Can you imagine Nemo, the adorable clown fish that had captivated
our hearts, in an inanimate object documentary? Would The Lion King have touched
your childhood the same way, if it had not been the enthralling animation movie
that it was? Could you fall in love with the effervescent and very animated
King Julien had it not been for the brilliantly made animation movies of
Madagascar? Exactly. We can grow up as much as we want, become documentary
movie enthusiasts, Bollywood masala loyalists or a sucker for Hollywood romance
and action but anything animated will always pull on our heartstrings without a
doubt.
Animation comes from the Latin word animātiō: animō
being "to animate" or "give life to" and –ātiō which
means "the act of".
The history of animation goes back to as early as the
Palaeolithic age and the Palaeolithic cave paintings are evidence to that.
Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion drawing can be
found in these paintings where animals are depicted with multiple legs in
superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion.
A Chinese zoetrope-type device had been invented in 180 AD. The phenakistoscope,
praxinoscope, and the common ‘flip book’ were early popular animation devices
invented during the 19th century. In a way, no single person can be given the
credit of inventing film animation, as there were several people involved in
projects which could be considered animation at about the same time.
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Cave Painting in the Palaeolithic Age
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A creator of special-effect films, Georges Méliès was one of
the first people to use animation with his technique. He discovered a
technique, which was by accident and that was to stop the camera rolling to
change something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film. This idea
later came to be 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.
J. Stuart Blackton can possibly be called the first American film-maker to
use the techniques of stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. He pioneered these
concepts at the turn of the 20th century, with his first copyrighted work dated
1900. His films, The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) were film versions of
Blackton's "lightning artist" routine, and incorporated modified
versions of Méliès' early stop-motion techniques to make a series of blackboard
drawings appear to be in motion 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.
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| The Enchanted Drawing (1900) |
Emile
Cohl, another French artist, began drawing cartoon strips and created a film in
1908 called Fantasmagorie. The film largely comprised of a stick figure moving
about and encountering all manner of changing 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.
Post the successes of Blackton
and Cohl, numerous other artists began to experiment with animation. The
animation scenario had begun to bloom by now. Winsor McCay, a successful
newspaper cartoonist, who created detailed animations which 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 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
theatres. 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.
Did you know?
El Apostol (Spanish: "The
Apostle") was a 1917 Argentine animated film utilizing cut-out animation,
and the world's first animated feature film.
Computer animation has become
popular since Toy Story (1995),
the first animated film completely made using this technique.
In 2008, the animation market was
worth US$68.4 billion.
