Learn animation to a polished 30-second character animation in nine months
Nine months of daily practice — about 45 minutes a day on principles drills and one ongoing scene — gets a beginner with basic drawing skills to a polished 30-second 2D character animation. Roughly 200 hours total. You will not be a working studio animator. You will own all twelve principles in your hands and be able to plan, key and inbetween a finished shot.
9 months · ~200 hours · animate a 30-second character scene with timing, weight and acting
1.Alan Becker — 12 Principles of Animation
Alan Becker's free 12-part YouTube series is the cleanest possible introduction to the Disney 12 principles — squash and stretch, anticipation, follow-through, slow in/slow out, all of them. Each video is two to three minutes. Watch one principle a day, then animate a simple bouncing-ball or pendulum exercise demonstrating it. By the end of week three you'll have a folder of 12 short tests that prove the principles to your own hands.
Free
12 Principles of Animation playlist →2.The Animator's Survival Kit — Richard Williams
Williams animated Roger Rabbit and wrote the most copied animation textbook of the last forty years. Don't read it cover to cover — use it as a lookup manual every time you start a new exercise. The walk-cycle chapter, the run-cycle chapter, and the timing tables alone will teach you more than any course. The companion DVD lectures (now on torrent and the Internet Archive) are equally famous; watch them for the demos.
~$28 expanded paperback
The Animator's Survival Kit →3.Animate one scene in Krita or OpenToonz
Pick one shot from a film you love — twenty to forty seconds, two characters or fewer — and rebuild it from scratch in a free tool. Krita has solid frame-by-frame animation; OpenToonz is what Studio Ghibli uses. Do thumbnails, then planning sketches, then keys, then breakdowns, then inbetweens, then clean-up, then colour. Spend three months on it. The finished shot is the entire portfolio you need.
Free
Krita →If this doesn't fit you
If your real interest is 3D character animation, skip Krita and animate the same scene in Blender using the free Rain or Snow rigs from the Blender Studio. Williams and Becker still apply word-for-word — the principles are universal. The 3D path will take roughly twice as long because you also have to learn the rig and the graph editor.
Why this path
Most beginners watch Disney lectures, buy four animation books, and never finish a shot longer than a bouncing ball. Becker compresses theory into hours not months, Williams answers every technical question that comes up, and the long-form scene is what teaches planning, patience and the difference between a moving drawing and an actual performance. Skipping the long shot is the universal mistake. Pick the scene in week one even if you can't animate it yet — the year is for catching up to it.