From the Art Department's Craft Mastery Special Unit
Smear frames in animation is a creative solution to making animated characters move with more fluidity in a short amount of frames. This webpage does an EXCELLENT job at explaining it with interactive examples.
THE ART OF THE SMEAR: BREAKING DOWN A SECRET ANIMATION TRICK LINK
I share this because someone recently posted screen grabs of all the smears from the recent 3D animated Spongebob film. Each of these frames is like a Dali painting. Brilliant work by the artists at Mikros, who animated the film.
