Family Guy, built around the darkly emotional Peter (center), is an altogether edgier world. ™ © 2001 FOX Broadcasting.

Peter shows just enough of this potential, with little insight, naturally, to keep the belief system going. Of course, it’s difficult to elicit this kind of response to such a character without the context of the people around him. We really only understand this about Peter through the eyes of his family, particularly his wife, Lois.

This dark side of love is handled very believably. Lois’s family background confirms why she is prone to keep rooting for him. And the only time Peter gets even a moment of real awareness, they tie it to the extreme of a life threatening fire and then take it all back with a time travel machine built by Stewie for his own nefarious purposes.

All this opens up new options for the audience that would likely be repelled by him. We can view him through Lois’s eyes and either join in her fantasy or become aghast on her behalf and invest in the hope she’ll come to her senses one day. This doesn’t make Peter any more likable but it does give audience members another, equally compelling, way to stay engaged.

The world built around Peter reflects the darker emotions he elicits. It is an altogether edgier, less certain world and the characters within it — including mother hating Stewie, rich girl and former slut, Lois and the aforementioned alcoholic pet dog, Brian — are consequently that much more dysfunctional.

So characters interact and therefore create each other and create story but only in part. Another factor has to come from the personal life of each character, something that exists beyond the boundaries of their immediate interactions.

This greater life, including personal history, not only affects story by giving characters the raw material that helps define their interactions, but also acts in less obvious ways, taking us back into the realm of performance but this time within context. So personal history provides the source of performance subtleties, the specifics of what gestures and exactly how they are performed, of how a character chooses to dress and do his hair and how well he pulls off his intended look and so on, all of which serves to round out the sense of character.

What rounding out a character really means is giving a character the same sense of a life fully lived that any ordinary human achieves just by virtue of being alive. This birthright includes not only a sense of history but also a life being actively lived during the course of the given story.

Stephen Barnes, formerly of Pixar, observes that animators need to understand and feel what the character is thinking, instead of what they're saying.

Stephen Barnes comments from his experience:

“I’ve often observed a tendency amongst animators to focus on their specific shot, ignoring the context of their characters and not seeing their circumstances as being slices of a bigger pie. All too often we seize up on receiving a shot assignment. We consider the number of characters, how they are staged in their layouts, how many frames the shot is and how many days to complete it. Listening to the actor’s voice read is the starter’s pistol — we hear the words, and fly off our marks plotting out how to move the character based on what sounds the dialogue makes.”

“But this is the point where what we actually need is to understand and feel what the character is thinking, instead of what they’re saying. We’re down to the level of illustrated radio if we don’t respect the thought processes behind a character’s speech. The shots leading up to ours establish the crucial emotional and intellectual tone that each character is sounding if we could only slow down long enough to feel it. Just like in real life, our context may be the present, but it is influenced in varying degrees by events leading up to it.”

“Every character on your stage was in a specific headspace mere frames before your shot comes onto the screen; it’s our job as animators to do the “pre-roll” and get into those motions and emotions, ready to hit the ground running. All too often it’s tempting to only think of the shots in terms of the dialogue cues. If you get into that trap, you’ll literally have your characters standing around waiting for their line (not unlike small town little theatre, where the amateur actors remain idle, fearful of missing their cues!) This yanks them out of the context of their present space.”

“It is essential to watch the footage before your shot and use it to imagine what the character would need to be doing right from frame one.”

You can take this kind of mindfulness to another level by also considering what your character is doing when he is not on camera, his hidden life between the shots. Now here are the components of a vivid life — perhaps you have a character under great stress who has a secret drinking problem. So between key shots, he is actually slipping off to take a nip.

Think of the performance possibilities this new off screen context opens up —the character gradually deteriorating as the action becomes more critical, throwing the supporting characters into disarray. Maybe some of these characters know about his problem, knowledge that they may or may not openly share through word or gesture, while others are mystified, so now this secret context begins to affect the context of the story itself.

You could also then start throwing the audience hints of what’s going on — playing on their general knowledge of the signs of substance abuse. These hints could go beyond performance into the settings, offering glimpses of hidden stashes or half filled glasses always at hand whenever the character is around and so on.