omg I got that book when I was a kid! :D my dad got it for me and my brother (all three love drawing and cartoons).

Reading the description and comments ITT, I was a bit confused and kept thinking, "but I had this other book, and it was mainly about cartooning, not anatomy, and it explained things really well". Then someone here mentioned "lines of action" and I thought "wait a minute ..", clicked the link and it was that book :) :)

Well, I am glad that I had the opportunity to learn from such a classic when I was young. I have to agree, a lot of the ideas, techniques and really fundamentals stuck with me and shaped my cartooning style over the years.

See, anatomy is IMO not the end-all of cartooning. When I hear the word, I think about super realistic sketches of human figures where you can see all the muscles, figuring out how the clothes would wrap and fold around the body, etc. This is important if you want to draw the Silver Surfer or US super hero style comics, but that's never really been my thing.

The importance of "anatomy" in cartooning, for me, is limited to the way human body parts are connected to eachother, how they can move w/respect to eachother, and their relative sizes. As opposed to the almost biological/physiological detail I have in mind when I hear "anatomy" with respect to illustrations ...

For instance, and this is something that is treated in the Preston Blair book very well, which for me immediately sprang to mind as an example why "anatomy" really is not the end-all of cartooning: facial expressions.

Facial expressions in cartoons are nothing like how a human face actually moves. They are caricatured far beyond physical possibility (but not "beyond recognition", as I shall explain). They are NOT based on careful observation of what a human face actually looks like when it experiences a particular emotion. Look at a real crying face, a real hysterical-laughter face, that's not how cartoon characters emote at all[0]. And you can't learn how to do cartoon-emotions by studying actual human faces. Instead, they are based on the biological concept of the "supernormal stimulus"[1]. These don't exist in real life (except where someone else has already drawn/modelled them, advertisements are a good source). You have to figure them out by experimentation, not observation, because you can't know which attributes can be exaggerated for the psychological/biological supernormal stimulus effect (which can be weird and unexpected). Instead, you just draw hundreds or thousands of quick-sketch cartoon faces, with the eyes and the mouth and the ears and whatnot, just-so, randomly trying out weird configurations, anything, and figure out how it affects the perceived mood/emotion of these faces. Or body language. The other option is to copy and try out styles or ideas you like, or happen to notice (same as when learning typography, you start getting an eye for it). Or perhaps like Robert Crumb, do supernormal stimuli by just drawing whatever's your fetish.

The Preston Blair book only half-covers this, btw (if I remember correctly, it's been 10-15 years or so...), they talk about baby and toddler like configurations of the face and body proportions. Maybe also the sexual "Jessica Rabbit" type of supernormal stimuli, I forget. These are powerful, but not the only ones that exist. In particular for facial expressions, like chords and scales in music, some very powerful and useful tricks are very weird and unorthodox (or maybe I've just not figured out the reason behind the quirky sequency that is the minor Blues scale, which works so well no matter what you play with it).

Either way, my point is these exaggerations are not based on real-life observable phenomena, but on how the human psychology reacts to superstimuli (which you need to create before you can observe the reaction--which, fortunately, is quite easy to do).

Also the lines of action. are these based on anatomy? The Preston Blair book has that beautiful example of an animated character throwing a baseball, frame by frame[2]. That's not at all how a human moves IRL :) It is, however, an exaggeration/caricature of what our brains expect of rubbery bouncy physics. You can't observe that in real-life, because it never really happens like that.

Another example is the famous Pixar desk-lamp animation. It's not even got anatomy. But it moves according to some weird exaggerated physics model, and it has emotions, what, how? Because it plays to our minds, not real-life.

Another note, I'm not a native English speaker, I must have had only a very basic understanding of English when I was 11 or 12. Still, the Preston-Blair book was quite easy to follow, because most of it was explained as illustrations. Just a hint, if any non-English HNer is considering a present for their kids (they have to love drawing first, though) :)

There is one "step by step" part of that book which I didn't really like very much, and felt to me (then) it was imposing a certain style too much. This is the bit where it explains how to build a character made from spheres/ellipsoids and cylinders. I never liked first sketching shapes that you were going to draw over and erase later on anyhow. But then, this is probably exactly a type of technique that you'd learn if you'd start with anatomy as well :) I probably learned from that as well, but at the time it felt a bit restricting.

[0] which is brilliantly subverted by Ren & Stimpy, with their hyper realistic cut-scenes and close-ups, going one step beyond the fictional cartoon world into the surreal, for dramatic emphasis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstimulus

[2] thanks to the Internet, you can click and view the cartoon here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3vhl1_mgm-batty-baseball-1... the jokes are corny, the cartoon-animation is beautiful. take note how almost none of it is realistic.