What is Animation?

No matter how old or young you are, everyone has come into contact with animation at some point in their lives, whether they themselves are animators working at a big company, flash artists at home on their laptops, or merely a fan watching a movie. Animation has helped sculpt the world into what it is today, giving artists of all kinds a brand new way to tell a story. It first appeared in the 19th century, where there were several devices invented to flash pictures quickly at the viewer, making it appear as though they were moving. There are many different kinds of animation, such as:

Though there are many examples of attempts at animation that existed before any of these things, such as paintings on vases and flash books.
 * Hand Drawn (2D) Animation
 * Flash (Model) Animation
 * Computer Animation

Animation in History
Numerous devices which successfully displayed animated images were introduced well before the advent of the motion picture. These devices were used to entertain, amaze and sometimes even frighten people. The majority of these devices didn’t project their images and accordingly could only be viewed by a single person at any one time. For this reason they were considered toys rather than being a large scale entertainment industry like later animation. Many of these devices are still built by and for film students being taught the basic principles of animation.

The magic lantern (c. 1650)
The magic lantern is an early predecessor of the modern day projector. It consisted of a translucent oil painting and a simple lamp. In a darkened room, the image would appear projected onto an adjacent flat surface. It was often used to project demonic, frightening images in order to convince people that they were witnessing the supernatural. Some slides for the lanterns contained moving parts which makes the magic lantern the earliest known example of projected animation. The origin of the magic lantern is debated, but in the 15th century the Venetian inventor Giovanni Fontana published an illustration of a device which projected the image of a demon in his Liber Instrumentorum. The earliest known actual magic lanterns are usually credited to Christiaan Huygens or Athanasius Kircher.[5] [6]

Thaumatrope (1824)
A thaumatrope was a simple toy used in the Victorian era. A thaumatrope is a small circular disk or card with two different pictures on each side that was attached to a piece of string or a pair of strings running through the centre. When the string is twirled quickly between the fingers, the two pictures appear to combine into a single image. The thaumatrope demonstrates the Phi phenomenon, the brain's ability to persistently perceive an image. Its invention is often credited to Sir John Herschel. John A. Paris popularized the invention when he used one to illustrate the Phi phenomenon in 1824 to the Royal College of Physicians.[7]

Phenakistoscope (1831)
A phenakistoscope disc by Eadweard Muybridge (1893).The phenakistoscope was an early animation device. It was invented in 1831 simultaneously by the Belgian Joseph Plateau and the Austrian Simon von Stampfer. It consists of a disk with a series of images, drawn on radii evenly spaced around the center of the disk. Slots are cut out of the disk on the same radii as the drawings, but at a different distance from the center. The device would be placed in front of a mirror and spun. As the phenakistoscope spun, a viewer would looks through the slots at the reflection of the drawings which would only become visible when a slot passes by the viewer’s eye.[8] This created the illusion of animation.

Zoetrope (180 AD; 1834)
The zoetrope was produced in 1834 by William George Horner and operates on the same principle as the phenakistoscope. It was a cylindrical spinning device with several frames of animation printed along the interior circumference. There are vertical slits around the sides through which an observer can view the moving images on the opposite side when the cylinder spins. As it spins the material between the viewing slits moves in the opposite direction of the images on the other side and in doing so serves as a rudimentary shutter. The zoetrope had several advantages over the phenakistoscope. It didn’t require the use of a mirror to view the illusion, and because of its cylindrical shape it could be viewed by several people at once.

In China around 180 AD the prolific inventor [Ting Huan] (丁緩) invented a device similar to the modern zoetrope. It was made of translucent paper or mica panels and was operated by being hung over a lamp so that vanes at the top would rotate as they came in contact with the warm air currents rising from the lamp. This rotation, if it reached the ideal speed triggered the same illusion of quick animation as a more modern zoetrope.[9] [10] [11] [12]

Flip book (1868)
A 1886 illustration of the kineograph.The first flip book was patented in 1868 by John Barnes Linnett as the kineograph. A flip book is just a book with particularly springy pages that have an animated series of images printed near the unbound edge. A viewer bends the pages back and then rapidly releases them one at a time so that each image viewed springs out of view to momentarily reveal the next image just before it does the same. They operate on the same principle as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope what with the rapid replacement of images with others, but they create the illusion without any thing serving as a flickering shutter as the slits had in the previous devices. They accomplish this because of the simple physiological fact that the eye can focus more easily on stationary objects than on moving ones. Flip books were more often cited as inspiration by early animated filmmakers than the previously discussed devices which didn’t reach quite as wide of an audience.[13] In previous animation devices the images were drawn in circles which meant diameter of the circles physically limited just how many images could reasonably be displayed. While the book format still brings about something of a physical limit to the length of the animation, this limit is significantly longer than the round devices. Even this limit was able to be broken with the invention of the mutoscope in 1894. It consisted of a long circularly bound flip book in a box with a crank handle to flip through the pages.

Praxinoscope (1877)
The praxinoscope, invented by French scientist Charles-Émile Reynaud, combined the cylindrical design of the zoetrope with the viewing mirror of the phenakistoscope. The mirrors were mounted still in the center of the spinning ring of slots and drawings so that the image can be more clearly seen no matter what the device’s radius. Reynaud also developed a larger version of the praxinoscope that could be projected onto a screen, called the Théâtre Optique.

The silent era
A still from Fantasmagorie (1908).Poster for Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).Charles-Émile Reynaud's Théâtre Optique is the earliest known example of projected animation. It predates even photographic video devices such as Thomas Edison's 1883 invention, the Kinetsocope, and the Lumière brothers' 1884 invention, the cinematograph. Reynaud exhibited three of his animations on October 28, 1892 at Musée Grévin in Paris, France. The only surviving example of these three is Pauvre Pierrot which was 500 frames long.[14]

After the cinematograph popularized the motion picture, the endless possibilities of animation began to be explored in much greater depth.[15] A short stop-motion animation was produced in 1899 by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton called The Humpty Dumpty Circus.[16] Stop motion is a video technique in which real objects are moved around in the time between their images being recorded so that when the images are viewed as a video, they appear to be moving by some invisible force. It directly descends from various early “trick” film techniques which used video to realistically display the impossible. A few other films featuring the stop motion technique were released afterward, but the first to receive wide scale appreciation was Blackton’s Haunted Mansion which baffled viewers and inspired a lot of further development in animation.[17] In 1906 Blackton also made the first drawn work of animation on standard film, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. It features faces being drawn on a chalkboard which suddenly begin to move autonomously.

Fantasmagorie, by the French director Émile Cohl (also called Émile Courtet), is also noteworthy. It was screened for the first time on August 17, 1908 at Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris. Cohl later went to Fort Lee, New Jersey near New York City in 1912, where he worked for French studio Éclair and spread its animation technique to the US. Influenced by Cohl, Russian scientist Wladyslaw Starewicz started to create stop motion films using dead insects with wire limbs. In 1911 he created The Cameraman's Revenge, a complex tale of treason, suicide and violence between several different insects. It is a pioneer work of puppet animation, and the oldest animated film of such dramatic complexity, with characters filled with motivation, desire and feelings. In 1914, American cartoonist Winsor McCay released Gertie the Dinosaur, an early example of character development in drawn animation. The film was made for McCay’s vaudeville act and as it played McCay would speak to Gertie who would respond with a series of gestures. There was a scene at the end of the film where McCay walked behind the projection screen and a video of him appears on the screen showing him getting on the cartoons back and riding out of frame. This scene made Gertie the Dinosaur the first film to combine live action footage with hand drawn animation. McCay hand drew almost every one of the 10,000 drawings he used for the film.[18]

Also in 1914, John Bray opened John Bray Studios which revolutionized the way animation was created. Earl Hurd, one of Bray’s employees patented the cel technique. This involved animating moving objects on transparent celluloid sheets which were then placed over a stationary background image and then photographed to generate the sequence of images. This as well as Bray’s innovative use of the assembly line method allowed John Bray Studios to create Col. Heeza Liar, the first animated series.[19] In 1915 Max and Dave Fleischer invented rotoscoping, the process of using film as a reference point for animation and their studios went on to later release such animated classics as Ko-Ko the Clown, Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor Man, and Superman. In 1918 McCay released The Sinking of the Lusitania, a wartime propaganda film. McCay did utilize some of the newer animation techniques such as cels over paintings, but because he did all of his animation by himself, the project wasn’t actually released until just shortly before the end of the war.[19] At this point the larger scale animation studios were becoming the industrial norm and artists such as McCay faded from the public eye.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Crandol_17-1">[18]

The first animated feature film was El Apóstol, made in 1917 by Quirino Cristiani from Argentina. He also directed two other animated feature films, including 1931's Peludopolis, the first feature length animation to use synchronized sound. None of these, however, survive to the present day.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Awn.com_19-0">[20] <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Quirio_Cristiani.27s_page_Spanish_20-0">[21] In 1920, Otto Mesmer of Pat Sullivan Studios created Felix the Cat. Pat Sullivan, the studio head took all of the credit for Felix, a practice which was very common in the early days of studio animation. Felix the Cat was distributed by Paramount Studios and attracted a very large audience. Felix was the first cartoon to be merchandised, and he soon became a household name. In 1921 abstract animation was becoming popular in Germany. Artists developing this genre include Walter Ruttman, Hans Richter, and Oskar Fischinger, who referred to his works as “absolute animation.”<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-McLaughlin_18-2">[19] The earliest-surviving animated feature is the 1926 silhouette-animated Adventures of Prince Achmed which used colour-tinted film. It was directed by German Lotte Reiniger and French/Hungarian Berthold Bartosch.

The Golden Age of Animation
In 1923 a studio called Laugh-O-Grams went bankrupt and its owner Walt Disney opened a new studio in Los Angeles. Disney’s first project was the Alice Comedies Series which featured a live action girl who interacted with numerous cartoon characters. Some of the first animated sound films with recorded sound synchronized with the animation were the Song Car-Tunes films (1924-1927) and Dinner Time (1928). The earliest sound Song Car-Tunes films were Oh Mabel (May 1924) and Mother, Mother, Mother Pin a Rose on Me and Goodbye My Lady Love (both from June 1924). Disney’s first notable breakthrough was 1928’s Steamboat Willie, the third of the Mickey Mouse series, which was the first cartoon to include a fully post-produced soundtrack, featuring voice and sound effects printed on the film itself ("sound-on-film"). The short film showed an anthropomorphic mouse named Mickey neglecting his work on a steamboat to instead make music using the animals aboard the boat.

In 1930 Warner Brothers Cartoons were founded. While Disney’s studio was known for its releases being strictly controlled by Walt Disney himself, Warner brothers allowed its animators significantly more freedom, which allowed for their animators to develop more recognizable personal styles.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Crandol_17-2">[18] The first animated feature sound film was Peludópolis which premiered on September 16, 1931.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-21">[22] The first animation to use the full, three-color Technicolor method was "Flowers and Trees" made in 1932 by Disney Studios which won an Academy Award for the work.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Animated_Films_Part_1_13-1">[14] Color animation soon became the industry standard and in 1934 Warner brothers released “Honeymoon Hotel” of the Merry Melodies series, their first color film. In 1935 Tex Avery released his first film with Warner Brothers. Avery’s style was notably fast paced, violent, and satirical, with a slapstick sensibility, and he introduced the Looney Tunes characters who are still extremely popular to this day. The thrilling nature of Avery’s productions appealed to a much wider audience than Disney’s which was directly marketed towards children.

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937, is often considered to be the first animated feature but at least eight were previously released. However, Snow White was the first to become successful and well-known within the English-speaking world and the first to use Technicolor cel animation. Following Snow White’s release Disney began to focus much of its productive force on feature length films. Though Disney did continue to produce shorts throughout the century, Warner Brothers continued to focus on shorts.

The first<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[citation needed] Japanese-made feature length anime film was the propaganda film Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors (桃太郎 海の神兵) by the Japanese director Mitsuyo Seo. The film, shown in 1945, was ordered to be made to support the war by the Japanese Naval Ministry. The film's song AIUEO no Uta (アイウエオの歌) was later used in Osamu Tezuka's anime series Kimba the White Lion. Originally thought to have been destroyed during the American occupation, a negative copy survived and the film is now available in Japan on VHS.

The television era
Color television was introduced to the US Market in 1951. In 1958 Hanna-Barbera released Huckleberry Hound, the first half-hour television program to feature only animation. Terrytoons released Tom Terrific the same year. In 1960 Hanna - Barbera released another monumental animated television show, The Flintstones, which was the first animated series on prime time television. Television significantly decreased public attention to the animated shorts being shown theatres. Warner brothers resented television for this and accordingly, they avoided putting their cartoons on television until the mid 70s.

The first<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[citation needed] individually hand-drawn animated feature was The Tune (1992) by American independent animator Bill Plympton. Before limited distribution The Tune was nominated for the 1992 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize dramatic and in 1993 was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Original Score by Maureen McElheron. To date, only this film's animator lays claim to having individually hand-drawn feature-length films, and has gone on to produce four more: I Married A Strange Person (1997), Mutant Aliens (2001), Hair High (2004), and Idiots and Angels (2008).

Animation Techniques
Innumerable approaches to creating animation have arisen throughout the years. Here is a brief account of some of the non traditional techniques commonly incorporated.

Stop motion
This process is used for many productions, for example, the most common types of puppets are clay puppets, as used in The California Raisins and Wallace and Gromit, and figures made of various rubbers, cloths and plastic resins, such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. Sometimes even objects are used, such as with the films of Jan Švankmajer.

Stop motion animation was also commonly used for special effects work in many live-action films, such as the 1933 version of King Kong and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

CGI animation
Computer-generated imagery (CGI) revolutionized animation. The first fully computer-animated feature film was Pixar's Toy Story (1995).<sup class="Template-Fact" style="white-space:nowrap;">[citation needed] The process of CGI animation is still very tedious and similar in that sense to traditional animation, and it still adheres to many of the same principles.

A principal difference of CGI animation compared to traditional animation is that drawing is replaced by 3D modeling, almost like a virtual version of stop-motion, though a form of animation that combines the two worlds can be considered to be computer aided animation but on 2D computer drawing (which can be considered close to traditional drawing and sometimes based on it).

Most CGI created films are based on animal characters, monsters, machines or cartoon-like humans. Animation studios are now trying to develop ways of creating realistic-looking humans. Films that have attempted this include Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in 2001, Final Fantasy: Advent Children in 2005, The Polar Express in 2004, Beowulf in 2007 and Resident Evil: Degeneration in 2009. However, due to the complexity of human body functions, emotions and interactions, this method of animation is rarely used. The more realistic a CG character becomes, the more difficult it is to create the nuances and details of a living person, and the greater the likelihood of the character falling into the uncanny valley. The creation of hair and clothing that move convincingly with the animated human character is another area of difficulty. The Incredibles and Up both have humans as protagonists, while films like Avatar combine animation with live action to create humanoid creatures.

A type of non-photorealistic rendering designed to make computer graphics appear to be hand-drawn. Cel-shading is often used to mimic the style of a comic book or cartoon. It is a somewhat recent addition to computer graphics, most commonly turning up in console video games. Though the end result of cel-shading has a very simplistic feel like that of hand-drawn animation, the process is complex. The name comes from the clear sheets of acetate (originally, celluloid), called cels, that are painted on for use in traditional 2D animation. It may be considered a "2.5D" form of animation. True real-time cel-shading was first introduced in 2000 by Sega's Jet Set Radio for their Dreamcast console. Besides video games, a number of anime have also used this style of animation, such as Freedom Project in 2006.