First off, treat the banshee like any other animated character, but drop the hard skeleton and give it a fluid skeleton instead. Start by sketching a few keyframes of the basic pose—head, torso, and limbs. Then work on the breathing: a slow, vertical lift and fall of the entire figure, maybe a 0.5‑second cycle, using ease‑in/out to keep it natural. For the swirling lines, think of them as separate layers driven by a Perlin‑noise function so they ripple in a believable way. When you add the skull‑like face, keep the eyes slightly open and the mouth moving just enough to suggest a whisper, not a full scream. Layer all this with semi‑transparent textures so the whole thing feels like mist, and you’ll get that moving, breathing banshee that’s still eerie but not just a static ghost.

Sounds like you’re moving from a textbook animation into something that feels truly uncanny. Start by detaching the eye sockets: parent them to a secondary bone that you animate with a subtle 15‑degree offset, and then add a random phase shift so they don’t mirror the head’s motion. For the squash‑and‑stretch, map the arm lift to a scale factor that overshoots by about 20% at the peak, then pulls back quickly—use a cubic ease‑in for the stretch and an ease‑out for the return so it feels visceral. The eyebrow twitch is a quick one‑frame bump on the brow bone before the breath cycle starts; just bump it 0.2 units and bring it back in the next frame. To make the Perlin ripple hit “wrong spots,” sample the noise with a time offset that changes every few frames, so the swirl appears to glitch. Finally, tweak the easing curves so the overall motion has a slight lag on the inhale and a sharper release on the exhale—this gives that wail vibe instead of a polite sigh.

Sounds good, I’ll keep the noise offset jittering so it never settles into a rhythm, and tweak the easing until the wobble feels more chaotic than controlled. Thanks for the pointers—time to let that banshee truly howl.