History of

Animation

The Magic Lantern

The Magic Lantern or
Lanterna Magica is an early
type of image projector
developed in the 17th century.
The magic lantern has a
concave mirror in front of a
light source that gathers light
and projects it through a slide
with an image scanned onto
it. The light rays cross an
aperture (which is an opening
at the front of the apparatus),
and hit a lens. The lens
throws an enlarged picture of
the original image from the
slide onto a screen

1824 Thaumatrope
A disk or card with a
picture on each side is
attached to two
pieces of string. When
the strings are twirled
quickly between the
fingers the two
pictures appear to
combine into a single
image due to
persistence of vision.

1832 Phenakistoscope
The phenakistoscope used a
spinning disc attached vertically
to a handle. Arrayed around the
disc's center was a series of
drawings showing phases of the
animation, and cut through it was
a series of equally spaced radial
slits. The user would spin the disc
and look through the moviing
slits at the discs reflection in a
mirror.The scanning of the slits
across the reflected images kept
them from blurring together, so
that the user would see a rapid
succession of imagesthat
appeared to be a single moving
picture.

1833 (180 AD) Zoetrope

The zoetrope consists of a
cylinder with slits cut vertically
in the sides. On the inner
surface of the cylinder is a band
with images from a set of
sequenced pictures. As the
cylinder spins, the user looks
through the slits at the pictures
across. The scanning of the slits
keeps the pictures from simply
blurring together, and the user
sees a rapid succession of
images, producing the illusion
of motion.

1868 Flip Book

0 A flip book or flick

book is a book with a

series of pictures that
vary gradually from
one page to the next,
so that when the
pages are turned
rapidly the pictures
appear to animate by
simulating motion or
some other change.

1877 Praxinoscope
The praxinoscope was an
animation device, the successor
of the zoetrope. Like the zoetrope,
it used a strip of pictures placed
around the inner surface of a
spinning cylinder. The
praxinoscope improved on the
zoetrope by replacing its narrow
viewing slits with an inner circle
of mirrors, placed so the
reflections appreared more or less
stationary as the wheel
turned.Someone looking in the
mirrors would therefore see a
rapid succession of images,
producing the illusion of motion.

1888 Kinetoscope
The Kinetoscope is an early
motion picture exhibition
device. Though not a movie
projector, it was designed for
films to be viewed
individually through the
window of the cabinet
housing its components. It
creates the illusion of
movement by conveying a
strip of film bearing
sequential images over a
light source with a high speed
shitter.

35 mm filmstrip of the
Edison production
Butterfly Dance (ca.
189495), featuring
Annabelle Whitford
Moore, in the format
that would become
standard for both still
and motion picture
photography around
the world.

1892 Cinematograph
It is a film camera,
which also serves as a
film projector.

1908 Fantasmagorie
French animated film by Emile
Cohl.
The film was created by
drawing each frame on paper
and then shooting each frame
onto negative film which gave
the picture a blackboard look.
It was made up of 700
drawings, each of which was
double-exposed (animated
"on twos"), leading to a
running time of almost two
minutes.

1914 Gertie the Dinosaur

Gertie the Dinosaur is a
1914 American animated
short film by Windsor McCay.
Although not the first
animated film, as is
sometimes thought, it was the
first cartoon to feature a
character with an appealing
personality. The appearance of
a true character distinguished
it from earlier animated "trick
films. The film was also the
first to be created using
keyframe animation.

1917 El Apostol
El Apstol (Spanish:
"The Apostle") was a
1917 Argentine
animated film utilizing
cutout animation, and
the world's first
animated feature film.

1925 Felix the Cat

Felix the Cat is a cartoon
character created in the silent
film era. His black body, white
eyes, and giant grin, coupled
with the surrealism of the
situations in which his
cartoons place him, combine
to make Felix one of the most
recognized cartoon characters
in film history. Felix was the
first character from animation
to attain a level of popularity
sufficient to draw movie
audiences

1925 Walt Disneys Alice

Comedies
The "Alice Comedies"
are a series of animated
cartoons created by Walt
Disney in the 1920s, in
which a live action little
girl named Alice
(originally played by
Virginia Davis) and an
animated cat named
Julius have adventures in
an animated landscape.

1928 Walt Disneys

Steamboat Willie
Steamboat Willie was
produced in black-and-white by
The Walt Disney Studio and
released by Celebrity
Productions. The cartoon is
considered the debut of Mickey
Mouse, and his girlfriend Minnie,
but the characters had both
appeared several months earlier
in test screenings. Steamboat
Willie was the third of Mickey's
films to be produced, but was
the first to be distributed.
The film is also notable for being
one of the first cartoons with
synchronized sound.

1930 Warner Bros

Looney Tunes
Sinkin' in the Bathtub was the
very first Warner Bros. theatrical
cartoon short as well as the very
first of the Looney Tunes series.
Made in 1930, this short marked
the theatrical debut of Bosko the
"Talk-Ink Kid" whom Harman and
Ising had created to show to
Warner Brothers. Bosko became
their first star character,
surpassed only much later by
Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. Also,
this is the first publicly released
non-Disney cartoon to have a
pre-recorded soundtrack

1932 Disneys Silly

Symphonies Flowers and
Trees
It was the first
commercially released
film to be produced in
the full-color threestrip Technicolor
process, after several
years of two-color
Technicolor films.

1937 Disneys Snow White

and the Seven Dwarfs
It is the first full-length
cel animated feature in
motion picture history,
the first animated feature
film produced in the
United States, the first
produced in full color, the
first to be produced by
Walt Disney Productions,
and the first in the Walt
Disney Animated Classics
series.

1945 Momotaros Divine

Sea Warriors
The first Japanese
feature-length
animated film. It was
made as a
propoganda film for
the war by the
Japanese Naval
Ministry.

TASK
Choose what you believe to be the key
developments in animation from the 17th
Century to the present. (This PowerPoint only
covers until 1945 you will have to decide on
the key moments from then until the present.
Good luck, there are many to choose from!)
For each, explain their importance in the
development of animation.

Rotoscoping

Live Action/Animation

Rotoscoping is an
animation technique in
which animators trace
over footage, frame by
frame, for use in liveaction and animated
films.Originally, recorded
live-action film images
were projected onto a
frosted glass panel and
re-drawn by an animator.
This projection equipment
is called a rotoscope,
although this device was
eventually replaced by
computers.

There were also many previous films

combining live action with stop motion
animation using back projection, such
as the films of Willis O'Brien and Ray
Harryhausen in the United States, and
Aleksandr Ptushko, Karel Zeman and
more recently Jan ankmajer in Eastern
Europe. The first feature film to do this
was The Lost World (1925). In the
1935 Soviet film The New Gulliver, the
only character who wasn't animated
was Gulliver himself.

Puppet Animation

Clay Animation

Stop Motion
The object is moved in small
increments between
individually photographed
frames, creating the illusion of
movement when the series of
frames is played as a
continuous sequence. Dolls
with movable joints or clay
figures are often used in stop
motion for their ease of
repositioning. Stop motion
animation using plasticine is
called clay animation or "claymation". Not all stop motion
requires figures or models;
many stop motion films can
involve using humans,
household appliances and
other things for comedic effect.
Stop motion using objects is
sometimes referred to as
object animation.

Each object or character is

sculpted from clay or other such
similarly pliable material as
Plasticine, usually around a wire
skeleton called an armature, and
then arranged on the set, where it
is photographed once before being
slightly moved by hand to prepare
it for the next shot, and so on until
the animator has achieved the
desired amount of film. A variation
of clay animation was developed
by another Vinton animator, Craig
Bartlett, for his series of Arnold
short films (also made in the late1980s/early-1990s), in which he
not only used clay painting but
sometimes built up clay images
that rose off the plane of the flat
support platform toward the
camera lens to give a more 3-D
stop-motion look to his films.

Silouette Animation
Silhouette animation is animation
in which the characters are only
visible as black silhouettes. This
is usually accomplished by
backlighting articulated cardboard
cut-outs, though other methods
exist. It is partially inspired by, but
for a number of reasons
technically distinct from, shadow
play.

Model Animation
Model animation is a form of stop
motion animation designed to
merge with live action footage to
create the illusion of a real-world
fantasy sequence.

Computer Animation
Computer animation or CGI animation is the process used for
generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more
general term computer-generated imagery encompasses both static
scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers
to moving images.Modern computer animation usually uses
3Dcomputer graphics, although 2Dcomputer graphics are still used
for stylistic, low bandwidth, and faster real-time renderings.
Sometimes the target of the animation is the computer itself, but
sometimes the target is another medium, such as film.Computer
animation is essentially a digital successor to the stop motion
techniques used in traditional animation with 3D models and frameby-frame animation of 2D illustrations. Computer generated
animations are more controllable than other more physically based
processes, such as constructing miniatures for effects shots or hiring
extras for crowd scenes, and because it allows the creation of
images that would not be feasible using any other technology. It can
also allow a single graphic artist to produce such content without the
use of actors, expensive set pieces, or props.