Chop Shop is a combiner formed from five fat round bugs. He would simply not be able to move around in his humanoid form so easily. They probably should have made the bugs skinnier, or more oblong.
The animators cheat on ALL designs. Transformers Prime has scenes where Megatron does poses that make no physical sense simply because armor shouldn't be able to squeeze like it's made of meat. It's part of the proccess of making robot characters stay expressive.
Yeah, the animators *have* to cheat on all the designs because the designs weren't based off the toys or created with toys in mind like the original RID, Unicron Trilogy and Animated were- that's why we got some of our most show-accurate toys ever from those lines. My favorite example is Bumblebee- without seeing it in motion, you have no idea how his design turns into a car, aside from the door wings and shoulderpads. Seeing it moving, you can see how the grille of the car becomes his chest, and the hood splits into the legs, but in order to get to their final positions, parts literally just explode off his body and move around and reshape in space. They just do it so fast that you don't notice it. I hated it at first, but as time has gone on I've seen it as more of an opportunity for the toy engineers to work their black-magic muscles like they do now and then. Strongarm has a more apparent transformation scheme, but her parts shift in size MUCH more apparently, especially in scenes where she's with Sideswipe. Funny enough, outside of some minor mass shifting, I could actually envision a simple transformation scheme for Chop Shop, as the bulbous bug shapes make it pretty easy to form the larger, rounder parts of his combined form.
Animation cheats are to be expected. Besides the detailed sequences for Cybertron (and to a lesser extent, Energon), I have never seen an accurate Transformation in any animated fiction. That and with the designs the way they are, it's obvious animators need to cheat poses out of them as well.
Yup, even blocky robots use animation cheats. It just gives em more expression, y'know? One of my faves has always been Sludge getting his eyes smacked outta his head by Devastator
