The History of Animation

Animation is featured in a lot of children’s programs in today’s television programs and films. These cartoons as they are known are completely created by a series of images all rapidly displayed together which creates the illusion. The character seems to move and do things and this is because of the optical illusion created by the rapid movement. This is called persistence of vision.  Within history there have been very early attempts to show movement in their drawings.

The Egyptians in their drawings drew one position of the people and then the next position of the person. This gives the eye something to follow and creates a form of motion. This motion was unfortunately never brought to life as we see now but these early attempts show that artists of the day were aware of the way to show movement in a series of drawings for the eye to follow. Other examples in history include the Paleolithic cave paintings and the Shahr I Sokhta earthenware bowl.

Later in the 1800’s the flip book was created and the advancement towards animation as we see it today was born. By drawing a figure on each page doing something slightly different and then when finished the artist then flips all of the pieces of paper consecutively which shows the illusion of movement. Later on a real advancement in animation came when cinematography was invented. No one can name a creator of animation as it really is a group of people who have created it. The invention is someone improving or accidently improving up on another’s idea so as you can see no one can be named specifically as the creator of animation.  The first form of stop animation was accidently created by Georges Melies . This accident occurred when his camera broke when he was filming a bus. By the time the camera was fixed another car was passing, a hearse. What he had done seemed like magic when the film was played, he had turned a bus into a hearse. Stop motion animation was born.  He recreated this in his studio by stopping the rolling of the camera to change a prop or something with in the scene of the film and then roll the camera again. None of these films still survive to this day only the story of it but a film by another maker has survived and is known as the earliest example of stop motion animation. This film was an advertisement by English born Arthur Melbourne Cooper in 1899. 

The first American film producer to use the stop motion technique was J Stuart Blackton, he also used hand drawn animation. He worked with Edison himself and copyrighted his work in 1900. He then went on to create several films that used his own technique called lightning artist and also included the rudimentary skills within stop motion technique. His animated film: Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, which was filmed in 1906 launched Blackton into the record books and he has been known  by some as the first animated film maker in the truest sence.