Simple movement animations in React

Making animations in React is surprisingly more fun than I originally thought. At first I thought it was going to be a difficult task, but with a bit of research and some CSS, you too can make some interactive apps in react.

Moving things in React is as simple as assigning a React component a style prop. This prop looks like the following:

What you see here is a stylesheet that will have its position passed down through props and changes the items position on the page. To force a re-rendering, you can just ensure that its parent container has an event handler. In this case, my Car element just needs to move vertically on the page:

On a key press, you can see that the car element has its position manually set and passed down. Its parent container is just a div that has an onKeyDown event, which controls movement. Handling the logic of movement is pretty simple. You can get the key that was pressed here by using the Synthetic Event’s key property and adjust an animation step size. Having the position handled in the GameContainer state allows you to force a re-render.

While event based movement is easy to accomplish, time based movement is a bit trickier. The gist of this is trick is to create a timer using setInterval, and then set it in state to be cleared for later. In this element, setInterval updates the position of the element every millisecond. By making this interval shorter, you can create smoother movement in your application.

Here’s a gif of this in action

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