# Four walkers, same figure, same stride. What changed?

- Series: [How It's Clipped](https://miu.fm/howitsclipped.md)
- Published: 2026-10-21
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitsclipped/four-walkers-same-figure-same-stride-what-changed

## Story

Four walkers, same figure, same stride. What changed?

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).

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