An early history of animation

The Animators survival kit has been a great tool. Ive learned a lot about the history of animation and the fundamentals behind them. Over 35,000 years ago humans began painting animals on caves that showed motion. In 1600 BC the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II built a temple to the goddess Isis which had 110 columns. Ingeniously, each column had a painted figure of the goddess in a progressively changed position. To horsemen or charioteers riding past-Isis appeared to move! The ancient Greeks decorated pots with figures in successive stages of action. Spinning the pot would create a sense of motion. It was not until 1824 that ‘the persistence of vision’ principal was discovered. This principle rests on the fact that our eyes temporarily retain the image of anything they’ve just seen. If this wasn’t so, we would never get the illusion of an unbroken connection in a series of images, and neither movies nor animation would be possible. Many people don’t realize that movies don’t actually move, and that they are still images that appear to move when projected in a series. Animation by definition is the illusion of continuous action. In 1868 the flipper book was invented. It was simply a pad of drawings bound like a book along one edge. Hold the book in one hand along the bound edge and with the other hand flip the pages and the result is an illusion of motion. Today the classical animator still flips his drawings the same way as a flipper book before testing it on video. He places the drawings in a sequence, with the low numbers on the bottom, then flips through the action from the bottom up. In 1896 a New York newspaper cartoonist James Stuart Blackton interviewed the inventor Thomas Edison who was experimenting with moving pictures. Blackton did some sketches of Edison, who was impressed by Blackton’s speed and drawing facility and asked hm to do some drawings in a series. Later, Edison photographed these- the first combination of drawings and photography. In 1906 they publicly released Humerous Phases of Funny Faces. Blackton used about 3000 ‘flickering drawings’ to make this first animated picture- the forefather of the animated cartoon.

A few years later Winsor McCay was the first man to try to develop animation as an art form. In 1914 he created his most famous character Gertie the dinosaur. This was the first ‘personality’ animation- the beginnings of a cartoon individually. It was so lifelike that the audience could identify with Gertie. It was a sensation. McCay also made the first serious dramatic cartoon, The Sinking of the Lusitania, in 1918. A war propaganda film expressing outrage at the catastrophe, it was a huge step forward in realism and drama- the longest animated film so far. 25,000 drawings shot one at a time.



In 1928 Mickey Mouse took off with his appearance in Steamboat Willie – the first cartoon with synchronized sound. ‘You have no idea of the impact that having these drawings suddenly speak and make noises had on audiences at the time. People went crazy over it’ (Ward Kimball, early Disney Animator) In 1932 the first full color cartoon Flowers and Trees was made. In 1937 Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world’s first fully animated feature length film, raising cartoon drwaring to the level of art and holding the audience spellbound for eighty-three minutes. The tremendous financial and critical success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became the foundation of Disney’s output and gave birth to the ‘Golden Age’ of animation: Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi and fantasia.