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Comment by metakermit | Hacker News Reader

If you’re interested in this topic I really recommend The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams (the director of animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit):

https://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Willia...

Most of the points from the article seem to be derived from the stuff the book covers in more details.

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Survival Kit is an advanced book that dives into the deep end, The Illusion Of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson [1] (two of the guys on a bunch of the early Disney features) and Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair [2] (countless MGM shorts) will give you a solid grounding in the basics.

The whole article focuses on expanding a list of principles of animation from Illusion.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Life-Disney-Animation/dp/078...

2: https://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Animation-Collectors-Preston-...

Do you have any recommendations for someone who wants to learn to draw, but currently can't even scribble a decent stick figure?

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. Learning to draw is actually mostly about learning to see; not seeing the objects as we usually do, but seeing the light and shadow that form them.

These are really old, but I found them very helpful for beginning cartooning years ago: http://karmatoons.com/drawing/drawing.htm

andrew loomis has really helped me, search on archive.org, the books are not in copyright anymore..

Drawabox has some great exercises and starts by teaching the mechanical skills necessary for drawing.

https://drawabox.com/

Check out the Traditional Drawing list here: https://www.ctrlpaint.com/library/

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