John Alston:

OKAY. If you're the animator.. buy any stop motion capable toys, LEGO minifig, Stikbot, 3D-printed action figurer..

Now with a phone or computer app, photograph the figures doing anything (conventionally fighting). And move the characters 1/10th of an inch.

Pretty soon you'll knock a character over. Wash-rinse-repeat.

If you burn out from that - look Papagayo's lip sync software.

Now you know how gravity works- great for expressive motion, and the standard shapes for lipsync, so I think you could make a decent animation next go around.