Animation

Animation is the filming a sequence of drawings or positions of models to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision.

Early Animation

There is no single person that can be considered the "creator" of the art of animation, as there were several people doing several projects which could be considered various types of animation all around the same time. The following is a brief on those who are often acknowledged as significant to the development of animation. Note that this list is by no means a comprehensive list of contributors to early animation.

Georges Méliès was a creator of special effect films, such as A Trip to the Moon. He used many techniques – one of which was to stop the camera rolling, change something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film. This is a very similar idea to that of stop motion animation. Meleises accidentally happened upon the technique when his camera broke down while shooting a bus driving by. When the camera was fixed, a horse happened to be passing by just as Méliès continued to film. The result was that the bus appeared to change into a horse.

Fantasmagorie by Emile Cohl, 1908

Émile Cohl began drawing cartoon strips and created a film in 1908 called Fantasmagorie. The film was largely comprised 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.

Winsor McCay created detailed animations that required a team of artists and painstaking attention for detail. Each frame was drawn on paper, requiring backgrounds to be redrawn, as well characters to be animated. His films such as Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) were of an impressive scale, althought The Sinking of the Lusitania used cels.

In 1919 Otto Messmer created the character of Felix the cat for Pat Sullivan's animation studios. The importance of Felix lies in the character's strong personality, created largely through gesture and actions.