Cartoon Animation

Flash is one of those wonderful programs that can be put for a plethora of uses. But one of the most common things people want to be able to do with it is make cartoons and animations. There's a lot of ways to do this, but I'm going to show you a very simple, scripting free way of bringing some characters to life.

Steps to Create Animation
Before we begin our animation, we need a character. This little guy below is one that I quickly drew using a similar process to that described in another tutorial, Line Art In Flash. He looks a little bit lost, bless him. Let's call him Dexter.

At the moment, Dexter is just a collection of lines and fills, and not much good for animating. What we need to do is break up the character into his component parts (ouch!), and save them all as Library items.

Of course, the easiest way to do this is to simply draw each body part on a different layer as you go. That way, you can see how the fit together in relation to each other, get the sizes right etc etc. But if you've already drawn the character, then you'll just have to get your mouse dirty, get in there and pull poor Dexter to pieces. Select the lines and fills that make up a body part (say the head) then cut and paste into a new symbol. In a lot of case, you may find that a piece isn't complete, where it intersected with other areas. If that happens, then you just add some more lines and complete the part..

You can see from the picture above that Dexter is now split up into sections. Notice that although we only had one original eye image, I've duplicated the symbol and made three more versions, each with the lids closing. We need this to make him blink. I've also made a short movie clip for the mouth, containing a couple of lines / states for a talking mouth. A little tip for arms - make sure that the registration point is located at the 'shoulder' joint of the image. This makes it easier when you come to rotate them.
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SWAT Kats – The Radical Squadron: The Complete Series

Storyboard:

Two disgraced police officers are assigned dump duty, but continue serving the city as vigilante aviators.

The Sweatbox Review:

By 1990, the glory days of classic Hanna-Barbera productions were largely over. The founders were ready to move onto their own projects after the disappointing process of producing The Jetsons Movie for Universal. (Of course, they could have retired then, too, but both Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera worked into their old age.) Their studio was sold from Great American (formerly Taft) Broadcasting to Turner Productions in 1991, where it became a vital component of Cartoon Network when Turner launched it a year later, and both Bill and Joe worked on directing new shorts for the cable network. The company did find new life on cable, with a number of creator-driven shows appearing there over the next few years, but it certainly wasn’t the same Hanna-Barbera anymore. In 1993, the company also produced a syndicated series that bore little resemblance to anything else in the H-B filmography.

SWAT Kats was created by brothers Christian and Yvon Tremblay, who designed much of the show, while Robert Alvarez did the directing for all the episodes. It ran as part of the weekend syndicated block of programming known as The Funtastic World Of Hanna-Barbera, and was seen on such stations as TBS (you remember— THE SUPERSTATION!). Overseas animation was handled by Seoul-based Hanho Heung-Up Co., Ltd., and it certainly shows in the visuals. The show looks nothing like Secret Squirrel, that’s for sure.

Though I’m a big H-B fan, my first exposure to the show has been the recently released DVD set. First impressions were not good. The first episode, The Pastmaster Always Rings Twice, dropped viewers right into the world of SWAT Kats. While it’s an interesting story premise, with a long-buried wizard being released in the modern day, I was left fairly confused as to the premise of the series. No explanation was given in the initial episode regarding who the SWAT Kats are, or why they do what they do. Characters show up without proper introductions, and it all feels more like an episode from later in the season. Consequently, I really couldn’t care about any of it, and I was left unenthused about watching more. The animation style didn’t help, with too many swooping points of view, and that 80s/90s style of overseas animation that used badly-colored line art backgrounds, and comic-style all-black shading (or big blobs of color) in both backgrounds and figures. Even my kids asked me to never show them an episode of the show again. Not a good sign.
For more info- http://animatedviews.com/2011/swat-kats-the-radical-squadron-the-complete-series/