14 - History of Animation

Lecture

Can you believe that one of the first "animations" can be found in prehistoric cave paintings? Early mankind gave animals multiple legs to make it look like they were running. Egyptians made "comic strips" that told stories to decorate the walls of pyramids and temples. Below you can see the action of man making fire. In one of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous illustrations, Versuvian Man, shows how limbs would look in various positions.

Hall of Bulls, Cave Painting. Courtesy of ArtServe

	Since the beginnings of time, human beings have tried to capture a sense of motion in their art. From a six legged boar in the Altamira caves of Spain to paintings alongside the remains of pharaohs, this quest for capturing motion has been a common theme throughout many of mankind's artistic endeavors.
Bearer of Offering. Courtesy Bluffton University

True animation cannot be achieved without first understanding a fundamental principle of the human eye: the persistence of vision. This is the phenomenon of your eye mentally connecting two or more pictures together so that your mind believes it is moving. This was first demonstrated in 1828 by Frenchman, Paul Roget, who invented the thaumatrope. It was a disc with a string or peg attached to both sides. One side of the disc showed a bird, the other an empty cage. When the disc was twirled, the bird appeared in the cage. This proved that the eye retains images when it is exposed to a series of pictures, one at a time. The animation to the right is made up of two pictures. A bird and an empty cage. It's rate of speed is 7/100's of a second.

Bird in Cage, by K. Brott (refresh page to restart)

Two other inventions helped to further the cause of animation. The phenakistoscope, (may also be called the stroboscope) invented by Joseph Plateau in 1826, was a circular card with slits around the edge. The viewer held the card up to a mirror and peered through the slits as the card whirled. Through a series of drawings around the circumference of the card, the viewer saw a progression of images resulting in a moving object.

Another low-tech animation piece of equipment was the flipbook. The flipbook was a tablet of paper with an individual drawing on each page so the viewer could flip through them. This was also popular in the 1800s. However, these devices were little more than parlor curiosities used for light entertainment.

The same technique applied to the r, was an early form of motion picture projector that consisted of a drum containing a set of still images, that was turned in a circular fashion in order to create the illusion of motion. Horner originally called it the Daedatelum, but Pierre Desvignes, a French inventor, renamed his version of it the zoetrope (from Greek word root zoo for "animal life" and trope for "things that turn.") He inserted a strip of paper containing drawings on the inside of a drumlike cylinder. The drum twirled on a spindle, and the viewer gazed through slots to the top of the drum. The figures on the inside magically came to life, endlessly looping in acrobatic feats of wonder.

The development of the motion camera and projector by Thomas Edision and others provided the first real practical means of making animation. Even still, the animation was done in the simplest of means. Saturate Blacken, issued a short film in 1906 entitled Humorous Phases of Funny Faces where he drew comical faces on a blackboard, photographed them, and the erased it to draw another stage of the facial expression. This "stop-motion" effect astonished audiences by making drawings comes to life. It was extremely labor intensive as there were literally hundreds of drawings per minute of film.

Windsor McCay, the father of animation, nursed animation from a simple camera trick to full blown character animation that would take 20 years to be surpassed. Some consider McCay's Sinking of the Lusitania from 1918 as the world's first animated feature film. McCay animated his films almost single-handedly; from drawing board to finished product each cartoon was his and his alone. (This is absolutely unheard of by today's standards). He took the time to make his films unique artistic visions, sometimes spending a year or more to make one five-minute cartoon. His landmark film was "Gertie the Dinosaur" in 1914. Like many of the early animators, he was an accomplished newspaper cartoonist. He redrew each complete image on rice paper mounted on cardboard. He was also the first to experiment with color in animation. Much of his early work was incorporated into staged acts in which he would 'interact' with the animated character on the screen.

The process of inking the animator's drawings onto clear pieces of celluloid and then photographing them in succession on a single painted background was invented by Earl Hurd in late 1914. Instead of numerous drawings, the animator now could make a complex background and/or foreground and sandwich moving characters in between several other pieces of celluloid. Celluloid is transparent except for where drawings are painted on it. This made it unnecessary to repeatedly draw the background as it remained static and only the characters moved. It also created an illusion of depth, especially if foreground elements were placed in the frames.

Otto Messmer created Felix the Cat in 1919; it was a milestone in the development of animation as an artform. Not since Gertie the Dinosaur had a cartoon character exhibited such a degree of personality animation as Felix.

Walt Disney rose the bar on animation. In 1928, he was the first animator to add sound to his movie cartoons with the premiere of Steamboat Willie. In 1937, he produced the world's first full length animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Until computers came along, animation was done almost the same way as it was done in 1937. A succession of individually fed pictures into a projector at the rate of 24 frames per second gave the illusion of movement. A lot of supplies are needed to make an animated movie. Approximately 360,000 drawings, 1,100 backgrounds, film 7,035 feet long, 450 gallons of paint, 180 people and 748 hues of color were needed for the average animation before computers took over.

With the introduction of computers, animation took on a whole new meaning. Many feature films of today had animation incorporated into them for special effects. A film like Star Wars by George Lucas relies heavily on computer animation for many of its special effects. Released in 1995, Toy Story, produced by Pixar Animation Studios with Walt Disney Productions, became the first full length feature film animated entirely on computers.

Vocabulary:

Persistence of Vision

The retina captures and holds an image for one-tenth of a second before processing the next image. If images are flashed before the eye at at least 10 frames per second, the brain thinks it is seeing a single moving image.

Phenakistoscope

A revolving disk on which figures drawn in different relative positions are seen successively, so as to produce the appearance of an object in actual motion, as an animal leaping, etc., in consequence of the persistence of the successive visual impressions of the retina. It is often arranged so that the figures may be projected upon a screen.

Thaumatrope

It consists of a card having on its opposite faces figures of two different objects, or halves of the same object, as a bird and a cage, which, when the card is whirled rapidly round a diameter by the strings that hold it, appear to the eye combined in a single picture, as of a bird in its cage.

Zoetrope

An optical toy, in which figures made to revolve on the inside of a cylinder, and viewed through slits in its circumference, appear like a single figure passing through a series of natural motions as if animated or mechanically moved.