The ORIGINS of ANIMATION

From the beginning, animation has been an important part of film history. Even before the invention of the motion picture camera, photographer Eadweard Muybridge used sequential photographs to analyze animal and human movement. Early 19th-century devices such as the thaumatrope, praxinoscope and zoetrope anticipated motion picture animation by making still images appear to move. Quickly flashing a series of still pictures past the viewer, these devices took advantage of a phenomenon called "persistence of vision." Because the human eye briefly retains an impression of an image after it has disappeared, the brain will read a rapid series of images as an unbroken movement. Animated films work on the same principle. Each frame of an animated film is a separate still picture, individually exposed. Drawings or props are moved slightly between exposures, creating an illusion of movement when the film is projected. In 1892, Emile Reynaud opened his popular Theatre Optique in Paris, where he projected films that had been drawn directly on transparent celluloid, a technique that would not be used again until the 1930s.The “trick-films” of Parisian magician Georges Méliès mixed stop-motion and single-frame photography with live-action film for magical effect. By the early 20th century, animators such as J. Stuart Blackton and Winsor McCay in the U.S. and Emile Cohl in France were making animated films composed entirely of drawings. Brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, creators of Betty Boop, patented the rotoscope in 1917, enabling animators to copy the movement of live-action by tracing filmed live-action images frame by frame. Raoul Barré opened the first animation studio in New York around 1914. Soon studios in New York, California and elsewhere were producing short films that screened in theaters before the main feature. Over the next few decades, cartoon series flourished, featuring popular characters such as Felix the Cat, Disney’s Mickey Mouse,Walter Lantz's Woody Woodpecker and Warner Bros.’ Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote. In the 1940s, George Pal’s Puppetoons represented one of the few examples of commercial animation using three-dimensional materials.