Let’s take Inside Out for example.
In every scene, you can watch each emotion having different reactions and build-ups to their next piece of dialogue. I’d imagine that would be a nightmare for animation teams that are designing each scene.
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Not quite for modern CGI
For CGI there is a team that creates each character in the computer. They design it and program it.
But then the characters can be animated to do what the director wants. So someone directs the scene and chooses what the character does. They don’t animate each character separately and then put them together in the scene.
It used to be that each character was drawn separately and then layered onto the scene. And there was a separate team for each character. There would be a single person dedicated to a single detail like the sparkles of a magic wand.
I doubt it’s the animators figuring out how they’d move. It’s likely a character design team coming up with the way they move, then the animators interpret that.
So sadness is likely described as having a slow plodding movement. Likely with examples for the animators to work off. Anxiety likely a frenetic movement. Ennui a fluid movement, etc.
I do know that one of the things they had to make sure that things were right was that they had a team of teenage girls going in every couple of months to watch and critique the film.
Different teams/studios have different workflows, so there’s no universal. An oft-cited example is how Disney’s classic 2D animated features had an animator (team) assigned to each character, while Japanese anime usually has one animator assigned to each cut (cut = the full sequence between camera changes), who draws all the characters in that scene. Not sure on the specifics with 3D animation, but I’m sure workflows vary there as well.
As for how they keep character movements consistent, teams usually develop a “bible” of reference material during pre-production, featuring drawings of how characters would look in different expressions, their various signature poses, and probably some example test animation, too. The animators use this material to inform how they animate, and at the top an animation supervisor reviews the work and gives feedback/makes corrections to ensure it’s all consistent.
I saw an interview about the making of Tom and Jerry, and they had different animators for different bits. One was really good at giving things mass, so they had him animate when Tom was carrying an entire horse, for instance.
I’m a hobbyist animator. I know studios (especially big ones) have dedicated teams to the different tasks involved in making a movie, even a short one.
The characters need to be modelled, textured and rigged (applying “bones” and tools to make it possible later to animate.)
The rigged models are then passed to the animators and later put together (composed) with the background/sky/props/sfx.
Like in a movie you may have a team and an experienced supervisor to assure the quality and continuity.
Worth noticing a pro studio would spend weeks or months in pre-production, just to sort out the needs for different skills/characters/props and of course soundtrack and voiceovers, and that’s (again) another different skillset..
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