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Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although there are other methods.
Early Examples
Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion drawing can be found in
paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion.
A 5,000 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in
Shahr-i Sokhta has five images of a goat painted along the sides. This has been claimed to be an example of early animation.
[1] However, since no equipment existed to show the images in motion, such a series of images cannot be called animation in a true sense of the word.
[2]
A Chinese
zoetrope-type device had been invented in 180 AD.
[3] The
phenakistoscope,
praxinoscope, and the common
flip book were early popular animation devices invented during the 19th century.
These devices produced the appearance of movement from sequential drawings using technological means, but animation did not really develop much further until the advent of
cinematography.
There is no single person who can be considered the "creator" of film animation, as there were several people working on projects which could be considered animation at about the same time.
Georges Méliès was a creator of special-effect films; he was generally one of the first people to use animation with his technique. He discovered a technique by accident which was to stop the camera rolling to change something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film. This idea was later known as stop-motion animation. Méliès discovered this technique accidentally when his camera broke down while shooting a bus driving by. When he had fixed the camera, a hearse happened to be passing by just as Méliès restarted rolling the film, his end result was that he had managed to make a bus transform into a hearse. This was just one of the great contributors to animation in the early years.
The earliest surviving stop-motion advertising film was an English short by
Arthur Melbourne-Cooper called
Matches: An Appeal (1899). Developed for the
Bryant and May Matchsticks company, it involved stop-motion animation of wired-together matches writing a patriotic call to action on a blackboard.
J. Stuart Blackton was possibly the first American film-maker to use the techniques of stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. Introduced to film-making by
Edison, he pioneered these concepts at the turn of the 20th century, with his first copyrighted work dated 1900. Several of his films, among them
The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and
Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) were film versions of Blackton's "lightning artist" routine, and utilized modified versions of Méliès' early stop-motion techniques to make a series of
blackboard drawings appear to move and reshape themselves. 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces' is regularly cited as the first true animated film, and Blackton is considered the first true
animator.
Another French artist,
Émile Cohl, began drawing cartoon strips and created a film in 1908 called
Fantasmagorie. The film largely consisted of a
stick figure moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action where the animator’s hands would enter the scene. The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto
negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look. This makes
Fantasmagorie the first animated film created using what came to be known as
traditional (hand-drawn) animation.
Following the successes of Blackton and Cohl, many other artists began experimenting with animation. One such artist was
Winsor McCay, a successful newspaper cartoonist, who created detailed animations that required a team of artists and painstaking attention for detail. Each frame was drawn on paper; which invariably required backgrounds and characters to be redrawn and animated. Among McCay's most noted films are
Little Nemo (1911),
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and
The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).
The production of animated short films, typically referred to as "cartoons", became an industry of its own during the 1910s, and cartoon shorts were produced to be shown in
movie theaters. The most successful early animation producer was
John Randolph Bray, who, along with
animator Earl Hurd, patented the
cel animation process which dominated the animation industry for the rest of the decade.
El Apóstol (Spanish: "The Apostle") was a 1917 Argentine animated film utilizing cutout animation, and the world's first animated feature film.
[citation needed]
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