Trigger Happy
Witness the beautiful bounces and skids of Mario in Mario 64, or the graceful, arcing somersaults and handstands of Lara in Tomb Raider III. Good characters are good largely by virtue of having a wide range of physical abilities, and by having those physical abilities particularly well animated. Just as we can often be surprised in the flesh by the beauty of a person whom we have previously seen only in photographs— because part of a human being’s attractiveness lies in the choreography of facial is of much less visual interest when frozen in time.
For a start, characters such as Crash Bandicoot or Sonic (see fig. 15) obviously borrow very heavily from the cartoon styles of Warner Bros and others: Sonic was allegedly created (after a honcho at Sega ordered that someone design them a character to compete with Nintendo’s Mario) by a deliberate crossing of Felix the Cat with Mickey Mouse, while Crash obeys the cartoon tradition of animals that look nothing like their
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