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How does cycling help animators create repeated actions such as walking?

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Animated scene from The Wild Robot showing a round-eyed robot with a fox perched on its shoulder in a forest clearing. — Animation Scene from the 2024 science fiction animated film *The Wild Robot*, directed by Chris Sanders.

In the context of animation, cycling is a labor-saving technique used to manage the high costs and time-intensive nature of frame-by-frame production.12

Rather than drawing every individual phase of a complex action, animators use cycling to create repeated movements, such as walking or talking, by drawing only a limited number of movement phases. These drawings are then repeated in a sequence to simulate continuous motion. This method serves as a shortcut to achieve fluid-looking action without the need for the hundreds of unique drawings typically required for full, frame-by-frame animation.21