More extreme body poses usually happen in more extreme movement... It might sound more than obvious, but it can be overlooked. I found myself posing the character and twisting its limbs and body in too extreme ways, without a reason, just because I thought it looked cool... but it ended up looking and feeling unnatural. If the character is sitting or just standing, or doing something that doesn't involve much effort in doing it, it should have a more relaxed pose, and there's a difficulty in making a simple relaxed pose natural... you still need to twist and offset things and make the pose look organic, but you have to do it in a subtle way, which is always tough.

On the other way, if you don't deform the body enough in extremes, the animation doesn't have enough punch, or vitality. This can be seen in live action as well, not only in cartoon animation - frame-by-framing though live action reveals a lot of weird, contorted, sometimes horribly deformed poses, when stuff is in movement - you know, like if someone takes a photo of you when least expected... and you look at it and go "ugh, I look like crap, throw it away!!" :) So anyway, the idea is - mutilate your characters' poses and expressions during fast movement. :D

 


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