Creating Anime Facial Expressions | Pose & Emotion Breakdown

Facial expressions in anime are often pushed, stylized, and emotionally clear — and that all starts with strong posing.
In this video, I break down how I create anime-style facial expressions in Maya, focusing on exaggerated poses and clear emotional intent. Using an anime character, I walk through my thought process as an animator and explain why certain facial poses work better than others for communicating emotion.

This video covers:
How to approach facial posing for anime characters
Pushing expressions while keeping them readable
Using pose and shape to clearly sell emotion
Translating anime-style exaggeration into Maya

This breakdown is aimed at animators and artists who want to improve their facial posing and better understand how emotion is communicated in anime-style characters.
If you found this helpful, let me know which expression or character you’d like to see explored next

Timecode
0:00 - Intro
0:15 - Rig I will use
0:47 - Let's start
1:01 - Pose 1
1:58 - Apply squash and stretch with the posing
2:45 - Timelapse - Creating angry mouth shape
2:54 - Adding A Symmetry in the face
3:17 - Squashing 1 side of the face
4:23 - Cheek puffs
5:00 - Final tweaks for angry pose
5:34 - Creating Extreme Angry pose
5:52 - Timelapse - Focusing on sharp and strong shapes
6:08 - Moving the teeth around
6:23 - Timelapse - Sculpting mouth shape with tweakers
6:41 - Reviewing poses
7:05 - Half eyelid pose - Chilled
7:25 - Tipmelapse - Posing a carefree eye pose using tweakers
7:34 - Mirror Tool!
7:59 - Timelapse - Posing Eyebrows
8:04 - Reviewing Poses
8:13 - Posing a Happy expression
8:33 - Exploring ideas
8:57 - Opening up the face
9:01 - Timelapse - More white around the eyes + posing mouth
9:44 - Super Happy Expression
10:39 - Timelapse - continuing with the posing
10:52 - Final Thoughts
11:09 - Outro