Lecture 6 - Animation

Animation is derived from the Latin word 'animare', meaning: To give life to.

A series of images that are played quickly in a sequence to create the illusion of movement, if played quick enough it fools our brains into thinking movement is taking place; it's officially called The Persistence of Vision

Sequential images have been illustrated on walls, bowls, vases etc for years, ever since the Greeks started making vases with designs like this:

A chronological order of the first inventions that allowed us to create animation in its simplest form:

1650: "The Magic Lantern" was the first piece of animating tech created by Christian Huygens. 

1824: "The Thaumatrope" is credited to John Herschel.

1831: "The Phenakistoscope" was invented by both Plateu and Von Stampfer independently of each other.

1834: "The Zoetrope" 

1868: "Kineograph"/"Flipbook" Pierre-Hubert Desvignes is usually credited for this invention.

1892: "The Praxinoscope Projection" from Charles-Emilie Reynaud.

"Animation is not the art of drawings that move, but the art of movements that are drawn" said by Norman Mclaren. 

"In order to move forward, you need to know where you have come from" Michaela Pavlatova.

Both of these quotes are significant to understanding the history of animation and where we came from, because we have to understand what people have already done, and how they did it, so that we can move forward in our own practice.

Between 1900-1927 came the first ever drawn Frame by Frame animations... Including:

Georges Melies: A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Emile Cohl: Fantasmagorie (1908)

Windsor McCay: Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) 

Lotte Reiniger: The Adventures Of Prince Achmed (1926)

Fantasmagorie

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

My favourite categorised out of this time period was Windsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur.

Made in 1914, Windsor McCay is the first person to explore how keyframes work, and interacting with the drawings and music. This has inspired many in the years that followed this piece... Still inspiring many animators today!

By 1928, animation had developed technically, artistically and commercially enough to be valued more then just an art form; but as a profitable, popular culture that was able to amaze and entertain a new generation...
All the artists previously mentioned touched on the ideas of different aspects of animation, but one person pulled it all together...
Walt Disney.

The most iconic name in the world of animation today, he started out with a few animations such as "Steamboat Willie" (1928) and "The Skeleton Dance" (1929) which tied together the idea of animation interacting with music, which worked brilliantly to bring the drawings to life! Thus how Disney started off The Golden Age of Cartoons.

The Skeleton Dance

As well as drawings, artists were exploring the use of Stop Motion animation - a different technique using live models and puppets rather then 2D drawings.
The main pioneers of this technique were Aleksandr Ptushko's: "Novvy (the new) Gulliver" (1929), Ladislaw Starewicz: "The Tale of the Fox" (1930) and Willis O'Brien's 'King Kong' (1933).

King Kong

There are other great inspirations that came from this time period, such as:
Max Fleischer's: 'Dizzy Dishes' (1930) and 'Popeye' (1933)
Oskar Fischinger: 'Komposition in Blau' (1935) - using shapes to represent sounds.
ToyBox: 'Momotaro Vs Mickey Mouse' (1936)
Len Lye: 'Colour Box' (1935-6)

Dizzy Dishes

Colour Box

In 1937 came the first ever fully drawn feature length animated piece: "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:. It introduced complex layered animation, and rotoscoping on the human characters, and there were up to 1000 people working on it! Seeing this made animation much more exciting and gave them a lot of prospects for the future...
Other films came after this such as 'Fantasia' (1941) and Wan Brothers's: 'Princess Iron Fan' - The first feature length Chinese Animation... Proving that animation was becoming popular on an international level.

Fantasia

Princess Iron Fan

Between 1943-1945 Disney was producing a number of films to support the war effort of the American government, which included: 'Education for Death: The Rising of a Nazi' and 'Victory Through Air Power'.

After the war, UPA Films came into light, with animated pieces and series such as: 'The Brotherhood of Man' (1945) and 'Gerald McBoing-Boing' (1951).

Gerald McBoing-Boing

Other animators appear in history, showing us famous peices such as:
Norman Mclean's: 'Neighbours' (1952)
Chuck Jones's: 'Duck Amuck' (1953)
Halas and Batchelor's: 'Animal Farm' (1954)
Saul Bass's: 'The Man with the Golden Arm' (1954) and 'Anatomy of A Murderer' (1959)

Neighbours

Duck Amuck

This is where The Golden Age of Cartoons ended, since the rise in popularity of television meant the broadcasters wanted large quantities of programmes on low budgets, which was difficult to achieve with animation unless some big changes were made... Simplifying the backgrounds and animation techniques meant that there was a slow decline of feature length animations (which were simply too expensive to make on mass!) So it was replaced by cheaper mass produced shorts and TV series;
This is when The Television Age began...

Due to the amount of information given to us in this lecture, I will split this chronology into two blog posts...