Physics Intuition

This transforms Disney's 12 principles of animation into a physics checklist you can actually use when motion feels off. When your animations look floaty, it tells you to add ease-in and settling oscillations. When they feel stiff, it suggests squash-and-stretch and offset timing. The core insight is solid: audiences don't analyze physics, they feel it, so your goal is believability over accuracy. The mental model of asking "what does this weigh?" before animating anything is genuinely useful. It's written for animators but the principles translate to any UI motion work where you want things to feel grounded instead of sliding around like they're on ice.

skills.sh installs: 624
GitHub stars: 146
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add dylantarre/animation-principles --skill physics-intuition --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

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Physics Intuition

Think like a physicist watching the world move. Every object has mass. Every motion has cause and consequence.

Core Mental Model

Before animating anything, ask: What does this weigh?

A feather and a bowling ball both fall, but they tell completely different stories. Your job is to make the audience feel that weight without thinking about it.

The 12 Principles Through Physics

Squash & Stretch — Mass is conserved. When something compresses, it must bulge. A bouncing ball flattens on impact because its volume has to go somewhere.

Timing — Heavy = slow to start, slow to stop. Light = quick reactions. A truck and a bicycle brake very differently.

Slow In & Slow Out — Nothing starts or stops instantly. Acceleration and deceleration are the fingerprints of mass.

Arcs — Gravity curves everything. Even a punch follows a pendulum path from the shoulder. Straight lines feel robotic.

Secondary Action — When the main mass moves, attached masses follow with delay. Hair, clothing, jowls—they're all passengers on the physics train.

SKILL.md on GitHub