of vision

is broken as the object feels less like it's moving and more as if it's simply strobing across the screen.

While 2D animation is an attempt to mimic the movement of life, it has a lot of its own special rules that separate reality from the magic that happens in hand-drawn animation. This is why rotoscoping (tracing video of real life camera footage) can sometimes look very jarring. Our brains know that information is missing and is trying to process the animation as something it would see in every day life. It goes against what animation is supposed to be - a comment on reality instead of a replication of it.

Smears are just one of 2D animation's solutions to the problems of mimicking reality, and it works because it keeps the brain's object persistence in check, while making for a visually striking effect. Smears look a little silly frozen in time, but in motion (if done right) they look great.

If you're curious about smears and would like to see some more amazing and hilarious examples, check out this tumblr blog dedicated to animation smears!