A HISTORY OF ANIMATION

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A HISTORY OF ANIMATION
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MANY scholars write that the history of
animation started over 30,000 years ago in the
caves of France and Spain where Neanderthals drew
running and vaulting animals to suggest living
motion.
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• Thanks to Non Sequitur writer and
• cartoonist Wiley Miller (who spent his
• high school years in McClean,Virginia,
• and who graduated from Virginia
• Commonwealth University), today we
• know the true story about Neanderthals
• and the history of animation . . .

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• The history of animation
• has also been traced
• back to the early- to
• mid-1700s when Dutch
• scientists and brothers
• Pieter and Jan van
• Musschenbroek created
• the forerunner of the
• modern slide projector.

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• Their creation became
• known as the MAGIC
• LANTERN, which could
• project a series of slides. This is a photo of
  the
• oldest known existing
• lantern made around
• 1720 by Jan van
• Musschenbroek.

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The wooden case stands on a height
adjustable,base. Smoke and heat from the oil
burning lampescaped from a tin chimney on top of
the body.
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A concave mirror and an ingenious lens
arrangement projected a image visible up to a
distance of ten metres.
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IN 1824, Peter Mark Roget published Persistence
of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects, which
established four principles of animation
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• 1. The viewers vision must be restricted to one
  still picture at a time.
• 2. The eye blurs many images into one image if
  they are presented in quick succession.
• 3. A certain minimum speed is required to
  produce this blurring effect.
• 4. A large quantity of light is essential to
  create a convincing image.

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• In 1829, Belgian artist
• scientist Joseph Plateau
• developed the
• PHENAKISTOSCOPE,
• a series of pictures
• mounted on a
• spinning disc.

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• Major cities of the world offered a
• hundred variations of this new toy,
• with moving pictures of running dogs,
• horses, monkeys, fish, and acrobats.
• These first animation devices were
• called a variety of names from
• ANIMATOSCOPE to ZOETROPE.

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The PHENAKISTOSCOPE set the stage for the
developmentsof the last decade of the nineteenth
century The invention of the camera (attributed
to The Edison Company), the invention of film
(attributed to Eastman Kodak Company), and the
first successful film projection (attributed to
the Lumière brothers in 1896).
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• One early version of claymation
• using stop-camera produced by the
• Thomas Edison Company in 1900
• was Fun in a Bakery Shop.

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• IN 1883 IN NEW
• YORK CITY,
• Joseph Pulitzer
• bought the
• New York World,
• giving it a new
• flair and style.
• Competition for
• newsstand sales
• began in earnest.

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Another New Yorker, William Randolph Hearst
bought the Journal, and started to imitate
Pulitzers style. As competition heated up,
Pulitzer sought an edge. In 1893, he bought a
four-color rotary press to print famous works of
art for his New York World Sunday supplement.
Though the art series was unsuccessful,
Pulitzers Sunday editor, Morrill Goddard, talked
Pulitzer into using the equipment for comic art
similar to the work done in Judge, Puck, and
Life, the most popular humor magazines of the
time.
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• Goddard hired Richard Outcalt,
• a young American comic artist
• who created the first comic
• series, Down in Hogans Alley,
• published in 1895. Hogans
• Alley, as the series came to be
• called, attempted to burlesque
• current events using a group of
• neighborhood characters.

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• The setting for Hogans Alley was
• the city slumssqualid tenements
• and backyards filled with dogs,
• cats, and little tough guys. One of
• the street kids was a nameless,
• one-toothed, bald-headed boy
• dressed in a long, dirty nightshirt,
• the front of which was often used
• for additional commentary.

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• At the time, yellow ink
• had a tendency to
• smudge on newsprint.
• To experiment, a press
• foreman arbitrarily
• chose the bald-headed
• kids nightshirt on
• which to try out a
• quick-drying yellow
• ink. The Yellow Kid
• was born, and with
• him, some say, the
• comic strip.

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• The Yellow Kid was so popular that the
• close association of wild-headlines with
• this yellow-shirted character gave rise to
• the name yellow journalism. Many
• credit Outcalt and the comic strip artists
• following him as the ones who gave birth
• to animated art on film. Indeed, almost all
• of the early animators started as comic
• strip artist and were even traded from
• paper to paper like sports players.

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• Among the most famous of cartoonists was
• Winsor McCay, Max Fleisher, and George
• Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat
• Goes A-Wooing (1916) and the Krazy Kat film
• series was animated by a different artist,
• Leon Searl.

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• Many historians credit French
• animator Emile Cohl with the first
• animated film. American animator
• and historian John Canemaker
• credits J. Stuart Blackton with the
• first two animated films
• The Enchanted Drawing, and
• Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.

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• In The Enchanted Drawing
• (1900), Blackton, then a
• cartoonist for the New York
• Evening World, is photographed
• in Thomas Edisons New Jersey
• studio, performing a vaudeville
• routine knows as the lightening
• sketch, supplemented by stop
• camera tricks that bring the
• objects to life.

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• Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)
• used chalkboard sketches and then cut-outs to
• simplify the process. The flickering in the film
• was common to the earliest animation and
• resulted from the camera operators failure to
• achieve consistent exposure in manual
• one-frame cranking.

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• Winsor McCay put his newspaper-born Little Nemo
• on film in 1911. He gave us the first fluid
  animation,
• drawing on translucent rice paper, and using
  crude
• crossmarks for registration from frame to frame.

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• After his longtime assistant John A.
• Fitzsimmons developed a cel
• registration system (a forerunner of
• most peg systems used today), McCay
• introduced animation cycles, the
• repeated use of a series of cels. He
• used his cycle technique in How a
• Mosquito Operates, and the highly
• successful Gertie the Dinosaur.

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• The following fragment from Gertie on Tour
• (1921) was done in collaboration with
• McCays son John and Fitzsimmons. It may
• have been released as part of the 1921
• Series Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.

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• SOME MILESTONES IN ANIMATION INCLUDE

Emile Cohl created the first animated series
Phantasmagorie, a simple blackboard technique
with stick figures.
Raoul Barré established the first studio capable
of producing animated cartoons in quantity.
Max Fleisher filed for a patent for the
Rotoscope, a device that allowed the animator to
trace over live-action images
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• In Pat Sullivans
• studio, cartoonist
• Otto Messmer
• created Felix the
• Cat, the hottest
• cartoon property
• around during
• the 1920s.

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• But 1927 brought two things sound
• on film, and the loss of Felix.
• Wonderful Felix, who walked and
• ran to piano music or whatever the
• theatre musicians happened to be
• playing, had a short lived career.
• Sullivan, who owned him, refused to
• believe that Felix needed sound
• accompaniment. A new animated
• animal star would take Felixs place.