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Animation

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"Animate" redirects here. For other uses, see Animate (disambiguation) and Animation (disambiguation).

The bouncing ball animation (below) consists of these six frames, repeated indefinitely.

This animation moves at 10 frames per second.

Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most animations are made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Computer animation can be very detailed 3D animation, while 2D computer animation (which may have the look of traditional animation) can be used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth, or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop motion technique to two- and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts, puppets, or clay figures.

A cartoon is an animated film, usually a short film, featuring an exaggerated visual style. The style takes inspiration from comic strips, often featuring anthropomorphic animals, superheroes, or the adventures of human protagonists. Especially with animals that form a natural predator/prey relationship (e.g. cats and mice, coyotes and birds), the action often centers on violent pratfalls such as falls, collisions, and explosions that would be lethal in real life.

The illusion of animation—as in motion pictures in general—has traditionally been attributed to the persistence of vision and later to the phi phenomenon and/or beta movement, but the exact neurological causes are still uncertain. The illusion of motion caused by a rapid succession of images that minimally differ from each other, with unnoticeable interruptions, is a stroboscopic effect. While animators traditionally used to draw each part of the movements and changes of figures on transparent cells that could be moved over a separate background, computer animation is usually based on programming paths between keyframes to maneuver digitally created figures throughout a digitally created environment.

Analog mechanical animation media that rely on the rapid display of sequential images include the phénakisticope, zoetrope, flip book, praxinoscope, and film. Television and video are popular electronic animation media that originally were analog and now operate digitally. For display on computers, technology such as the animated GIF and Flash animation were developed.

In addition to short films, feature films, television series, animated GIFs, and other media dedicated to the display of moving images, the animation is also prevalent in video games, motion graphics, user interfaces, and visual effects.^[1]

The physical movement of image parts through simple mechanics—for instance moving images in magic lantern shows—can also be considered animation. The mechanical manipulation of three-dimensional puppets and objects to emulate living beings has a very long history in automata. Electronic automata were popularized by Disney as animatronics.

Etymology[edit]

The word "animation" stems from the Latin "animātiōn", the stem of "animātiō", meaning "a bestowing of life".^[2] The primary meaning of the English word is "liveliness" and has been in use much longer than the meaning of "moving image medium".

History[edit]

Main article: History of animation

Before cinematography[edit]

Nr. 10 in the reworked second series of Stampfer's stroboscopic discs published by Trentsensky & Vieweg in 1833.

Hundreds of years before the introduction of true animation, people all over the world enjoyed shows with moving figures that were created and manipulated manually in puppetry, automata, shadow play, and the magic lantern. The multi-media phantasmagoria shows that were very popular in European theatres from the late 18th century through the first half of the 19th century, featured lifelike projections of moving ghosts and other frightful imagery in motion.^{[citation needed]}

A projecting praxinoscope, from 1882, here shows superimposing an animated figure on a separately projected background scene

In 1833, the stroboscopic disc (better known as the phénakisticope) introduced the principle of modern animation with sequential images that were shown one by one in quick succession to form an optical illusion of motion pictures. Series of sequential images had occasionally been made over thousands of years, but the stroboscopic disc provided the first method to represent such images in fluent motion and for the first time had artists creating series with a proper systematic breakdown of movements. The stroboscopic animation principle was also applied in the zoetrope (1866), the flip book (1868), and the praxinoscope (1877). A typical 19th-century animation contained about 12 images that were displayed as a continuous loop by spinning a device manually. The flip book often contained more pictures and had a beginning and end, but its animation would not last longer than a few seconds. The first to create much longer sequences seem to have been Charles-Émile Reynaud, who between 1892 and 1900 had much success with his 10- to 15-minute-long Pantomimes Lumineuses.^{[citation needed]}

Silent era[edit]

When cinematography eventually broke through in 1895 after animated pictures had been known for decades, the wonder of the realistic details in the new medium was seen as its biggest accomplishment. Animation on film was not commercialized until a few years later by manufacturers of optical toys, with chromolithography film loops (often traced from live-action footage) for adapted toy magic lanterns intended for kids to use at home. It would take some more years before animation reached movie theaters.^{[citation needed]}

After earlier experiments by movie pioneers J. Stuart Blackton, Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, Segundo de Chomón, and Edwin S. Porter (among others), Blackton's The Haunted Hotel (1907) was the first huge stop-motion success, baffling audiences by showing objects that apparently moved by themselves in full photographic detail, without signs of any known stage trick.^{[citation needed]}

Fantasmagorie (1908) by Émile Cohl

Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) is the oldest known example of a standard cinematographic film composed entirely of what became known as traditional (hand-drawn) animation. Other great artistic and very influential short films were created by Ladislas Starevich with his puppet animations since 1910 and by Winsor McCay with detailed drawn animation in films such as Little Nemo (1911) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914).^{[citation needed]}

During the 1910s, the production of animated "cartoons" became an industry in the US.^[3] Successful producer John Randolph Bray and animator Earl Hurd patented the cel animation process that dominated the animation industry for the rest of the century.^[4][5] Felix the Cat, who debuted in 1919, became the first fully realized animal character in the history of American film animation.^[6]

4:15CC

Feline Follies with Felix the Cat, silent, 1919

American golden age[edit]

In 1928, Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, popularized film with synchronized sound and put Walt Disney's studio at the forefront of the animation industry. Although Disney Animation's actual output relative to total global animation output has always been very small, the studio has overwhelmingly dominated the "aesthetic norms" of animation ever since.^[7]

The enormous success of Mickey Mouse is seen as the start of the golden age of American animation that would last until the 1960s. The United States dominated the world market of animation with a plethora of cel-animated theatrical shorts.^{[citation needed]} Several studios would introduce characters that would become very popular and would have long-lasting careers, including Walt Disney Productions' Goofy (1932) and Donald Duck (1934), Warner Bros. Cartoons' Looney Tunes characters like Porky Pig (1935), Daffy Duck (1937), Bugs Bunny (1938–1940), Tweety (1941–1942), Sylvester the Cat (1945), Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner (1949), Fleischer Studios/Paramount Cartoon Studios' Betty Boop (1930), Popeye (1933), Superman (1941) and Casper (1945), MGM cartoon studio's Tom and Jerry (1940) and Droopy, Walter Lantz Productions/Universal Studio Cartoons' Woody Woodpecker (1940), Terrytoons/20th Century Fox's Gandy Goose (1938), Dinky Duck (1939), Mighty Mouse (1942) and Heckle and Jeckle (1946) and United Artists' Pink Panther (1963).

Features before CGI[edit]

Italian-Argentine cartoonist Quirino Cristiani showed the cut and articulated figure of his satirical character El Peludo (based on President Yrigoyen) patented in 1916 for the realization of his films, including the world's first animated feature film El Apóstol.^[8]

In 1917, Italian-Argentine director Quirino Cristiani made the first feature-length film El Apóstol (now lost), which became a critical and commercial success. It was followed by Cristiani's Sin dejar rastros in 1918, but one day after its premiere, the film was confiscated by the government.^{[citation needed]}

After working on it for three years, Lotte Reiniger released the German feature-length silhouette animation Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed in 1926, the oldest extant animated feature.^{[citation needed]}

In 1937, Walt Disney Studios premiered their first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, still one of the highest-grossing traditional animation features as of May 2020.^[9][10] The Fleischer studios followed this example in 1939 with Gulliver's Travels with some success. Partly due to foreign markets being cut off by the Second World War, Disney's next features Pinocchio, Fantasia (both 1940) and Fleischer Studios' second animated feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941–1942) failed at the box office. For decades afterward, Disney would be the only American studio to regularly produce animated features, until Ralph Bakshi became the first to also release more than a handful of features. Sullivan-Bluth Studios began to regularly produce animated features starting with An American Tail in 1986.^{[citation needed]}

Although relatively few titles became as successful as Disney's features, other countries developed their own animation industries that produced both short and feature theatrical animations in a wide variety of styles, relatively often including stop motion and cutout animation techniques. Russia's Soyuzmultfilm animation studio, founded in 1936, produced 20 films (including shorts) per year on average and reached 1,582 titles in 2018. China, Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic, Italy, France, and Belgium were other countries that more than occasionally released feature films, while Japan became a true powerhouse of animation production, with its own recognizable and influential anime style of effectively limited animation.^{[citation needed]}

Television[edit]

Animation became very popular on television in the 1950s, when television sets started to become common in most developed countries. Cartoons were mainly programmed for children, on convenient time slots, and especially US youth spent many hours watching Saturday morning cartoons. Many classic cartoons found a new life on the small screen and by the end of the 1950s, the production of new animated cartoons started to shift from theatrical releases to TV series. Hanna-Barbera Productions was especially prolific and had huge hit series, such as The Flintstones (1960–1966) (the first prime-time animated series), Scooby-Doo (since 1969), and Belgian co-production The Smurfs (1981–1989). The constraints of American television programming and the demand for an enormous quantity resulted in cheaper and quicker limited animation methods and much more formulaic scripts. Quality dwindled until more daring animation surfaced in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s with hit series such as The Simpsons (since 1989) as part of a "renaissance" of American animation.^{[citation needed]}

While US animated series also spawned successes internationally, many other countries produced their own child-oriented programming, relatively often preferring stop motion and puppetry over cel animation. Japanese anime TV series became very successful internationally in the 1960s, and European producers looking for affordable cel animators relatively often started co-productions with Japanese studios, resulting in hit series such as Barbapapa (The Netherlands/Japan/France 1973–1977), Wickie und die to starken Männer/小さなバイキング ビッケ (Vicky the Viking) (Austria/Germany/Japan 1974), and The Jungle Book (Italy/Japan 1989).^{[citation needed]}

Switch from cels to computers[edit]

Main article: History of computer animation

Computer animation was gradually developed since the 1940s. 3D wireframe animation started popping up in the mainstream in the 1970s, with an early (short) appearance in the sci-fi thriller Futureworld (1976).^{[citation needed]}

The Rescuers Down Under was the first feature film to be completely created digitally without a camera.^[11] It was produced in a style that's very similar to traditional cel animation on the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS), developed by The Walt Disney Company in collaboration with Pixar in the late 1980s.^{[citation needed]}

The so-called 3D style, more often associated with computer animation, became the dominant technique following the release of Pixar's Toy Story (1995), the first computer-animated feature in this style.^{[citation needed]}

Most of the cel animation studios switched to producing mostly computer-animated films around the 1990s, as it proved cheaper and more profitable. Not only the very popular 3D animation style was generated with computers, but also most of the films and series with a more traditional hand-crafted appearance, in which the charming characteristics of cel animation could be emulated with software, while new digital tools helped develop new styles and effects.^{[12][13][14][15][16][17]}

Economic status[edit]

In 2010, the animation market was estimated to be worth circa US$80 billion.^[18] By 2020, the value had increased to an estimated US$270 billion.^[19] Animated feature-length films returned the highest gross margins (around 52%) of all film genres between 2004 and 2013.^[20] Animation as an art and industry continue to thrive as of the early 2020s.^{[citation needed]}

Education, propaganda, and commercials[edit]

The clarity of animation makes it a powerful tool for instruction, while its total malleability also allows exaggeration that can be employed to convey strong emotions and thwart reality. It has therefore been widely used for other purposes than mere entertainment.^{[citation needed]}

During World War II, animation was widely exploited for propaganda. Many American studios, including Warner Bros. and Disney, lent their talents and their cartoon characters to convey to the public certain war values. Some countries, including China, Japan, and the United Kingdom, produced their first feature-length animation for their war efforts.^{[citation needed]}

Animation has been very popular in television commercials, both due to its graphic appeal, and the humor it can provide. Some animated characters in commercials have survived for decades, such as Snap, Crackle, and Pop in advertisements for Kellogg's cereals.^[21] Tex Avery was the producer of the first Raid "Kills Bugs Dead" commercials in 1966, which were very successful for the company.^[22]

Other media, merchandise, and theme parks[edit]

Apart from their success in movie theaters and television series, many cartoon characters would also prove extremely lucrative when licensed for all kinds of merchandise and for other media.^{[citation needed]}

Animation has traditionally been very closely related to comic books. While many comic book characters found their way to the screen (which is often the case in Japan, where many mangas are adapted into anime), original animated characters also commonly appear in comic books and magazines. Somewhat similarly, characters and plots for video games (an interactive animation medium) have been derived from films and vice versa.^{[citation needed]}

Some of the original content produced for the screen can be used and marketed in other media. Stories and images can easily be adapted into children's books and other printed media. Songs and music have appeared on records and as streaming media.^{[citation needed]}

While very many animation companies commercially exploit their creations outside of moving image media, The Walt Disney Company is the best-known and most extreme example. Since first being licensed for a children's writing tablet in 1929, their Mickey Mouse mascot has been depicted on an enormous amount of products, as have many other Disney characters. This may have influenced some pejorative use of Mickey's name but licensed Disney products to sell well, and the so-called Disneyana has many avid collectors, and even a dedicated Disneyana Fanclub (since 1984).^{[citation needed]}

Disneyland opened in 1955 and features many attractions that were based on Disney's cartoon characters. Its enormous success spawned several other Disney theme parks and resorts. Disney's earnings from the theme parks have relatively often been higher than those from their movies.^{[citation needed]}

Criticism[edit]

Criticism of animation has been common in media and cinema since its inception. With its popularity, a large amount of criticism has arisen, especially animated feature-length films.^[23] Criticisms regarding cultural representation and psychological effects on children have been raised around the animation industry, which some claim has remained politically unchanged and stagnant since its inception into mainstream culture.^[24]

Awards[edit]

Main article: List of animation awards

As with any other form of media, animation has instituted awards for excellence in the field. Many are part of general or regional film award programs, like China's Golden Rooster Award for Best Animation (since 1981). Awards programs dedicated to animation, with many categories, include ASIFA-Hollywood's Annie Awards, the Emile Awards in Europe, and the Anima Mundi awards in Brazil.