| The history of animation spans from the first animation experiments and early devices to the evolution of animation in film, TV, and digital media. Milestones in the history of animation timeline include hand-drawn cel animation, stop motion, and the rise of computer animation. The 20th century saw breakthroughs with Disney and the golden age of cartoons, followed by 3D animation history reshaping modern cinema. Today, animation technology continues to advance, making animated movies more accessible and innovative than ever. |
Here’s a question you’ve probably never asked yourself: How far back in history does animation really go?
Chances are, you aren’t an animation nerd like us here at Broadcast2World and don’t think about stuff like this often.
Still, the answer would likely surprise you.
What if we told you that animation is actually much older than television itself?
It’s true.
But how, you might ask?
This week, we’re going to dive into the surprisingly old history of animation as an art form.
Animation falls under the umbrella category of what’s called visual storytelling, sequential storytelling or narrative art.
In the most basic sense, it’s telling a story using a sequence of images.
This means that technically, comic books and graphic novels are in the same family as animation.
It’s important to understand this before we dive into how and when animation first came into being.
So by that definition, any sequence of images that tell a story counts as the roots of not just comics, but animation, too.
We all know that animation has been around for a long time. But you might not believe us if we told you its history can be measured not in decades, or even centuries, but millennia!
Here’s an Egyptian mural depicting a wrestling match:
And by the way, this mural is 4,000 years old!
But you can see what we mean by “sequential art” or “narrative art” because it’s a series of images that tell a story on a timeline. As your eyes scan the still images from one to the next, it’s almost as though your mind senses the motion and the images appear to move. It’s much the same way that modern comics depict action.
Now some of you might be reading this and objecting that this isn’t “real” animation, because animation involves movement, while comic strips and graphic novels do not.
But this is really more of a philosophical argument than anything else, when it comes to the nebulous and ancient origins of visual storytelling. The core mechanisms of what makes narrative art work are ultimately the same, it’s just a question of how it’s rendered in the final.
People have been telling stories with visuals for millennia now. Some experts argue that even Egyptian hieroglyphics are a form of visual storytelling!
Another mesmerizing art form that closely resembles animation called shadowgraphy, and it’s been around since ancient times.
People in the ancient world told stories using hand-drawn shadows - also called ‘cinema in silhouette’. It shares a lot in common with puppetry, making inanimate objects appear to come to life.
Then in 1659, scientist and astronomer Christiaan Huygens invented a device called the Magic Lantern to project moving images.
Fast forward to 1832, and the invention of the Phenakistoscope by Belgian mathematician Joseph Plateau, which was one the first real animation devices.
Source: Wikipedia
It was arguably the first machine that created the illusion of movement. And it long predates the movies, existing a full century before the invention of television, video camera or cinema projectors.
Animation is basically an optical illusion that takes advantage of the fact that our eyes can see about 30 individual images per second. Any more than that, and your eyes can only capture a blur.
For example, if you had a light bulb that flashed on and off less than 30 times a second, you would see it flickering on and off. But if it flashed faster than 30 times a second, you would only see a light bulb that’s continuously on with no flickering, because it’s turning on and off faster than your eyes and brain can process the individual flashes.
This is why almost all video is 24 frames per second or more, and why 60 fps appears smoother and more fluid than 30 fps.
All video technology takes advantage of this illusion, from television to live-action films to animation.
The early animated films were crude and made with devices that were relatively simple and primitive.
The first such system was called the Theatre Optique, invented by Émile Reynaud and patented in 1888. His series of animated films included Pauvre Pierrot and Autour d'une Cabine.
Each of his films contained 300-700 frames (or individual painted images) and ran for 10 to 15 minutes.
Animated short films were popular even in the early 1900s.
It is widely regarded that the short film, “Fantasmagorie” is the first animated short film ever made, created by French animator Emile Cohl in 1908:
This is where we come to the era most people associate with early animation.
The first animated cartoons were all hand-drawn, using what’s called Cel Animation.
A Cel was a transparent sheet consisting of cellulose nitrate and camphor, used to create hand-drawn objects. These were the beginnings of modern animation as we know it today.
The first animated characters were drawn on Cels and superimposed on common painted background images, to reduce the number of frames and production times.
Colonel Heeza Liar (1914) was the first cartoon series created using this animation technique.
The production house was John Bray Studios. Take a look:
Steamboat Willie was released in 1928 and it was the first animated film to include sound, heralding the modern age of animation.
Many consider this the first animated feature film. But in truth, there were seven films released before this, and the American animation industry was nascent but arguably already established at this point.
However, this was the first film completely made using hand-drawn animation technique, and featuring sound.
The movie was also the first appearance of Mickey Mouse.
With the release of the first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, it was clear that animation had emerged from its experimental sandbox phase to cement itself as a popular form of mainstream commercial entertainment. Disney pioneered many of the techniques and processes that remained common in commercial animation production for many decades to come.
As one of the earliest major pioneers of the animation process as we know it today, and one of the first to break out into commercially successful animation, Disney went from strength to strength with groundbreaking productions like Sword in The Stone, Jungle Book, Mary Poppins, and the Aristocrats– just to name a few.
This was when it became clear that animated feature films could easily hold their own against live-action Hollywood movies.
Another form of animation that was commonly used in the traditional era was stop-motion animation.
Rather than cartoonists and artists drawing thousands of individual drawings with minor changes to create movement, stop motion took “photos” of miniature set pieces rendered in clay or plasticine, which were moved by hand incrementally between individual frames to create movement.
The advantages are: Less drawing, and a more lifelike and three-dimensional look (since the shots were of actual models created in miniature in real life).
The disadvantages are: It’s still tedious and time-consuming work despite being slightly faster than hand-drawn animation, and requires highly skilled modelers / sculptors / artists to create the models and sets.
But stop-motion has a uniquely charming look and feel that’s all its own.
Notable works include:
One of the biggest challenges in animation is making the characters look lifelike, moving fluidly and expressing raw and genuine emotion like real human actors do.
So at some point, a wild idea came about: Why not film real actors’ faces, and “map” them onto your CGI character model, and therefore get the best of both worlds? A CGI character that can perfectly move and emote like a real living being?
And that’s the idea behind motion capture.
Rotoscoped character animation in Prince of Persia, 1989 (on Apple II and MS-DOS)
When it comes to the history of computer animation, one the earliest uses of motion capture was the 1989 video game “Prince of Persia,” where the game creator filmed his friend performing the moves and traced them into the character in the game. The result was absolutely stunning, even if it was rendered in so few pixels you could count them on your hands.
But to scale this up to Hollywood levels was no easy task, and the technology took time to mature. The first successful use of motion capture for a major Hollywood movie was James Cameron’s Avatar, where human actors performed on a green stage with cameras bolted to their heads and strange marks painted on their faces.
This was mapped to detailed CGI characters who would follow their exact movements and expressions like digital puppets. This created a best-of-both-worlds result where you had fantastic creatures moving with the fluidity of living beings and the facial expressions and emotions of Oscar-worthy actors.
The late 1960s saw the first experiments to create animation purely on computer graphics. To say they were basic would be an understatement. It was truly uncharted territory. Nevertheless, it hinted at things to come in the decades that followed.
Computer animation history began with Hummingbird (1967), the first truly computer-generated animated film - it was made using 30,000 images and 25 motion sequences, all generated by a computer.
It marked the first time the actual frame by frame animation of 2D characters was done entirely on computers, rather than hand-drawn by animators.
While you would assume this made things easier than the usual tedious and painstaking hand-drawn animation, the reality was that computers were simply not that advanced or powerful enough, both in terms of software and hardware.
To put another way, imagine doing Excel sheet calculations using the barebones Notepad app, and you get a better idea of how difficult it must have been compared to today.
Trailblazing isn’t easy!
Pixar’s Toy Story (1995) was the first entirely computer-animated feature film, and heralded the age of 3D computer animation in mainstream Hollywood.
The production of this movie really pushed the technology of the time to its absolute limits— a refrain you’ll hear often when it comes to the history of computers being used for animation.
By the way, in case you’re confused about the differences between 2D and 3D animation, we got you covered.
A groundbreaking moment was when Walt Disney released Beauty and the Beast to a stunned public. It was nominated for an Oscar in 1991– not in any animated category, but for the much-coveted Best Picture, competing against big-budget Hollywood blockbusters!
The next big sea change in animation was the release of the first fully-computer-generated 3D animated feature film, Pixar’s Toy Story in 1995.
Following this in 2002, the Academy Awards finally gave animated movies their own category: Best Animated Feature Film. And Shrek was the first winner of this category.
This conclusively proved that animation as a format can appeal to adults as well as children– something animation fans knew all along (see also: Japanese and European animation that’s decidedly for adults and not kids).
And speaking of foreign animation, 2002 also saw the first foreign animated film to win an Oscar– the legendary Spirited Away.
If there remained any doubt at this point that animation is a serious force to be reckoned with, 2010 saw the first animated feature film to gross over $1 billion at the box office with Toy Story 3.
But it’s not all cute cartoon characters and imaginary worlds. Animation, especially when it comes to computer-generated visuals, also dominates live-action movies with special effects.
Here’s an example in Terminator 2, one of the most successful Hollywood action franchises of all time:
Everything culminated with James Cameron’s two-decades-in-the-making masterpiece, Avatar.
It used advanced CGI and groundbreaking motion capture techniques, requiring 2,000 Hewlett-Packard servers, sporting 35,000 processor cores and 104 terabytes of RAM, to render the film.
While animated films were being made using computers, the advent of internet technologies made the process of creating 2D and 3D animated videos simpler and faster.
The future of animation is being shaped by rapid innovations in both media and technology. Below are three key areas driving this transformation.
So where is this all heading?
Technology in general is exploding. With computer processors multiplying in speed every few years, tech that seemed to be science fiction a decade ago are in the palm of your hand in an average smartphone— tech like live-streaming, 3D, 360-degree video, VR, augmented reality and much more.
And not only is it accessible to almost everyone, we’re seeing applications where they can even be rendered in real-time and streamed instantly.
So what does this all mean for the future? It’s hard to say, but it seems as though we’re more limited by our imagination than we are by the technological limitations.
On one hand, there’s a furious arms race of sorts, where Hollywood animation studios have to raise the bar and shatter paradigms of animation with seemingly every release, in order to keep up with the competition.
Toy Story blew minds when it was released, but today that level of animation can be rendered on a smartphone. Animated movies from even a few years ago look outdated compared to the latest release.
On the other hand, there’s the democratization and accessibility of ubiquitous animation technology, where anyone armed with a typical computer and a creative spirit could start creating their own animated work.
Just a few decades ago, this would have needed them to start their own animation studio with a full staff, expensive technology, and a small mountain of startup funding.
Sites like YouTube and Vimeo are already full of individual creators doing their own animation from scratch— some of which rivals the work of huge well-funded studios.
And that’s not even getting into AI and AI-generated video content, which opens the door for non-artists to try creating their own artwork. Controversial as it is, it’s clear AI is here to stay— a topic that deserves its own blog post.
Where this is all going remains to be seen. But what is certain is that the world of animation is on the precipice of an explosion in creativity, diversity and accessibility.
And that’s never a bad thing!