A Brief and Very Incomplete History of Early, Pre-CGI Animation

The Pre-Modern Era

≈40,000BCE - 1850s

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Cave paintings depicting motion

prehistoric paintings in the Chauvet Cave

32,000-30,000 BCE

Egyptian burial murals

Ancient Grecian Vases

Indonesian puppet shows (Wayang)

The Magic Lantern

The Modern Era

Late 1800s - 1960’s

“The Grand Narrative of Progress”

Gino Severini’s Red Cross Train Passing a Village

1824 - rediscovery of ‘the persistence of vision’

“This principle rests on the fact that our eyes temporarily retain the image of anything they’ve just seen. If this wasn’t so, we would never get the illusion of an unbroken connection in a series of images, and neither movies nor animation would be possible. Many people don’t realise that movies don’t actually move, and that they are still images that appear to move when they are projected in a series. Roget’s principle quickly gave birth to various optical contraptions…”

-Richard Williams, The Animator’s Suvival Kit, pg 20

thaumatrope

phenakistoscope

Zoetrope

The first cartoon, 1908

Fantasmagorie is an 1908 French animated film by Émile Cohl. It is one of the earliest examples of traditional (hand-drawn) animation, and considered by film historians to be the first animated cartoon.

The Cel (1914)

Precursor to the idea of “Layers” in Photoshop and animation software

1940

1930

1919

the cartoon character

1919

How Animated Cartoons Are Made, 1919

Steamboat Willie, 1928

The first cartoon with sound effects.

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Rotoscoping is an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion picture footage, frame by frame, to produce realistic action. Originally, animators projected photographed live-action movie images onto a glass panel and traced over the image. This projection equipment is referred to as a rotoscope, developed by Polish-American animator Max Fleischer in 1915. This device was eventually replaced by computers, but the process is still called rotoscoping.

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Fleischer’s patent expired in 1934 and shortly after many major animation studios began using it, especially Disney.

Versions by artist Oliver Laric, 2010

Fantasia, 1940

Soyuzmultfilm

Established in June 10, 1936, Souzmultfilm is a Soviet and Russian state animation studio. Over the eighty years of its existence, Souzmultfilm has created more than 1,500 cartoons in various genres using a rich variety of artistic techniques, including stop-motion, clay and hand-drawn ones. Many of the films rank among the classics of world animation, garnered a multitude of international and Russian awards and prizes, and became an integral part of Russian culture.

The Little Mermaid, 1968

The Mystery of the 3rd Planet, 1981

Heroic Sisters from the Grassland (China, 1964)

The cartoon Heroic Little Sisters of the Grassland (草原英雄小姐妹) is based on the true story of two Mongolian sisters who almost sacrificed their lives to protect the sheep of the people’s commune in a snowstorm in February 1964.

Astro Boy, 1952

Some of the first anime for television. Still to this day anime is mostly done by hand.

The Jetsons

Hanna Barbera

1962-63

1985-86

The Flintstones

Hanna Barbera

1960-66

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