History of Animation Technology

Sample Lesson - Introduction

Lesson 1.01: Early Animation

We feel you, cow.
(Source)

Back in the day, Shmoop had to walk uphill—both ways—in the snow, without shoes to make it to our favorite movie theater. As hard as that was, Ice Age animators had it way rougher.

Think about it.

Painting pictures on stone in cold, dark caves and then having to convince hungry Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers to come see your feature-length production of last month's big hunt. Makes our made-up story about walking barefoot to a movie theater sound easy.

Back before there were computers, cels, or even paper, people were animating things. Very. Very. Slowly. It's a good thing we passed the point of monochromatic drawings on walls; otherwise cinematic masterpieces like Wreck-It Ralph probably would have taken three generations to finish.

As much as we love romanticizing how much harder working we were from having to walk to the movie theater in the middle of a blizzard, modern animation wouldn't be worth it if all we had were the tools of yesteryear.

Plus: now we don't have to worry about frostbite that much. What a luxury.

Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 1.1.01: A Short History of Everything (Animated)

Before we really get into things, let's start with a discussion on what animation is. At its heart, animation is when you flip or play a bunch of still images quickly so that the objects in those images look like they're moving and—dare we say it—alive.

We've got some potentially life-changing news for you, Shmooper. When Simba just can't wait to be king, he isn't actually:

• moving.
• singing.
• waiting.

Instead of being a real, live, animated lion (whatever that is), Simba is a series of pictures. Each picture of Simba has differences so small that you probably wouldn't notice any if you just looked at them side-by-side. When they're all put together and flashed through quickly, you go from lion image to a lion that looks like it's moving and—well—alive.

After that, all you need to do is add in some music and you've got a dancing lion on your hands. (The best kind of lion, in our humble opinion.)

Take a bunch of still images, flash them onto a screen quickly, and you can make it look like something's moving. We can get more exact than "a bunch," though. To really convince people that your favorite talking lion is moving, you'll need twenty-four frames (which is what an individual image is called in animation, btw) flashing onto the screen every single second of animation.

That's a lot of frames for a two-hour movie.

Oh, you'd like a technical definition of a frame? Alright. A frame is a single image in a film (animated or otherwise) that, when added to other frames, helps show a sequence of events. Playing these frames one after the other quickly creates the illusion of motion.

This kind of animation isn't as much of a thing as it used to be, but you don't have to go back far to see it in action. Even movies as recent as Aladdin uses paper frames to plan out the sequences.

Paleo Animation

Before we had frames—or even paper—we were still trying to create motion from still pictures. If you've ever seen a cave drawing of animals with multiple heads, legs, and tails, you aren't looking at someone's fantasy about mutant horse zombies (though seriously: how cool would that be?), you're actually seeing multiple images of an animal superimposed over one another.

By superimposing, the cave artist captured the animal at different points in time with the same image. A horse might have its legs on the ground at one point, but later have its hooves off the ground as it gallops. The result is an animal with far too many body parts, but that's an artistic choice those cave painters were willing to make.

If you look at it the right way, it kind-of makes sense.

That's not the only way people would show animation in the old old old days. The world's oldest animation (until we find something older) actually came from a bowl created in an Iranian city during the Bronze Age (3300–1200 B.C.E.). On this bowl, five engraved images of a goat show the animal's valiant effort to eat some leaves from a tree proving that people have always been obsessed with funny animal videos.

Mmm, leaves.

This bowl documenting the harrowing struggles of being a goat isn't the only time people in the Bronze Age thought about animation—it's just the oldest. We also have pots from the ancient Greeks showing a succession of images to give the feel of an animated scene.

Moving Parts

Jump forward a couple hundred years to the 19th Century, the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope were invented, leaving less to the imagination when it comes to animating images. The phenakistoscope is a wheel with a series of images running along the edge. The images all show the same character in a slightly different pose for a single movement. Because it's a wheel, the sequence is in a loop. Spin the wheel and all the images melt together to create one moving image.

The zoetrope is basically the same, but it has a small viewing window. For reasons.

But what's a dry description without an actual video of the two proto-films? You don't have to watch the entire thing. Just watch until you see the devils jumping between top hats or the giant faces with legs right after them (about a minute and ten seconds in).

Sorry in advance for fueling your future nightmares.

We might have moved on technology-wise, but people still make zoetropes because…art. Our personal favorite involves characters from The Simpsons, Gumby, and Felix the Cat.

Animated film, though? That's a different story. We'll need to skip forward another fifty years or so to the year 1900. J. Stuart Blackton created the first film with animation despite having a name that makes him sound like a James Bond villain or something. His movie, "The Enchanted Drawing," is free to watch (thanks, Public Domain!) from the Library of Congress, so take some time to watch animated cinematic history.

Blackton was able to make things animated by filming one drawing on the board, stopping the camera, switching the drawing, and then starting the camera again.

As if that wasn't enough, Blackton created the first completely animated film just six years after "The Enchanted Drawing." "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces," which you'll definitely need to watch, includes a cameo from a creepy clown.

Again, sorry if we're fueling your nightmares.

This time, Blackton made the artistic (re: hand-saving) decision to make most of the characters out of paper (Some of them were drawn with chalk). In fact, to create movement, he gave each character's different body parts their own piece of paper. When the body parts overlapped, they could form the shape of the character in a particular pose. The camera would take a picture the body parts would be moved into a slightly different position, and the camera would take another picture. This animation style is known as—wait for it—cut-out animation.

Paving the Way for Traditional Animation

Even though those two movies were the first—literally the first—animated films, they don't fit into the category of traditional animation. Nope, the first film to use traditional animation—also known as drawing by hand—was "Fantasmagorie" by Émile Cohl. Everything was drawn on paper. So for every second, a character had to be re-drawn 24 times.

Every. Second. Of. The. Movie.

That isn't too important unless you're in the middle of "Final Jeopardy," though, so let's move on to the story of a man named Winsor McCay. Winsor—known by his friends as Winsy (probably)—was a newspaper cartoonist known for his short film, "Gertie the Dinosaur." McCay would stand in front of a screen, pretending to be Gertie's trainer. He'd ask her to perform tricks, and she "reacted" to what he was saying.

But don't take our word for it. Check out the original movie from 5:46 till about 7:05. It's silent, so you won't get the full Vaudeville effect, but pretty cool anyway.

Did you notice the wiggly lines of Gertie and the background? That's because Gertie and the background were both redrawn for every frame. Think about how much time it would take. (Hint: a lot.) Luckily, all that work paid off because film was very popular and inspired many to become animators.

But back to McCay's problems. The background was wiggling (because, you know, lines would move slightly on every re-draw) and it took forever to redraw everything. What's an animator to do?

Apparently the answer was to ask the newspaper cartoonists, because in 1914, John Randolph Bray and Earl Hurd, from the same industry as McCay, helped create the cel animation process. Cel animation uses clear sheets called—wait for it—cels. Animating with cels follows these steps:

1. The characters are drawn or painted onto the cels.
2. The cels are laid over an unmoving background image that can stay the same for the whole scene.

If you want an example of cel animation, look no further than right here. It isn't a required "reading," but it's pretty neat looking, (No need to watch the whole video, just until 8:12 is fine.)

Let's say McCay had cels when he was making "Gertie the Dinosaur." He'd

1. create one background image with the lake, the hills, and the rocks.
2. draw a cel of Gertie in one position.
3. record a frame of that one position.
4. remove that cel of Gertie and replace it with another cel of Gertie in a slightly different position.
5. repeat until all of Gertie's actions have been recorded.

What we didn't include in the background was the tree. The background can only include completely static objects, which the tree isn't. [Gasp] Instead, the tree is eaten by Gertie, so it needs its own cel. In general, every moving part of a scene needs its own cel.

It's like having different Layers in Photoshop. Every piece that you need to manipulate needs its own layer (a.k.a. cel). This clip would have a cel with a tree before Gertie gets to it. Then we'd need cels for the tree as Gertie eats it (making it shorter and shorter). Eventually the tree'd disappear from the scene, and we wouldn't need any more no more cels to represent it.

Unless you'd like to keep an empty cel up in memory of the tree. It's your call, Shmooper.

Cels isolate the different pieces of movement, meaning that they save a whole heck of a lot of effort. If a lion's tail needs to move, you'd no longer have to re-draw the lion. All you'd need to draw is a new tail. Backgrounds didn't need to be re-drawn at all and other elements wouldn't need new cels unless they started moving.

Cels were used all the way until the very end of the 1980s, which is pretty impressive as far as technological innovations go. (For comparison, flip phones became popular in 2003 and were replaced within a ten years. Just sayin'.)

The cel system was great at cutting down energy and whatnot, but there was still one major setback. Animators needed to keep their pages of animation perfectly lined up. Otherwise the character might be on part of the screen in one frame, and then jump to a different part of the screen in the next. That kind of inconsistency would make it look like the character was randomly hopping to different places—without the hopping movement. Or maybe just the drawing of the arm would be off, so that the character's arm would be waving at someone while detached from the character's body.

That's…terrifying.

(This was actually already a pretty big problem, tbh, given that the cel system was developed to get rid of the movement in the background images.)

Pegging Cels

To keep from fueling our nightmares even more, all the drawings need to be lined up in order for the animation to work correctly. (Not that live-action movies have any continuity errors. Nope. None.)

There must be something in the water at the funnies sections of newspaper offices, because another cartoonist invented the next tool. Raoul Barré, solved the problem of lining drawings up with none other than a peg system. He developed a system of punching holes in the bottom of each sheet of animation paper and laying the holes over pegs glued onto the animation board. If you're curious about the details, check out this video until about 2:21. Again, it isn't required. Just really interesting to watch. While other attempts at stabilizing/lining up the drawings had been attempted, none were nearly as successful as the peg system.

Probably because none of the other systems were invented by newspaper cartoonists. There. We said it.

That being said, let's turn our attention to another newspaper cartoonist. Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope, which lets an animator take live-action footage and trace over it, frame by frame. Now animators didn't need to imagine movement as they were drawing; they could instead trace an actor's movement and then copy the entire thing with an animated character.

Fleisher also combined live action and animation in his famous series, Out of the Inkwell. Watch this episode from 1:48 to 2:25 to get the full effect of what Fleisher was doing. The drawn character, Koko the Clown, can interact with everything in the room despite…y'know…not existing only on paper.

It's pretty great stuff, which is why you shouldn't find it surprising that also created famous animated shorts starring:

• Betty Boop.
• Popeye.
• Superman.

Tired of hearing about newspaper cartoonists?

Too bad. In 1919, a newspaper cartoonist named Otto Messmer was hired to work for a man named Pat Sullivan (take one guess as to what Sullivan's original profession was).

Messmer was assigned to do an entire animated short in his spare time. The finished short, which you should totally watch, featured a black cat named "Master Tom," who turned into Felix the Cat, the Mickey Mouse of the silent era.

Bet you didn't see that one coming. Felix was insanely popular and spawned tons of merchandise. Tons. His best feature? We'd say that has to be his tail that could magically become anything he needed. If he needed to catch a fish that day, his tail would turn into the rod. If he was locked out, it turned into a skeleton key. Like with most cartoons, surrealism was also a big part. For example, he erased once the face of a female cat and drew a new one.

You probably should have asked for her permission first, Felix.

Between Messmer and Sullivan, who should be credited for the creation of Felix? Despite the fact that Messmer was the lead animator and director of all Felix shorts, Sullivan took credit for:

• the creation of Felix.
• every short he's in.

That doesn't sound very fair to us, but what do we know?

Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 1.01: Cartoonimity

So far, you've:

• read about all the technology of animation.
• seen that technology in action.
• watched some short films that use…animation technology.

We know, it's pretty great. Sometimes it's hard to see the technology for the animation (or something like that), but we know you stayed focused enough to answer a couple of questions on the topic.

Answer the following questions in one to four sentences. For example, if Shmoop was answering a question about the first frame animation, we'd write:

The first frame animation was found on a pot in an ancient Iranian city and depicted a goat trying nobly to jump up and grab some branches off a tree.