Richard Williams, who directed the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, said that at fifteen he could draw but "didn't know how to move it worth a damn". His mentor, the Warner Bros. animator Ken Harris, told him a walk is the first thing to learn. Walking, Williams wrote, is falling over and catching yourself just in time: the heel lands on the contact, the bent leg takes the weight on the down, then the push-off on the up. Disney's Milt Kahl and Ken Harris swore by Eadweard Muybridge's 1887 photographs. It looks as if every mood needs new legs, but Williams kept three drawings: "The crucial thing is this middle position and where we put it". Weight is the up and down. A deeper down reads heavy, 20 frames a step reads tired, 24 a sneak, a double bounce optimism. Put the lowest point as the legs pass and it still has weight; he called that a cartoony walk. And his warning: no two people in the world walk the same.

The walkers here are our own drawings, not images from any film.

Which movie trick should we take apart next?

Sources: Richard Williams, The Animator's Survival Kit (Faber and Faber, 2001); Michael Posner, "He framed Roger Rabbit", The Globe and Mail, 2002; Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion (1887).
Sounds: our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).