From :"Drooler's Delight":
Ed Love is great at varying how he connects his bold and clear poses. Here's a real simple general way:

But to feel the the distance (or contrast) between them even stronger, Ed Love has created 2 more poses between them that caricature the held poses. He has made an anticipation pose and an overshoot pose. These 2 poses created more space between the extremes. That extra space gives the action more punch than if he had just inbetweened the 2 holds. (The farther you travel in the same amount of frames, the more punch the action has.)



Not every part of the second pose overshoots. The overshoot is focused on the main part of the action: Buzz' arm stretching Woody.
Focus of action gets to the final pose first. The rest catches up.
Here's a longer clip with more poses and more ways to connect them.

A good animator like Ed Love varies the way he connects consecutive poses. He doesn't always do an antic and an overshoot, and he doesn't time the connections the same way for each pose. What he does do is control the whole sequence with a hierarchical structure of poses. Some poses and actions are more important than others, and he uses all the drawing and animation tools to keep your eye following the important parts of the action. He does it all with flair and fun too.

The more variations you use in your poses and actions, the more natural the characters and animation feel. Lesser animation uses the same handful of formulaic ways to connect the same stock poses over and over again and the action gets monotonous and robotic. At least for me.

Remind me to tell you about the stock Canadian anticipation pose sometime.

A lot of cartoonists tend not to see space. We see fills or positive spaces. Areas of interest to us are eyes, mouths, ears, arms, fingers, but we sometimes neglect the big spaces between the fills. And those negative spaces are needed.
I've noticed when students are copying drawings from Preston Blair or old cartoons, or even life drawing there is a tendency to shrink the open spaces.
On a 3/4 angle, you see more space behind the eye that's close to you than the one that's farther away.
Chuck Jones is a master of balancing fills with space. And of using contrasting shapes.
He doesn't pile balls on balls, yet he uses all the classic 40s animation principles.
In this earlier model sheet of the bird you can tell the WB artists are just trying to get the basic principles down and it looks more like balls on balls. Chuck's more interesting individual style developed after he got confident of his principles. Then he stopped piling up balls.
Many cartoonists today (including me, when I'm not thinking about it) draw the whole face filling the head shape, with no space around it. This makes the image cramped and unfocused. It also leaves no room for the features to move if the character needs to raise his eyebrows or open his mouth wide.

And it's wrong. Characters have craniums and you see a lot of brain space behind the face. Or you should. Your face is well in front of your head.Below, I have exaggerated the space and perspective in Elroy's face.Even in an extreme close up where perspective is distorted you can see that the face doesn't take up a lot of space within the whole head. - and that there are spaces between the features. The aren't all crammed together.

Drawing these toys and trying to capture the construction, perspective and spaces oughta make it sink in.