Short History of Animation

Animation is a graphic representation of drawings to show movement. This is done using a series of drawings linked together and usually photographed using camera equipment. The movement is created by a slight difference in each drawing which when played back in rapid succession gives the illusion of movement within the drawings.

Pioneers of animation include George Melies and Emile Cohl of France and Windsor McCay of the United States. Some consider McCay's Sinking of Lusitania from 1918 as the first animated feature film.

Early animations, which started to appear before 1910, consisted of simplistic drawings photographed one at a time, this would have been extremely time consuming as at a rate of 24 frames per second used as the average, there would need to be hundreds of drawings per minute of film. The development of celluloid around 1913 made animation easier to manage. 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, which 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.

Walt Disney was next to take animation to a new level. He was the first animator to add sound to his movie cartoons with the premiere of Steamboat Willie in 1928. In 1937, he produced the first full length animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

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 would rely heavily on computer animation for many of its special effects. Toy Story, produced by Walt Disney Productions and Pixar Animation Studios, became the first full length feature film animated entirely on computers when it was released in 1995.