Visual Language - Life Drawing in an animation context - Disney's emphasis

I came across an interesting article; Why Disney sends its animators to life drawing classes

Which details how Disney urges its employees to participate in life drawing classes. This to me, highlights the importance of life drawing in an animation context with one of the biggest animation companies in the world, giving free classes to its workforce, also giving them an incentive by the fact they are free.

This video solidifies the importance of life drawing in an animation context, it was a great watch and particularly educational. 

One of the most interesting points I found from this was; wether your doing something stylised or realistic, there has to be a basis that you are abstracting or designing from, if you start designing something that doesn't have a reference you are apparently abstracting from the abstraction or lying from a lie. This is what we saw in the medieval periods, as it wasn't recommended to draw from life. Instead of looking at the human form, these artists looked to Greek art, which therefore meant we had artists making copies of copies. Copies of the copies of the copies that were done from life, getting further and further away from any life and realism that was in there;

This lack of human reference is evident with the bad proportions, especially on facial features, but also within the sizing of the head in relation to arms etc.

What these artists did with drawing from Greek art, is the same thing nowadays with people 'copying' or 'replicating' a certain style that they like. What you draw, should be your own abstraction of reality, rather than copying someone else's as opposed to what they drew from to come up with their style. You can be "influenced" of course, but you still have to add your own truth.

They also highlighted form and function in relation to your character. You can illustrate a picture as beautiful as you like, but that might not necessarily translate to a physical thing you are building in 3D so you have to understand form and function and convey that effectively.

When we are presented with evidence of this lack of life drawing within art, it exposes how vital an element it is when it comes to drawing the life form, more especially in animation when we have to consider movement, and therefore how the human form flows through a space. This lack of life drawing is even evident in the infant stages of Disney, where characters have loss of form with boneless legs. 

You can have a character as stylised as you like, however he/she still has to move with some form, form referenced from life.