Animation Writing and Development

Chapter 13

Dialogue

The Purpose of Dialogue

You want to show your story, not tell it! At its best, animation is all about action and movement; it’s not about words. Animation explores space. It experiments with time. When Jackie Chan is making his moves, he doesn’t need a lot of words to dish out disaster to the evil-doers. There are cartoons with no dialogue at all! The norm in television cartoons is three dialogue blocks at once with no more than three short sentences per block. Action cartoons will probably use less dialogue than prime-time cartoons. Once again follow the general dialogue ratio of the sample script for that series. In a feature where you’re delving deeper into character, a little more dialogue might be necessary, but even ...