A new $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation is enabling Alejandro Garcia to teach a class at San Jose State University called The Physics of Animation. But his students aren’t physicists. They are cartoon animators.

The point of the class is to provide animation students with a requisite knowledge of the laws of physics to make their cartoons realistic. For a cartoon to be believable, it has to largely replicate the laws of physics. That way, the characters’ extraordinary actions—whether heroic or comical—become the exceptions to the rule. And it’s those exceptions to reality that make cartoons so engaging. It’s what makes it funny when the Coyote runs past the Road Runner and off the edge of a cliff, and then has that moment suspended in mid-air to contemplate his fate.

Without the foundation and backdrop of realism, the extraordinary and exaggerated actions don’t seem to have any context. According to illustrator Courtney Granner, who co-directs the animation SJSU program, “You have to know what the rules are in order to break them.”

Well, this is more than just good cartoon theory.

It’s the foundation of creative theory on a much broader scale. The Impressionist Degas advised aspiring artists, “One must copy and copy the masters before one has the right to do a radish from nature.”

The 19th century French impressionists took Degas’ advice to heart. They cluttered the Louvre with their easels and brushes as they painted and re-painted the masters’ works from earlier centuries before innovating within the Impressionist school.

The principle also applies to various marketing disciplines:

Before a challenger brand can cut its own unique swath in the marketplace, the architects of that brand must study the competitive landscape and find as many points of similarity as possible with competitors. A requisite level of similarity with established category leaders must be achieved before rule-breaking differentiation can steal attention away from the big guys.

Logo design must first begin with an understanding of the basic principles of balance, structure and contrast before a breakthrough design can be achieved.

Website development must first take into consideration all that has been learned in the past 15 years about user interface and user experience before a relevant innovation can change the way people interact with a new site.

The list goes on, but the principle is the same: “You have to know what the rules are in order to break them.”