The bouncing ball animation (below)
consists of these 6 frames.
This animation moves at 10 frames per
second.
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of
images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create
an illusion of movement. It is an
optical illusion of
motion due to the phenomenon of
persistence of vision, and can be
created and demonstrated in a number of ways. The most common
method of presenting animation is as a
motion picture or
video
program, although several other forms of presenting animation also
exist.
Early examples
Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion
drawing can be found in
paleolithic
cave paintings, where animals are
depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly
attempting to convey the perception of motion.
A 5,200
year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta
has five images of a goat painted along the
sides. This has been claimed to be an example of early
animation. However, since no equipment existed to show the images
in motion, such a series of images cannot be called animation in a
true sense of the word.
The Visual Linguist: Burnt City animation
VL
The
phenakistoscope,
praxinoscope, as well as the common
flip book were early popular animation devices
invented during the 1800s, while a Chinese
zoetrope-type device was invented already in 180
AD. These devices produced movement from sequential drawings using
technological means, but animation did not really develop much
further until the advent of
cinematography.
There is no single person who can be considered the "creator" of
the art of film animation, as there were several people doing
several projects which could be considered various types of
animation all around the same time.
Georges Méliès was a
creator of special-effect films; he was generally one of the first
people to use animation with his technique. He discovered a
technique by accident which was to stop the camera rolling to
change something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film.
This idea was later known as stop-motion animation. Méliès
discovered this technique accidentally when his camera broke down
while shooting a bus driving by. When he had fixed the camera, a
hearse happened to be passing by just as Méliès restarted rolling
the film, his end result was that he had managed to make a bus
transform into a hearse. This was just one of the great
contributors to animation in the early years.
The earliest surviving stop-motion advertising film was an English
short by
Arthur
Melbourne-Cooper called
Matches: An Appeal (1899).
Developed for the
Bryant and May
Matchsticks company, it involved stop-motion animation of
wired-together matches writing a patriotic call to action on a
blackboard.
J. Stuart Blackton was possibly the first
American filmmaker to use the techniques of stop-motion and
hand-drawn animation. Introduced to filmmaking by
Edison, he pioneered these concepts at the
turn of the 20th century, with his first copyrighted work dated
1900. Several of his films, among them
The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and
Humorous Phases of
Funny Faces (1906) were film versions of Blackton's
"lightning artist" routine, and utilized modified versions of
Méliès' early stop-motion techniques to make a series of
blackboard drawings appear to move and reshape
themselves. 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces' is regularly cited as
the first true animated film, and Blackton is considered the first
true
animator.

Fantasmagorie by Emile Cohl,
1908
Another French artist,
Émile Cohl,
began drawing cartoon strips and created a film in 1908 called
Fantasmagorie. The film largely consisted of a
stick figure moving about and encountering all
manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms
into a flower. There were also sections of live action where the
animator’s hands would enter the scene. 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. This makes
Fantasmagorie the first
animated film created using what came to be known as
traditional animation.
Following the successes of Blackton and Cohl, many other artists
began experimenting with animation. One such artist was
Winsor McCay, a successful newspaper
cartoonist, who created detailed animations that required a team of
artists and painstaking attention for detail. Each frame was drawn
on paper; which invariably required backgrounds and characters to
be redrawn and animated. Among McCay's most noted films are
Little Nemo (1911),
Gertie the Dinosaur
(1914) and
The Sinking
of the Lusitania (1918).
The production of animated short films, typically referred to as
"cartoons", became an industry of its own during the 1910s, and
cartoon shorts were produced to be shown in
movie theaters. The most successful early
animation producer was
John Randolph
Bray, who, along with
animator Earl Hurd, patented the
cel animation process which dominated the
animation industry for the rest of the decade.
Techniques
Traditional animation
Traditional animation (also called cel animation or hand-drawn
animation) was the process used for most animated films of the 20th
century. The individual frames of a traditionally animated film are
photographs of drawings, which are first drawn on paper. To create
the illusion of movement, each drawing differs slightly from the
one before it. The animators' drawings are traced or photocopied
onto transparent acetate sheets called
cels,
which are filled in with paints in assigned colors or tones on the
side opposite the line drawings. The completed character cels are
photographed one-by-one onto motion picture film against a painted
background by a
rostrum camera.
The traditional cel animation process became obsolete by the
beginning of the 21st century. Today, animators' drawings and the
backgrounds are either scanned into or drawn directly into a
computer system. Various
software programs
are used to color the drawings and simulate camera movement and
effects. The final animated piece is output to one of several
delivery media, including traditional
35 mm
film and newer media such as
digital
video. The "look" of traditional cel animation is still
preserved, and the
character
animators' work has remained essentially the same over the past
70 years. Some animation producers have used the term "tradigital"
to describe cel animation which makes extensive use of computer
technology.
Examples
of traditionally animated feature films include Pinocchio (United States
, 1940), Animal Farm (United Kingdom
, 1954), and Akira (Japan
,
1988). Traditional animated films which were produced with
the aid of computer technology include
The Lion King (US, 1994)
Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Japan,
2001),
Treasure Planet
(USA, 2002) and
Les
Triplettes de Belleville (2003).
- Full animation refers to the process of
producing high-quality traditionally animated films, which
regularly use detailed drawings and plausible movement. Fully
animated films can be done in a variety of styles, from
realistically designed works such as those produced by the Walt Disney studio
(Beauty and the
Beast, Aladdin,
Lion King) to the more "cartoony"
styles of those produced by the Warner Bros. animation studio
(Iron Giant, Quest for Camelot, Cats Don't Dance). Many of the Disney animated features are
examples of full animation, as are non-Disney works such as
The Secret of NIMH (US,
1982) and The Iron Giant
(US, 1999), Nocturna
(Spain, 2007)
- Limited
animation involves the use of less detailed and/or
more stylized drawings and methods of movement. Pioneered by the
artists at the American studio United Productions of America,
limited animation can be used as a method of stylized artistic
expression, as in Gerald
McBoing Boing (US, 1951), Yellow Submarine (UK, 1968),
and much of the anime produced in Japan. Its
primary use, however, has been in producing cost-effective animated
content for media such as television (the
work of Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and other TV animation studios) and
later the Internet (web cartoons). Some examples are; Spongebob Squarepants (USA,
1999-present), The Fairly
OddParents (USA, 2001-present) and Invader Zim (USA, 2001-2006).
- Rotoscoping is a
technique, patented by Max Fleischer
in 1917, where animators trace live-action movement, frame by frame. The source film can be directly
copied from actors' outlines into animated drawings, as in
The Lord of the
Rings (US, 1978), used as a basis and inspiration for
character animation, as in most Disney films, or used in a stylized
and expressive manner, as in Waking
Life (US, 2001) and A Scanner Darkly (US, 2006).
Some other examples are; Ralf Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings
(USA, 1978), Fire and Ice
(USA, 1983) and Heavy Metal
(1981).
- Live-action/animation is
a technique, when combining hand-drawn characters into live action
shots. One of the earlier uses of it was Koko the Clown when Koko was drawn over live
action footage. Other examples would include Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (USA,
1988), Space Jam (USA, 1996) and
Osmosis Jones (USA,
2002).
- Anime is a technique
primarily used in Japan but inspired by Disney cartoons. It usually
consists of detailed characters but more of a stiff animation.
mouth moments primarily use 2-3 frames, leg moments use about 6-10,
etc. A lot of the time the eyes are very detailed, so sometimes
instead of the animator drawing them over again in every frame, two
eyes will be drawn in 5-6 angles and pasted on each frame(modern
times uses computer for that). Some example of Anime films are;
Spirited Away (Japan, 2001), Akira (Japan, 1988) and Princess Mononoke.
Stop motion

A clay animation scene from a TV
commercial.
Stop-motion animation is used to describe animation created by
physically manipulating real-world objects and photographing them
one frame of film at a time to create the illusion of movement.
There are many different types of stop-motion animation, usually
named after the type of media used to create the animation.
Computer software is widely available to create this type of
animation.
- Puppet
animation typically involves stop-motion puppet
figures interacting with each other in a constructed environment,
in contrast to the real-world interaction in model animation. The
puppets generally have an armature inside
of them to keep them still and steady as well as constraining them
to move at particular joints. Examples include The Tale of the Fox (France, 1937),
Nightmare Before
Christmas (US, 1993), Corpse
Bride (US, 2005), Coraline (US, 2009), the films of
Jiří Trnka and the TV series
Robot Chicken (US,
2005–present).
- Puppetoon, created
using techniques developed by George
Pál, are puppet-animated films which typically use a different
version of a puppet for different frames, rather than simply
manipulating one existing puppet.
- Clay animation,
or Plasticine animation often abbreviated as claymation,
uses figures made of clay or a similar malleable material to create
stop-motion animation. The figures may have an armature or wire frame inside of them, similar to
the related puppet animation (below), that can be manipulated in
order to pose the figures. Alternatively, the figures may be made
entirely of clay, such as in the films of Bruce Bickford, where clay creatures morph
into a variety of different shapes. Examples of clay-animated works include
The Gumby Show (US, 1957–1967)
Morph shorts (UK,
1977–2000), Wallace and
Gromit shorts (UK, as of 1989), Jan Švankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue (Czechoslovakia
, 1982), The Trap
Door (UK, 1984). Films include Wallace and Gromit:
Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Chicken
Run and The
Adventures of Mark Twain
- Cutout
animation is a type of stop-motion animation produced
by moving 2-dimensional pieces of material such as paper or cloth.
Examples
include Terry Gilliam's animated
sequences from Monty
Python's Flying Circus (UK, 1969-1974); Fantastic Planet
(France/Czechoslovakia, 1973) ; Tale
of Tales (Russia
, 1979), The
pilot episode of the TV series (and sometimes in episodes) of
South Park (US, 1997).
- Model animation
refers to stop-motion animation created to interact with and exist
as a part of a live-action world. Intercutting, matte effects, and split screens are often employed to
blend stop-motion characters or objects with live actors and
settings. Examples include the work of Ray Harryhausen, as seen in films such
Jason and the
Argonauts (1961), and the work of Willis O'Brien on films such as King Kong (1933 film).
- Object
animation refers to the use of regular inanimate
objects in stop-motion animation, as opposed to specially created
items. One example of object animation is the brickfilm, which incorporates the use
of plastic toy construction blocks such as Lego.
- Graphic
animation uses non-drawn flat visual graphic material
(photographs, newspaper clippings, magazines, etc.) which are
sometimes manipulated frame-by-frame to create movement. At other
times, the graphics remain stationary, while the stop-motion camera
is moved to create on-screen action.
- Pixilation involves
the use of live humans as stop motion characters. This allows for a
number of surreal effects, including disappearances and
reappearances, allowing people to appear to slide across the
ground, and other such effects. Examples of pixilation include
The Secret
Adventures of Tom Thumb and Angry
Kid shorts.
Computer animation
Computer animation encompasses a variety of techniques, the
unifying factor being that the animation is created digitally on a
computer.
2D animation
2D animation figures are
created and/or edited on the computer using 2D
bitmap graphics or created and edited using
2D
vector graphics. This includes
automated computerized versions of traditional animation techniques
such as of
tweening,
morphing,
onion
skinning and
interpolated
rotoscoping.
Examples:
Foster's Home for Imaginary
Friends,
Danny
Phantom,
Waltz with Bashir
3D animation
3D animation digital models manipulated
by an animator. In order to manipulate a mesh, it is given a
digital skeletal structure that can be used to control the mesh.
This process is called rigging. Various other techniques can be
applied, such as mathematical functions (ex. gravity, particle
simulations), simulated fur or hair, effects such as fire and water
and the use of
Motion capture to name
but a few, these techniques fall under the category of 3d dynamics.
Many
3D animations are very believable and are commonly
used as
Visual effects for recent
movies.
Terms
- Photo Realistic Animation, is
used primarily for animation that is wanting to resemble real life,
Using advanced rendering that makes detailed skin, plants, water,
fire, clouds, etc to mimic real life. Examples include Up (2009, USA), Kung-Fu Panda, Ice Age (2002, USA).
- Cel-shaded animation, is
used to mimic traditional animation using CG software. Shading
looked shark and less blending colors. Examples include, Skyland (2007, France), Appleseed (2007, Japan), The Legend of Zelda: Wind
Waker (2002, Japan)
- Motion capture, is used when live
action actors wear special suites that allow computers to copy
their movements into CG characters. Examples include Polar Express (2004, USA), Beowulf, 2007), Avatar (2009, USA).
2D animation techniques tend to focus on image manipulation while
3D techniques usually build virtual worlds in which characters and
objects move and interact. 3D animation can create images that seem
real to the viewer.
Other animation techniques
- Drawn on film
animation: a technique where footage is produced by
creating the images directly on film
stock, for example by Norman
McLaren, Len Lye and Stan Brakhage.
- Paint-on-glass
animation: a technique for making animated films by
manipulating slow drying oil paints on
sheets of glass.
- Pinscreen
animation: makes use of a screen filled with movable
pins, which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the
screen. The screen is lit from the side so that the pins cast
shadows. The technique has been used to create animated films with
a range of textural effects difficult to achieve with traditional
cel animation.
- Sand animation:
sand is moved around on a backlighted or frontlighted piece of
glass to create each frame for an animated film. This creates an
interesting effect when animated because of the light contrast.
- Flip book: A flip
book (sometimes, especially in British English, 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. Flip
books are often illustrated books for children, but may also be
geared towards adults and employ a series of photographs rather
than drawings. Flip books are not always separate books, but may
appear as an added feature in ordinary books or magazines, often in
the page corners. Software packages and websites are also available
that convert digital video files into custom-made flip books.
Other techniques and approaches
See also
References
- CHTHO produces documentary on world’s oldest
animation. Tehran Times. 04-03-2008.
- History of Media, University of Minnesota,
accessed May 13, 2006
- Dailymotion - Fantasmagorie - une vidéo
Cinéma
- Ball, R., Beck, J., DeMott R., Deneroff, H., Gerstein, D.,
Gladstone, F., Knott, T., Leal, A., Maestri, G., Mallory, M.,
Mayerson, M., McCracken, H., McGuire, D., Nagel, J., Pattern, F.,
Pointer, R., Webb, P., Robinson, C., Ryan, W., Scott, K., Snyder,
A. & Webb, G. (2004) Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel,
the History of Cartoon, Anime & CGI. Fulhamm London.:
Flame Tree Publishing. ISBN 1-84451-140-5
- Crafton, Donald (1982). Before Mickey. Cambridge,
Massachusetts.: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-03083-7
- Solomon, Charles (1989). Enchanted Drawings: The History of
Animation. New York.: Random House, Inc. ISBN
0-394-54684-9
Further reading
- Anderson, Joseph and Barbara, "The Myth of
Persistence of Vision Revisited", Journal of Film and
Video, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 1993): 3-12
- Culhane, Shamus, Animation Script to Screen
- Laybourne, Kit, The Animation Book
- Ledoux, Trish, Ranney, Doug, & Patten, Fred (Ed.),
Complete Anime Guide: Japanese Animation Film Directory and
Resource Guide, Tiger Mountain Press 1997
- Lowe, Richard & Schnotz, Wolfgang (Eds) Learning with
Animation. Research implications for design Cambridge
University Press, 2008
- Masson, Terrence, CG101: A Computer Graphics Industry Reference
Unique and personal histories of early computer animation
production, plus a comprehensive foundation of the industry for all
reading levels. ISBN 0-9778710-0-2
- Thomas, Frank and
Johnston, Ollie, Disney Animation: The
Illusion of Life, Abbeville 1981
- Walters, Faber and Helen (Ed.), Animation Unlimited:
Innovative Short Films Since 1940, HarperCollins Publishers,
2004
- Williams, Richard,
The Animator's Survival
Kit ISBN 0-5712-0228-4
- Bob Godfrey and Anna Jackson, 'The Do-It-Yourself Film
Animation Book' BBC Publications 1974 ISBN 0-563-10829-0 Now out of
print but available s/hand through a range of sources such as
Amazon Uk.
External links