The art of Subtle Animation

It is interesting as an Animator to see the art form that is subtle animation, it is beautiful in itself it just flow from one keyframe to the next. It is easier to come back to after you have mastered the art of extremes.
John K on the topic of subtle animation

This sums up the idea of adding the little things back into your animation or it becomes lifeless and without feeling. From the website http://people.ucsc.edu/~tedw/Laban_Capture.html talking about motion capture.

Every human being has his/her own unique perceivable movement style. This is what a Laban Movement Analyst would call a "Movement Signature." A style is composed of repeated recognizable movement elements that can be notated. These elements in their combinations and phrasing capture the liveliness of that person's movement-his dynamic expressiveness.

Unfortunately, despite all advances in current Motion Capture processes, we are not yet able to fully capture this dynamic life-quality of the "Movement Signature." These limitations show especially in motion capture based animation. Many important features that convey "life-ness", weight, personality, idiosyncrasies, and other subtleties, get diminished or lost in the process

Because human beings are sense-making animals, as this example demonstrates, the perception of movement dynamics leads inevitably to interpretation ("Bold, confident" versus "wimpy"), whether the observer is viewing a movement "live" or in animation. This is why it is so important to be able to accurately capture not only where the body parts go in space and how long it takes them to get there (the structural, quantitative aspects of movement), but also find some way to amplify the qualitative aspects that seem to get lost or diminished in animation done from motion capture.