A Largely Visual History of Animation: Part 1
Compiled by Erica Gorochow for NYU/ITP’s Commlab Animation Course
“Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn. What happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame.”
-Norman McLaren
Before the Illusion…
The earliest precursors to animation were sequential drawings, sculpted and scrawled by likes of cavemen and ancient Egyptians. Though these works feel closer to comics than animation, the connective tissue is the visual expression of story in relation to a duration of time. (Even though —ok — that ‘duration’ is pretty abstract).
Eureka Moment!
In 1824 Peter Roget presents a paper on a phenomenon called The Persistence of Vision. Basically, persistence of vision speculates that our retinas “hold on” to an image for a split second after we actually see it. This is why when we flash a series of sequential images, we see the illusion of motion. In some way, animation is the exploitation of our own biology.
Animation “Toys”
A series of inventions that tap into Roget’s “Persistence of Vision” theory, emerges.
1824: Thaumatrope: Possibly used in Roget’s POVision Demo
1829: The Phenakistoscope by Joseph Plateau
1833: The Zoetrope by William George Horner
1868: The Kineograph AKA The Flipbook by John Barnes Linnett
1877: Praxinoscope by Charles-Émile Reynaud
Muybridge’s Quest
Eadweard Muybridge was a photographer whose work pioneered frame-by-frame studies. His photos recorded what was too fast for the human eye to see. He also built special rigs and developed faster film emulsions to capture the “invisible” in-between movements of animals and humans. The legend of Muybridge goes as such:
In 1872, the former governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, hired Muybridge for some photographic studies. He had taken a position on a popularly debated question of the day — whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while trotting. The same question had arisen about the actions of horses during a gallop….Stanford sought out [the answer] and hired Muybridge to settle the question.
In 1872, Muybridge settled Stanford’s question with a single photographic negative showing his Standardbred trotting horse Occident airborne at the trot.
Many of Muybridge’s photographic studies still serve as reference to animators looking for breakdowns of movement.
The 1880s and 1890s also see rise to inventions that more closely align to the modern camera and film projector. Among those innovations were: Muybridge’s “Zoopraxiscope” (1879), Edison’s Kinetograph (the camera) and Kinetoscope (singer viewer system) (1891) and Léon Bouly / Lumière brothers’ cinematograph (audience viewing) (1982).
The first wave of Animation Pioneers
> The Enchanted Drawing by J. Stuart Blackman (1900) is considered to be the first (partially) animated film. Six years later he made Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)— the first ‘fully’ animated film. Before he was an animator, Blackman was a cartoonist and vaudeville performer.
> Meanwhile in France: 5o year-old cartoonist, Emile Cohl, makes Fantasmagorie (1908) — made up of 700 drawings!
> Georges Méliès blends stop motion with live-action in Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902)
> Władysław Starewicz begins to pioneer puppet based films. Develops obsession with insects: The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912)
> Windsor McCay, also a vaudeville performer, had become most famous for his comic strip Little Nemo. In 1914 he premiered Gertie the Dinosaur — which, in it’s own way, was interactive, as it paired to McCay’s live performance. Made from 10,000 drawings, the cartoon started to formalize animation process. It’s main dinosaur character was hugely influential to animation’s future as an industry.
> Lotte Reiniger is credited with pioneering silhouette animation. Her film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is considered to be the first feature length animation, weighing in at 65 minutes.
Animation as Experimental Art
Animation transcends vaudeville as avant-garde cinema is born. The medium becomes fertile ground for experimentation with artists in the 1920s, 30s and 40s — and is embraced by movements of the time: namely, Dadaism, Constructivism and Bauhaus.
> Hans Richter — Rhythmus 21 (1921) (Germany)
> Viking Eggeling — Symphonie Diagonal (1924) (Sweden/Switzerland/ Germany)
[Richter and Eggeling’s] explorations pushed the limits of early film and explored how visual phenomena intersect with concepts traditionally applied to music — rhythm, meter, duration, and tone. For Richter, film, not music, seemed to be the best medium for conveying the art of rhythm.
> Walter Ruttman — Lichtspiel Opus I (1921) (Germany)
[Ruttmann’s] first animations for Opus No. I were painted with oil on glass plates beneath an animation camera, shooting a frame after each brush stroke or each alteration because the wet paint could be wiped away or modified quite easily…Ruttmann also envisioned his Lichtspiel Opus I film to closely relate to music and commissioned the composer Max Butting to compose a string quartet for it. In the music score Ruttmann provided many indications to ensure that the music precisely synchronised with the visual elements unfolding on screen.
See also: Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of a City
> Oskar Fischinger — Worked Primarily in the late 20s, 30s and 40s. (Germany)
For me, Fischinger is the father of music videos. His work is still a huge influence on motion graphic artists today. In his lifetime, Fischinger made over 50 short animated films. His work straddled fine art and commercial commissions.
Studie No. 8 (1931)
Kreise (1933/34)
Composition in Blue (1935)
From Fantasia: J. S. Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (1940) — apparently, he quit without credit because Disney altered his designs.
Lucky Strike Cigarette Commercial (1948)
Also quite famous though hard to find a good link: Motion Painting No. 1
Look Familiar? The Knife — Silent Shout. Dir: Andreas Nilsson
Animation As Industry
Parallel to purely artistic exploration, animation forged ahead as an industry. Innovation occurred on two fronts: technical process and character development as pop-culture IP. One pattern we see repeated is the way studios would develop a series of shorts, which helps the studios, more or less, rapidly iterate.
> Around the 1910s: John Randolph Bray and animator Earl Hurd, patent cel animation. The process allows parts of each frame to be repeated from frame to frame, thus saving labor.
> Max and Dave Fleischer → Fleischer Studios. Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, Bimbo, Popeye the Sailor, and Superman. In ~1915 Max Fleischer invented a technique called rotoscoping: where an animator traces over footage, frame by frame, as a literal reference. To show off and refine the process, he made a series of cartoons called Out of the Inkwell. The theme was mostly always meta: Koko the Clown vs. his creator.
St. James Infirmary Excerpt (1933) — Rotoscope +“Rubber Hose” style animation
> Pat Sullivan / Otto Messmer → Felix the Cat in the Swim (1922) Felix was the first character from animation to attain a level of popularity sufficient to draw movie audiences.
> Disney Studios (1923 — Today) First films: In Kansas, Walt Disney’s firm was called Laugh-O-Gram Films. His Alice Comedies series featured a mix of live-action and animation.
After the demise of the Alice comedies, Disney developed an all-cartoon series starring his first original character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was distributed by Winkler Pictures through Universal Pictures. The distributor owned Oswald, so Disney only made a few hundred dollars. In 1928… Disney came up with the idea of a mouse character named Mortimer while on a train headed to California drawing up a few simple drawings. The mouse was later renamed Mickey Mouse.
1928 — Steamboat Willie was an immediate smash hit, and its initial success was attributed not just to Mickey’s appeal as a character, but to the fact that it was the first cartoon to feature synchronized sound.
From 1929 — 1939: Disney produces a series of 75 shorts called Silly Symphonies. Through the series, Disney experiments with Technicolor and the multiplane motion picture camera. It’s also where we first see Donald Duck in The Wise Little Hen (1934).
Deciding to push the boundaries of animation even further, Disney began production of his first feature-length animated film in 1934. Taking three years to complete, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, premiered in December 1937 and became highest-grossing film of that time by 1939.
Bonus points: See Disney’s nine old men wiki entry. OG animation innovation club: they pioneered a lot of the language and ‘rules’ animators still reference today.
> Warner Bros. Animation (1930s-1969) Warner’s cartoon unit had its roots in the independent Harman and Ising studio. Working with producer Leon Schlesinger, Harman and Ising introduced their character Bosko in the first Looney Tunes cartoon, Sinkin’ in the Bathtub, and created a sister series, Merrie Melodies, in 1931.
Leon Schlesinger split from Harman & Ising and continued with Merrie Melodies while starting production on Looney Tunes starring Buddy, a Bosko clone. By the end of the decade, a new Schlesinger production team, including directors Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Robert Clampett, and Chuck Jones was formed. Schlesinger’s staff developed a fast-paced, irreverent style that made their cartoons immensely popular worldwide.
The studio had their first star in Porky Pig. They went on develop a whole suite of characters that are still a part of pop-culture today, including Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny.
Ok, so The Dot and The Line (1965) was distributed by MGM but it was made by WB alums, Chuck Jones and (the real brains behind this film) Maurice Nobel (Bonus points: This 99% invisible podcast on Nobel — mega good!)
> UPA: United Productions of America (1940s-70s) → Mr. Magoo, Dick Tracey. A personal favorite of mine, UPA stood largely in conscious contrast to Disney Studios, which pushed to make animation more detailed and realistic. UPA sought to produce animated films with sufficient freedom to express design ideas considered radical by other established studios. They pioneered ‘limited animation’: a process that doesn’t redraw every element on every frame → overall the look and feel is very mid-century modern.
A Few Quick Facts: Fear (1945)
Gerald McBoing Boing (1951)
> Hanna-Barbera (1957 — 2001) formed by former MGM animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (creators of Tom and Jerry) and live-action director George Sidney. The studio became most famous for The Flinstones, The Jetsons, Yogi Bear, Scoobie Doo and The Smurfs. HB’s cartoons dominated Saturday morning TV. They resculpted the concept of ‘limited animation’ — largely in service of the studio’s notoriously low budgets.
Bonus Trivia: Hanna & Barbera did the title-sequence for I Love Lucy
Part Two: 20th Century Animators Expand the Medium
Part Three: A Tiny Survey of Animation Today
This blog post was made with the help of wikipedia and those who have uploaded incredible clips to youtube and vimeo. It’s not meant to be exhaustive, but if you feel something is wrong or grossly incomplete, please contact me @gorociao.
Other sources include: http://itp.nyu.edu/~mp51/commlab/historyofanim.html & http://www.joshuamosley.com/UPenn/courses/Ani/AnimationHistory.html
