The history of animation

By Rebecca Armstrong

Start

1906It features a cartoonist drawing faces on a chalkboard, and the faces coming to life. It is generally regarded by film historians as the first animated film

The film moves at 20 frames per second.

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is a silent cartoon by J. Stuart Blackton released in 1906.

1914

Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 American animated short film by Winsor McCay

Was named #6 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time in a 1994

It was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality

1921

1923

Koko the Clown was an animated character created by animation pioneer Max Fleischer

The character originated when Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope

The series was very popular and in 1921

Felix the Cat is a cartoon character created in the silent film era

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

1928

1933

Steamboat Willie is a 1928 American animated short film directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks.

The cartoon is considered the debut of Mickey Mouse

The film is also notable for being one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound

King Kong is a Pre-Code 1933 fantasy monster adventure film co-directed by Merian C.

The film tells of a gigantic island-dwelling apeman creature called Kong who dies in an attempt to possess a beautiful young woman

In 1991, the film was deemed "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

1937

1940

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a 1937 American animated film based on Snow White, a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm

It was the first full-length cel-animated feature in motion picture history, as well as the first animated feature film produced in America,

The first in the Walt Disney Animated Classics canon

Tom and Jerry is an American series of theatrical animated cartoon films created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Jerry has a worldwide audience that consists of children, teenagers and adults

been recognized as one of the most famous and longest-lived rivalries in American cinema

1992

2005

South Park is an American animated television series created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central television network.

Intended for mature audiences, the show has become famous for its crude language, surreal satirical and dark humor that lampoons a wide range of topics.

In the 2004 documentary The 100 Greatest Cartoons, South Park was placed at #3

Corpse Bride, often promoted as Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, is a 2005 stop-motion-animated fantasy musical film directed by Mike Johnson and Tim Burton.

The film was nominated in the 78th Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature

It was shot with a battery of Canon EOS-1D Mark II digital SLRs, rather than the 35mm film cameras used for Burton's previous stop-motion film The Nightmare Before Christmas

Pioneers

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon,and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century.

The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and had an annual revenue of approximately US$36 billion in the 2010 financial year

Disney is particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won twenty-two Academy Awards from a total of fifty-nine nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history.

Walt Disney

Walt Disney animation Walt Disney did cell animation

The Process of Animation

1. A storyboard is made, all the animators and directors come together to discuss the entire film.

2. The storyboards are presented as the story

3. Once the story is laid out, the dialogue is recorded. This is done before animation, so the animators know what the characters will say.

4. After the dialogue is recorded, the animators can make rough sketches of just the characters. Usually these drawings are quite messy, there is still no color, or background. Some animated films have used over 50,000 individual drawings.

At most animation studios, the best animators only sketched a few animation drawings, leaving gaps in between. Later on, a person called an "inbetweener" would finish the scenes, by drawing in between the areas that the animator had left.

5. Once the entire film has been drawn on paper, the animation drawings go to the inking department. There, the inkers copy the animation drawings on to a clear celluloid acetate, sometimes called a Cel.

6. After the outline of the characters has been made, the unfinished Cel's go to the Painting Department. The painters flip the Cel over, and paint the colors on the back. They paint on the back so the characters appear crisp, and have an outline.

7. Before the Animation Cels get photographed a background must be added. Because a Cel is clear, and it only has the painted character on it, if a background is made, it will show through. Usually backgrounds are painted with Tempera or Water Color paint. Although, in some Disney productions, the background was painted on glass, and combined with other glass painted backgrounds to create the illusion of extreme movement. (This technique is use in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.)

8. Now all the combined elements (the Cel and the background) can be photographed. Although, the final product is not filmed with a normal projector, or camera. A special device, with a lens mounted facing down on to a table top captures each frame of the animated feature. Usually, the background is placed into a special mount, then covered with the Cel, then covered with a large piece of glass, then photographed.

9. After all the drawings have been filmed, the dialogue is added. Sometimes the film is edited at this step.

10. The animated film is released, and the general public may view it.

Émile Cohl (January 4, 1857, Paris – January 20, 1938), born Émile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet, was a French caricaturist of the largely forgotten Incoherent Movement, cartoonist, and animator called "The Father of the Animated Cartoon" and "The Oldest Parisian".By 1907, the 50-year-old Émile Cohl, like everyone else in Paris, had become aware of motion pictures. Cohl made over 250 films between 1908 and 1923, working for Gaumont, Éclair (including a spell in America), Pathé and others.

Émile Cohl

Winsor McCay (September 26, 1869 – July 26, 1934) was an American cartoonist and animator.

A prolific artist, McCay's pioneering early animated films far outshone the work of his contemporaries, and set a standard followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades. His two best-known creations are the newspaper comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905–1914 and 1924–1927, and the animated cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur, which he created in 1914.

His comic strip work has influenced generations of artists, including creators such as William Joyce, André LeBlanc, Moebius, Maurice Sendak, Chris Ware and Bill Watterson.

Winsor McCay

Max Fleischer (July 19, 1883 – September 11, 1972) was an American animator. He was a pioneer in the development of the animated cartoon and served as the head of Fleischer Studios. He brought such animated characters as Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, Popeye, and Superman to the movie screen and was responsible for a number of technological innovations.

Max Fleischer

Eadweard J. Muybridge (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip.

Eadweard J. Muybridge

Ray Harryhausen (born Raymond Frederick Harryhausen on June 29, 1920 in Los Angeles, California) is an American film producer and special effects creator. He created a brand of stop-motion model animation known as "Dynamation."

Among his most notable works are his animation on Mighty Joe Young (with pioneer Willis O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for special effects) (1949), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad(his first colour film) and Jason and the Argonauts, featuring a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors.

Ray Harryhausen

Stephen and Timothy Quay (born June 17, 1947 in Norristown, Pennsylvania) are American identical twin brothers better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They are influential stop-motion animators. They are the recipients of the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play The Chairs.

The Quay Brothers reside and work in England, having moved there in 1969 to study at the Royal College of Art, London after studying illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In England they made their first short films, which no longer exist after the only print was irreparably damaged. They spent some time in the Netherlands in the 1970s and then returned to England where they teamed up with another Royal College student, Keith Griffiths, who produced all of their films. The trio formed Koninck Studios in 1980, which is currently based in Southwark, south London.

The Quay Brothers

Timothy William "Tim" Burton(born August 25, 1958) is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist.

He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and for blockbusters such as Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Batman, Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 9 and Alice in Wonderland, his most recent film, that was the second highest-grossing film of 2010 as well as the ninth highest-grossing film of all time.

Tim Burton

Aardman Animations, Ltd., also known as Aardman Studios, or simply as Aardman, is a British animation studio based in Bristol, United Kingdom. The studio is known for films made using stop-motion clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring Plasticine characters Wallace and Gromit. However, it successfully entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away.

Pixar Animation Studios, is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio has earned 26 Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and three Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Its films have made over $6.3 billion worldwide.It is best known for its CGI-animated feature films created with PhotoRealistic RenderMan, its own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface used to generate high-quality images.

Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam (born 22 November 1940) is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several films, including Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), and 12 Monkeys (1995). The only "Python" not born in Britain, he took British citizenship in 1968.

Terry Gilliam

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. (though the name was occasionally given in full form as Warner Brothers during the company's early years), is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank, California and New York, New York. Warner Bros. has several subsidiary companies, including Warner Bros. Studios, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Animation, Warner Home Video, New Line Cinema, TheWB.com, and DC Comics. Warner owns half of The CW Television Network.