The Animation Station

The first attempts to capture motion were simple, yet carried such a profound impact with them that we truly owe a great deal to our fully follicled ancestors. Around 34,000 years ago, a paleolithic human discovered, whether for ceremonial purposes or just out of curiosity, that, with the use of dyes, depictions of their world could be recorded. Mostly, the paintings were visualizations of game animals, a very important aspect of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Similar incidences began popping up all over the world. Humans were feeling the need to capture moments in time and keep them preserved forever.

Art continued in much the same way for many thousands of years but as the hunter-gatherer tribes began to learn the ways of agriculture and settled down into permanent residences, art exploded! Everything became art. Because homes and utensils became permanent, they had to be visually pleasing as well as functional. It's easy to live in a simple lean-to when abandoning it the next day is the plan. Some of the best examples of early art still around today is the earthenware, is the pottery. One of the very first known attempts at translating the still image into a moving image resides on one such piece of pottery. It's a piece from Iran from about 5,000BC, that when spun, depicts a goat leaping and eating from a tree. It consists of only five images but they are sequential, showing the beginning of human mastery over not only form, but movement and time.

It may seem that very few advancements were made between the years of cave paintings to now, but when you take in to account the amount of time it took for humans to get this point and how relatively little time it took to get where we are today, the explosion that I'm talking about becomes more obvious.

Of course the Greeks (who reigned from 1100BC to 146BC), not to be outdone by anyone, again showed their intellectual prowess and command over nature. A frieze (merely a wall carving) on the Parthenon depicts the sequential gallop of a horse as it speeds into a run.

Skipping ahead in time a bit to the 1500's AD, we come upon a man who most know as one of the greatest artists, inventors, and thinkers in human history: Leonardo Davinci. However, most don't think of him as one of the forefathers of animation. Leo was fascinated with anatomy and made several studies of the how our anatomical structure allowed our movement. This exploration into muscle and bone structure holds true to this day when creating believable and beautiful animation.

A series of inventions rocked the foundations of animation from this point throughout the late 1800's. For ease of remembering, I'll present these important inventions in list format.

The Magic Lantern
The Magic Lantern was a device first described in 1671, and was essentially a primitive ancestor of the modern day projector. While not exclusively an animation milestone, it was the first display of sequential images that replaced one another.

The Thaumatrope
Perhaps one of the single most important inventions pertaining to the psychology that makes animation possible, was a toy created in 1824. It demonstrates the phenomena of persistence of vision, in which an image still remains in a person's sight even after the stimulus has been removed. The design was a disc with a different image on each side, and a sting attached to on opposite edges. Rolling the strings between the thumbs and forefingers, the disc would spin and suddenly the two images would appear as one image. Although it was only a child's novelty, it's implications impacted all of film and animation history. It is the basis for the notion that individual frames in quick sequence could be perceived as a continuous image.

The Zoetrope
Essentially an evolution of the Phenakistiscope, the Zoetrope relied on viewing a spinning series of images through a slit (though it didn't rely on a mirror as did the Phenakistiscope). Interestingly, nearly 700 years before William Horner took credit for the invention of the device in 1834, a Chinese inventor created a similar creation. You might recognize the word "Zoetrope" from the Francis-Ford-Coppola-and-George-Lucas-founded company, American Zoetrope which produced such films as Apocalypse Now and Lost In Translation.

The Praxinoscope
Much like the Zoetrope, the Praxinoscope, invented in 1877 by Émile Reynaud, relied on a cylindrical series of images revolving. What changed though, was the method of viewing. Rather than peering through slits, the audience was able to view the animation being reflected on stationary mirrors on the interior of the wheel. This allowed for a clearer image as well as the opportunity for large groups of people to view the animation simultaneously. Reynaud went on to create the first animated film in 1892, a fifteen minute, hand-painted venture titled Pauvre Pierrot. It was shown using a combination of the praxinoscope and a projector.

And then...

James Stuart Blackton

Known as the Komical Kartoonist in his vaudeville act, Blackton was shown the power of film by Thomas Edison. By 1900 he created a film using a mixture between live action of himself drawing and a stop-action technique (the camera is stopped and changes are made then the camera is started again)called "The Enchanted Drawing."

Quite by accident, while experimenting with the stop-action technique, Mr. Blackton happened upon a new technique, stop-motion. This involves capturing one frame of film, changing something in the scene, capturing another frame, rinse, and repeat ad nauseum. As a result, in 1906, he created the first fluidly animated film on a chalkboard. It was titled "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces." Blackton's innovations provided the foundation for all future animations.

Émile Cohl

At 50 years of age, a Frenchman named Émile Cohl, a man who spent most of his life as a caricaturist, entered the world of animation. Building on inspiration from Blackton's films, Cohl created what many consider to be the first "true" animated film in 1908, a stream of consciousness journey featuring a clown. It was titled "Fantasmagorie," and made with black ink on white paper, but to mimick the chalkboard (white on black) effect of Blackton's film, a negative print of the film was used.

Winsor McCay

Following a career as a successful newspaper cartoonist, from which he was responsible for the popular strips Little Nemo and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (both were dream oriented), he entered the world of animation. With the help of J. Stuart Blackton, he directed a two minute segment of a "Little Nemo" animation. It introduced a theretofore unheard of sophistication to the medium. Notice the detailed drawings, all of which were hand drawn by McCay and his assistant.

In 1914, McCay decided to one-up himself and released "Gertie the Dinosaur" to the public. It was incorporated into his vaudeville act. What really differentiated this from the work Blackton and Cohl, though, was that rather than the animation itself serving to "wow" audiences, this animation served to bring Gertie's character to life. The show consisted of McCay standing on stage and instructing Gertie to do things, and at the very end he would instruct the diplodocus to lift him up in the air. The transition was seamless as he stepped behind the curtain and was replaced by a cartoon version of himself being lifted in the dinosaur's mouth.

Here is "Gertie the Dinosaur" (be sure to realize that this was before any multi-plane technique, which I'll get to later, was invented. This means that every frame had to be redrawn completely, background and all, for the thousands and thousands of frames that it consists of)

His drive for constant progression never ceasing, McCay embarked his most sophisticated (and controversial) piece of animation yet, "The Sinking of the Lusitania." Deemed to be "documentary animation", this 12 minute production featured some 25,000 drawings by McCay and chronicled the attack on the passenger vessel "Lusitania" by a German U-Boat. It was commissioned by the U.S. government in an attempt to heighten support for involvement in the first World War. It revealed something about McCay's philosophy on animation that held true throughout all of his work, always show what couldn't be captured any other way. There was film to show what could be filmed and there was animation for everything else.

Max Fleischer

I Know, I know. Most of you are probably thinking right about now, "So, yeah, but what about Walt Disney?" Well, he's on the horizon, but I have one last key player to discuss. Mr. Max Fleischer.

Later in his life he would become one of the biggest competitions for the Walt Disney Company with such animations as Popeye and Superman, but much earlier he took his place as one of the great animation pioneers. In 1915, in an effort to further the realism of movement in animation he developed an invention called the rotoscope. This device would back-project live action footage onto a glass plate which could then be traced, frame by frame.

He created a series called Out of the Inkwell which lasted from 1919 to 1925 and starred a clown named Koko. This is an episode of this series, titled "The Tantalizing Fly." Using footage of his brother dressed in a clown suit, Max rotoscoped most of the motion.

Walt Disney

Walt wasn't always the animation juggernaut that we know him as today. In many ways he owes his success to a cat and a man named Ub. Sullivan Studios had created a character called Felix, who was a mischievous cat, in 1919. Felix gained international popularity, rivaling Charlie Chaplin, the biggest star of the time. He was one of the most recognizable personalities in the world in the 20's.

At the time, Walt was doing a series of Alice (of Wonderland fame) comedies. These were a mixture of a live-action Alice interacting with an animated cast. The main animated character was a cat with an uncanny resemblance to Felix. As the series continued, the emphasis was placed more and more heavily on the animated aspects.

In 1927, he was commissioned for an animated series and created a character called Oswald Rabbit, again hugely influenced by the design of Felix. Due to a disagreement, Walt left the company who commissioned him, losing his job and the rights to Oswald. He turned to his great friend and professional partner, Ub Iwerks, to design a character to replace Oswald.

Mickey Mouse was born.

Mickey debuted in one silent cartoon before starring in one of the biggest milestones in animation history, "Steamboat Willie." It was the first ever animated film with sound and opened the door to a world of potential innovation regarding sound for animation.

Following the success of "Steamboat Willie" Disney began a series of animations called Silly Symphonies. This first in the series was called "Skeleton Dance," animated entirely by Ub Iwerks and employing the same musical sound elements as "Willie."

Mickey Mouse rose in popularity over the next few years, but the Silly Symphonies series only offered modest success. That is, until Walt was approached in 1932 and convinced to do his next picture, "Flowers and Trees," using a new three-strip technicolor camera. It was a smashing success, and from this point on, all Disney cartoons were shot in color.

Following this enormous success, Disney began drawing up (hah!) plans for a feature length animated film equipped with color and sound and all the bells and whistles. When the press got wind of Disney's attempt to make a feature length animated Snow White they predicted disaster; they predicted financial destruction; they predicted the death of the Disney company.

Undeterred, Walt began developing a process that would simulate a realistic representation of depth within the frame. It was called the multiplane camera technique and consisted of multiple planes, separated by a distance, each containing an element of the frame that is supposed to be at a different depth. The camera shoots through all these independent planes to give the illusion of depth. As were most of Disney's pre-Snow White experimentations, the multiplane camera technique was first used in a Silly Symphonies short. This particular one was called "The Old Mill."

The road to completing Snow White took over three years and nearly bankrupted Disney.

But in 1937, Walt Disney changed animation forever, opening doors that people never even thought existed. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened to wild critical and popular praise. It was a box-office smash, pulling in more money than any other film in 1938 and becoming the highest grossing American film of all-time up to that point.

Walt won an honorary Academy Award that year (actually one full-scale one and seven miniature ones) for his innovation to the film industry. And thus, the feature length animation was born. It was no longer just an entertainment novelty; it was a full-force medium to rival live-action film!