Background
Animation is a series of still drawings that, when
viewed in rapid succession, gives the impression
of a moving picture. The word animation derives
from the Latin words anima meaning life, and
animare meaning to breathe life into. Throughout
history, people have employed various techniques
to give the impression of moving pictures. Cave
drawings depicted animals with their legs
overlapping so that they appeared to be running.
The properties of animation can be seen in Asian
puppet shows, Greek bas-relief, Egyptian funeral
paintings, medieval stained glass, and modern
comic strips.
In 1640, a Jesuit monk named Althanasius
Kircher invented a "magic lantern" that projected
enlarged drawings on a wall. A fellow Jesuit,
Gaspar Schott, developed this idea further by
creating a straight strip of pictures, a sort of
early filmstrip, that could be pulled across the
lantern's lens. Schott further modified the
lantern until it became a revolving disk. A
century later, in 1736, a Dutch scientist named
Pieter Van Musschenbroek created a series of
drawings of windmill vanes that, when projected
in rapid succession, gave the illusion of the
windmill circling around and around.
The magic lantern became a popular form of
entertainment. Traveling entertainers, visiting
the villages and towns of Europe, included it in
their shows. In London, the Swiss-born physician
and scholar Peter Mark Roget, most famous for
compiling the Thesaurus of English Words and
Phrases, was fascinated by the scientific
phenomenon at play and wrote an essay entitled
"Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving
Objects" that was widely read and used as a
basis for subsequent inventions. One of the first
was the thaumatrope, developed in the 1820s by
John Paris, also an English doctor. The
thaumatrope was simply a small disk with a
different image drawn on either side. Strings
were knotted onto two edges so that the disk
could be spun. As the disk twirled around, the
two images appeared to blend. For example, a
monkey on one side appeared to sit inside the
cage on the opposite side.
The next major innovation was the
phenakistoscope, created by Joseph Plateau, a
Belgian physicist and doctor. Plateau's
contribution was a flat disk perforated with
evenly spaced slots. Figures were drawn around
the edges, depicting successive movements. A
stick attached to the back allowed the disk to be
held at eye level in front of a mirror. The viewer
then spun the disk and watched the reflection of
the figures pass through the slits, once again
giving the illusion of movement.
In Austria, Simon Ritter von Stampfer was toying
with the same idea and called his invention a
stroboscope. A number of other scopes followed,
culminating in the zoetrope, created by William
Homer. The zoetrope was a drum-shaped cylinder
that was open at the top with slits placed at
regularly spaced intervals. A paper strip with a
series of drawings could be inserted inside the
drum, so that when it was spun the images
appeared to move.
By 1845, Baron Franz von Uchatius invented the
first movie projector. Images painted on glass
were passed in front of the projected light.
Forty-three years later, George Eastman
introduced celluloid film, a strip of cellulose
acetate coated with a light-sensitive emulsion
that retained and projected images better than
those painted on glass. The first animated
cartoon Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by J.
Stuart Blackton, of the New York Evening World,
was shown in the United States in 1906. Two
years later, French animator Emile Cohl followed
suit with Phantasmagorie. Winsor McCay
introduced Gertie the Dinosaur in 1911. Other
cartoonists who brought their characters to the
screen included George McManus (Maggie and
Jiggs) and Max Fleischer (Betty Boop and
Popeye). By 1923, Walt Disney, the world's most
famous animator, began turning children's stories
into animated cartoons. Mickey Mouse was
introduced in Steamboat Willie in 1928. Disney's
first animated full-length film, Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs, debuted in 1937.
Yellow Submarine, a 1968 animated film starring
the Beatles, featured the process of pixilation,
in which live people are photographed in
stop-motion to give the illusion of
humanly-impossible movements. In the film The
Lord of the Rings, directed in 1978 by Ralph
Bakshi using rotoscoping, live action was filmed
first. Then each frame was traced and colored to
create a series of animation cels. By the late
twentieth century, many in the industry were
experimenting with computer technology to
create animation. In 1995, John Lassiter
directed Toy Story, the first feature film
created entirely with computer animation.
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