Animation

• 1. Introduction

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  Animation is a filmmaking technique where images are created or manipulated and then played in sequence to produce the illusion of moving pictures. The word itself comes from the Latin animatio, meaning bestowing of life. For centuries before any camera existed, master artists brought puppets, automatons, shadow figures, and fantastical lanterns to life. How did hand-painted sheets of transparent celluloid grow into an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Why did a world that prized cinema for its realism take years to embrace drawings that openly defied reality? And how did a single mouse come to shape what nearly everyone now expects animation to look like? The answers reach from a spinning cardboard disc in 1832 to virtual skeletons rigged inside a computer.

• 2. Before The Camera

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  In 1832, the Belgian inventor Joseph Plateau built the phenakistoscope, which introduced the principle of persistence of vision that underpins modern animation. The device worked by spinning a cardboard disc and watching the reflected image in a mirror through a series of moving slits, which made the picture appear to move. That same principle reappeared in William George Horner's zoetrope, a rotating drum lined with a strip of pictures, and in the flip book, the praxinoscope, and eventually film.

  Emile Reynaud began investing in the art form around 1876, adapting moving images for theatrical audiences. Analog mechanical media such as the phenakistiscope, zoetrope, flip book, and praxinoscope all relied on the rapid display of sequential images. Real traction in cinema, though, waited for the invention of sprocket-drive film stock.

• 3. The Illusion Of Motion

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  The illusion of animation has traditionally been credited to persistence of vision, and later to the phi phenomenon and beta movement, though the exact neurological causes remain uncertain. What viewers perceive is a stroboscopic effect, created when a rapid succession of barely different images runs past with unnoticeable interruptions.

  Traditional animators drew each part of a figure's movement onto transparent cels that could be slid over a separate background. Computer animation instead programs paths between key frames, steering digitally created figures through a digitally created environment. The cel approach, where animators trace or photocopy drawings onto acetate sheets and fill them with paint, dominated most animated films of the 20th century before becoming obsolete by the start of the 21st.

• 4. The American Golden Age

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  During the 1910s, producing animated cartoons became a genuine industry in the United States. The producer John Randolph Bray and the animator Earl Hurd patented the cel animation process that would rule the field for the rest of the century. Felix the Cat, who debuted in 1919, became the first fully realized anthropomorphic animal character in American animation, and his physical look set the standard model for cartoon characters that followed.

  In 1928, Steamboat Willie introduced Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse and popularized film with synchronized sound, pushing Walt Disney's studio to the front of the industry. Though Disney's actual output has always been small against total global animation, the studio overwhelmingly shaped the aesthetic norms ever since. Mickey's success is seen as the start of a golden age that lasted until the 1960s, filled with cel-animated theatrical shorts. Studios introduced lasting characters including Goofy in 1932, Donald Duck in 1934, Porky Pig in 1935, Bugs Bunny across 1938 to 1940, Tom and Jerry in 1940, and the Pink Panther in 1963.

• 5. Animation Beyond America

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  In 1917, the Italian-Argentine director Quirino Cristiani made the first feature-length animated film, El Apostol, which was a critical and commercial success and is now lost. His follow-up, Sin dejar rastros in 1918, was confiscated by the government one day after its premiere. After three years of work, Lotte Reiniger released the German feature-length silhouette film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed in 1926, the oldest extant animated feature.

  In 1941, Princess Iron Fan became the first animated feature film in Asia, described as the Chinese version of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Soviet Soyuzmultfilm studio, founded in 1936, averaged 20 films a year and reached 1,582 titles by 2018. China, Czechoslovakia, Italy, France, and Belgium were among the countries that more than occasionally released feature films, often favoring stop motion and cutout techniques.

• 6. The Move To Television

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  Animation grew very popular on television from the 1950s, as sets became common in most developed countries. Cartoons were mainly programmed for children in convenient slots, and American youth spent many hours on Saturday-morning cartoons. By the late 1950s, new production began shifting from theatrical releases to TV series.

  Hanna-Barbera Productions proved especially prolific, with The Flintstones running from 1960 to 1966 as the first prime time animated series, Scooby-Doo since 1969, and the Belgian co-production The Smurfs from 1981 to 1989. Tight budgets and enormous demand pushed studios toward cheaper, quicker limited animation and more formulaic scripts. Quality dwindled until bolder work surfaced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including the first Simpsons cartoon in 1987 and SpongeBob SquarePants since 1999. Japanese anime series became internationally successful from the 1960s, and European producers seeking affordable cel animators often co-produced with Japanese studios, yielding hits such as Maya the Honey Bee in 1975.

• 7. From Cels To Computers

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  Computer animation developed gradually from the 1940s, and 3D wireframe work reached the mainstream in the 1970s with an early short appearance in the 1976 sci-fi thriller Futureworld. The Rescuers Down Under became the first feature film created entirely digitally without a camera, produced with the Computer Animation Production System that Pixar built with The Walt Disney Company in a style resembling traditional cel animation.

  Pixar's Toy Story in 1995 was the first computer-animated feature in the so-called 3D style, and its success made that technique dominant. Most cel studios switched to computer-animated films around the 1990s because it proved cheaper and more profitable. Even films with a hand-crafted appearance now emulated cel animation's charm in software. The market reflected this growth: estimated at about 80 billion US dollars in 2010, it had risen to an estimated 370 billion by 2021, and animated feature-length films returned the highest gross margins, around 52 percent, of all film genres between 2004 and 2013.

• 8. Persuasion And Profit

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  During World War II, animation was widely used for propaganda, with American studios including Warner Bros. and Disney lending their characters to convey war values. Those efforts carried into the Cold War, and the English 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm, the nation's first feature-length animated film, is speculated to have had its production funded by the CIA. Tex Avery produced the first Raid Kills Bugs Dead commercials in 1966, which proved very successful, while Snap, Crackle and Pop have endured for decades selling Kellogg's cereals.

  The Walt Disney Company is the most extreme example of exploiting animated creations beyond the screen. Since Mickey Mouse was first licensed for a children's writing tablet in 1929, the mascot has appeared on an enormous range of products, with a dedicated Disneyana Fan Club since 1984. Disneyland opened in 1955 with attractions based on Disney's cartoon characters, and earnings from the theme parks have often exceeded those from the movies. Recognition followed too: Beauty and the Beast became the first animated film nominated for Best Picture, in 1991, a path later walked by Up in 2009 and Toy Story 3 in 2010.