A Guide to the History of Animation

What is animation?

Animation is the process of making something from artwork come alive through movies. Techniques are used to make it seem like something is moving and tell a story for those watching on-screen. Some may think that early Greek pottery showed some form of animation since there were figures whose expressions could change when you looked at them from different angles.

What Is the History of Animation?

This fascinating history of animation has spanned millennia. Animators from every era could make their kind of movie without cameras or recording equipment before Oscar-winning CGI spirits such as Pixar's Toy Story 3 (2010) and Academy Award winners like Finding Nemo (2003). Before energy started incorporating sound in 1928, J. Stuart Blackton's The Enchanted Drawing (1900) was the first animated sequence ever captured on film. It featured a live-action actor who played multiple parts using stop motion technique and props - including sewing cork onto a doll so it would float across the water. Other groundbreakers included Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908), which had crude stick figures moving around inside images drawn on paper; this toy theatre aesthetic anticipated surrealism at a time when its forerunner was unknown outside France. At 14 minutes long, these eight simple frames were believed to be the first examples of cutout construction in filmmaking.

What Was the First Animated Film?

Émile Reynaud's Pauvre Pierrot (1892) was created using a longer image roll for the praxinoscope, allowing a longer viewing time. Pauvre Pierrot is often credited as the first animated film because Reynaud's picture roll was hand-painted with 500 individual images (rather than using photographs). However, film historians argue that Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908 ) is the first instance of a film produced with traditional animation techniques, making it the first actual animated movie.

Some consider Britsh-American producer J. Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) to be the animation industry's first film. Blackton used stop-motion animation to depict a series of animated characters changing movements throughout the three-minute movie. Humorous Phases of Funny Faces was the first animated film recorded on standard picture film, technically making it the first animated movie captured on real film.

What Was the First Feature-Length Animated Movie?

The first animated feature film was Walt Disney Studios' Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which used a technique called cel animation. Cel animation is where animators paint images onto sheets of transparent celluloid, or cellophane, before being transferred onto successive drawings to create motion and save time.

What Is the History of Computer Animation?

People began experimenting with computer graphics for science and research purposes as early as the 1940s. Composer, animator, and inventor John Whitney Sr. built a custom computer device from a converted Kerrison Predictor (a World War II-era anti-aircraft fire-control system). They could produce precise lines and shapes using mathematics to control the device in more specific ways. Whitney Sr.with the assistance of legendary graphic designer Saul Bass, animated the opening title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo. The classic movie was considered one of the first live-action films to use computer animation.

By the 1960s, innovative digital graphics boomed as more computers entered the mainstream, and by the 1970s, many people began using computer graphics as an art form. Graphic design tools and software for computers continued to evolve, and government funding allotted to the University of Utah saw an emergence in groundbreaking animation projects, notably one produced by Ed Catmull, Hand/Face (1972). The abilities of computer animation continued to expand as more people discovered the capabilities of this new medium, eventually evolving into the CGI masterpieces that dominate our media today.