Animation is a method in which figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film.
1. Animation
Animation is a method in which figures are manipulated to appear
as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or
painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed
and exhibited on film. Today, most animations are made with
computer-generated imagery (CGI). Computer animation can be
very detailed 3D animation, while 2D computer animation can be
used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth or faster real-time
renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop motion
technique to two and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts,
puppets or clay figures.
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Commonly the effect of animation is achieved by a rapid succession
of sequential images that minimally differ from each other. The
illusion—as in motion pictures in general—is thought to rely on
the phi phenomenon and beta movement, but the exact causes are
still uncertain. Analog mechanical animation media that rely on the
rapid display of sequential images include the phénakisticope,
zoetrope, flip book, praxinoscope and film. Television and video are
popular electronic animation media that originally were analog and
now operate digitally. For display on the computer, techniques like
animated GIF and Flash animation were developed.
Animation is more pervasive than many people realize. Apart from
short films, feature films, television series, animated GIFs and
other media dedicated to the display of moving images, animation
is also prevalent in video games, motion graphics, user interfaces
and visual effects.
The physical movement of image parts through simple
mechanics—for instance moving images in magic lantern
shows—can also be considered animation. The mechanical
manipulation of three-dimensional puppets and objects to emulate
3. living beings has a very long history in automata. Electronic
automata were popularized by Disney as animatronics.
Animators are artists who specialize in creating animation.
Etymology
The word "animation" stems from the Latin "animātiōn", stem of
"animātiō", meaning "a bestowing of life". The primary meaning
of the English word is "liveliness" and has been in use much longer
than the meaning of "moving image medium".
Before cinematography
4. Hundreds of years before the introduction of true animation,
people from all over the world enjoyed shows with moving figures
that were created and manipulated manually in puppetry,
automata, shadow play and the magic lantern. The multi-media
phantasmagoria shows that were very popular in West-European
theatres from the late 18th century through the first half of the 19th
century, featured lifelike projections of moving ghosts and other
frightful imagery in motion.
In 1833, the stroboscopic disc (better known as the phénakisticope)
introduced the principle of modern animation with sequential
images that were shown one by one in quick succession to form an
optical illusion of motion pictures. Series of sequential images had
occasionally been made over thousands of years, but the
stroboscopic disc provided the first method to represent such
images in fluent motion and for the first time had artists creating
series with a proper systematic breakdown of movements. The
stroboscopic animation principle was also applied in the zoetrope
(1866), the flip book (1868) and the praxinoscope (1877). The
average 19th-century animation contained about 12 images that
were displayed as a continuous loop by spinning a device manually.
The flip book often contained more pictures and had a beginning
and end, but its animation would not last longer than a few
seconds. The first to create much longer sequences seems to have
5. been Charles-Émile Reynaud, who between 1892 and 1900 had
much success with his 10- to 15-minute-long Pantomimes
Lumineuses.
Silent era
When cinematography eventually broke through in 1895 after
animated pictures had been known for decades, the wonder of the
realistic details in the new medium was seen as its biggest
accomplishment. Animation on film was not commercialized until a
few years later by manufacturers of optical toys, with
chromolithography film loops (often traced from live-action
footage) for adapted toy magic lanterns intended for kids to use at
home. It would take some more years before animation reached
movie theatres.
6. After earlier experiments by movie pioneers J. Stuart Blackton,
Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, Segundo de Chomón and Edwin S.
Porter (among others), Blackton's The Haunted Hotel (1907) was
the first huge stop motion success, baffling audiences by showing
objects that apparently moved by themselves in full photographic
detail, without signs of any known stage trick.
Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) is the oldest known example of
what became known as traditional (hand-drawn) animation. Other
great artistic and very influential short films were created by
Ladislas Starevich with his puppet animations since 1910 and by
Winsor McCay with detailed drawn animation in films such as Little
Nemo (1911) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).
During the 1910s, the production of animated "cartoons" became
an industry in the US. Successful producer John Randolph Bray and
animator Earl Hurd, patented the cel animation process that
dominated the animation industry for the rest of the century. Felix
the Cat, who debuted in 1919, became the first animated superstar.
Golden age of US animation
In 1928, Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse and Minnie
Mouse, popularized film with synchronized sound and put Walt
Disney's studio at the forefront of the animation industry. In 1932,
7. Disney also introduced the innovation of full colour (in Flowers and
Trees) as part of a three-year-long exclusive deal with Technicolor.
The enormous success of Mickey Mouse is seen as the start of the
golden age of American animation that would last until the 1960s.
The United States dominated the world market of animation with a
plethora of cel-animated theatrical shorts. Several studios would
introduce characters that would become very popular and would
have long-lasting careers, including Walt Disney Productions'
Goofy (1932) and Donald Duck (1934), Warner Bros. Cartoons'
Looney Tunes characters like Daffy Duck (1937), Bugs Bunny
(1938/1940), Tweety (1941/1942), Sylvester the Cat (1945), Wile E.
Coyote and Road Runner (1949), Fleischer Studios/Paramount
Cartoon Studios' Betty Boop (1930), Popeye (1933), Superman
(1941) and Casper (1945), MGM cartoon studio's Tom and Jerry
(1940) and Droopy, Walter Lantz Productions/Universal Studio
Cartoons' Woody Woodpecker (1940), Terrytoons/20th Century
Fox's Mighty Mouse (1942) and United Artists' Pink Panther (1963).
Animated features before CGI
In 1917, Italian-Argentine director Quirino Cristiani made the first
feature-length film El Apóstol (now lost), which became a critical
and commercial success. It was followed by Cristiani's Sin dejar
8. rastros in 1918, but one day after its premiere the film was
confiscated by the government.
After working on it for three years, Lotte Reiniger released the
German feature-length silhouette animation Die Abenteuer des
Prinzen Achmed in 1926, the oldest extant animated feature.
In 1937, Walt Disney Studios premiered their first animated feature,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, still one of the highest-grossing
traditional animation features as of May 2020. The Fleischer
studios followed this example in 1939 with Gulliver's Travels with
some success. Partly due to foreign markets being cut off by the
Second World War, Disney's next features Pinocchio, Fantasia (both
1940) and Fleischer Studios' second animated feature Mr. Bug Goes
to Town (1941/1942) failed at the box office. For decades afterwards
9. Disney would be the only American studio to regularly produce
animated features, until Ralph Bakshi became the first to also
release more than a handful features. Sullivan-Bluth Studios began
to regularly produce animated features starting with An American
Tail in 1986.
Although relatively few titles became as successful as Disney's
features, other countries developed their own animation industries
that produced both short and feature theatrical animations in a
wide variety of styles, relatively often including stop motion and
cutout animation techniques. Russia's Soyuzmultfilm animation
studio, founded in 1936, produced 20 films (including shorts) per
year on average and reached 1,582 titles in 2018. China,
10. Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic, Italy, France and Belgium were
other countries that more than occasionally released feature films,
while Japan became a true powerhouse of animation production,
with its own recognizable and influential anime style of effective
limited animation.
Animation on television
Animation became very popular on television in the 1950s, when
television sets started to become common in most wealthy
countries. Cartoons were mainly programmed for children, on
convenient time slots, and especially US youth spent many hours
watching Saturday-morning cartoons. Many classic cartoons found
a new life on the small screen and by the end of the 1950s,
production of new animated cartoons started to shift from
theatrical releases to TV series. Hanna-Barbera Productions was
especially prolific and had huge hit series, such as The Flintstones
(1960–1966) (the first prime time animated series), Scooby-Doo
(since 1969) and Belgian co-production The Smurfs (1981–1989).
The constraints of American television programming and the
demand for an enormous quantity resulted in cheaper and quicker
limited animation methods and much more formulaic scripts.
Quality dwindled until more daring animation surfaced in the late
1980s and in the early 1990s with hit series such as The Simpsons
(since 1989) as part of a "renaissance" of American animation.
