The History of Animation

The History of Animation is a long story, it has evolved rapidly over time. Animation had started out as a very simplistic art-form where motions would be represented by a group of frames being shown one after the other. Even ancient paintings where they had told stories in a series of pictures were considered early forms of animations. In 1868 animations were shown through flip-books, each frame was hand drawn and they would flip through the pictures rapidly to animate the drawings and show movement.

Eventually these flip-books evolved into basic stop motion videos. Artists would hand draw each frame on paper and take photographs of each frame in negative film giving it a chalkboard kind of look. They would then take these photographs and put them in order in a film reel. These reels would be projected and it would create the animation. These animations were black and white and didn't have any sound.

Fantasmagorie was the first animation to be done on negative film in 1908

Soon after animators would hand draw the cartoons on paper and create each frame like that, they would have pre-made backgrounds that would consistently loop so they wouldn't have to animate the background when ever something was moving. They would then draw the characters and objects in front of the background on a translucent piece of plastic. They would create each character on transparent acetate sheets called cels.

Each character was drawn on an individual cel and they would layer the cels on top of the background. They would take a composite picture and lay these images out frame by frame in a film kind of like a seamless stop motion animation. This form of animation was called cel animation or traditional animation. Most of these Cel Animations were in black and white for some time. They had little sound effects, mainly simple ones and contained background music.

This is one of the first hand drawn animations done in cel animation. It was also the first introduction of Mickey Mouse: Steamboat Willie

The Cartoons that were in black and white were eventually remade in color through the process of technicolor.

Today cartoons are now made on the computer. Many cartoons the characters are designed before the animation process. These characters are made as 3-Dimensional models and once created they can move the models and position them in each frame almost like claymation but on the computer.