Talking trees, dancing mice and flying children: anything is possible I an animated film.Although animation has been on the rise in recent years, animation has been around for hundreds of years. We take you through the origins of animation and its development.
February 19, 2024
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The first real animated film was developed by Eadweard Muybridge. In 1877, he was commissioned to investigate whether a horse has a moment of suspension. To do this, he placed several cameras in a row and used them all to take a photo at the moment the horse ran past. By viewing the photos in quick succession, it looks as if the horse is moving.
Following this, Eadweard Muybridge devised the zoopraxiscope: this is a device for displaying moving images. In the device, pictures were painted on the glass. Rotating this disk rapidly created the illusion of moving images. You can think of the zoopraxiscope as the first movie projector.
Besides Eadweard Muybridge, there were a number of other pioneers in the field of animation. Take for example American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. He was the illustrator of the first fully developed cartoon character in 1914, namely Gertie the Dinosaur. He made thousands of drawings of Gertie, photographed them and had them played back in rapid succession. This created the illusion that Gertie could talk and move.
After World War I, Walt Disney and his brother founded an animation studio called The Disney Brothers Company. Together they developed their ideas and created short cartoons. In 1928, their first real cartoon with sound and vision was released: Steamboat Willy featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse, among others. After this film, the various cartoon characters such as Felix the cat, Bambi and Donald Duck were created.
The first well-known and feature-length animated film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, developed by (now) Walt Disney (1937). This became a great success and Disney received an oscar for this film. The company continued to grow and soon became a leader in the animation industry.
For a long time, animations were mainly aimed at children: in fact, the cartoons consisted of cartoon characters and the stories were often fairy tales. For example, after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney developed Pinocchio (1940), Alice in Wonderland (1949), Cinderella (1950) and Peter Pan (1953), among others.
During World War II, animations were used as a propaganda tool to convince civilians of the usefulness of war. Even after World War II, more and more animation agencies developed cartoons aimed at a somewhat older audience. They did this by making animations that included, for example, sex, coarse language and violence. More and more animations for adults, such as The Simpsons and The Flintstones, were therefore created on television.
The advent of the computer provided a milestone in animation: namely, it allowed the generation of digital moving images. Although a series of early computer animations were developed as early as the early 1960s, it wasn't until 1995 that the first fully computer-animated film was developed, namely Toy Story released by, you guessed it, Walt Disney.
After 2000 there was an increase in computer animated films. For example, Shrek was released in 2001 with as many as 36 separate locations in the film, which was a record for a computer animated film at the time. Not long after that, Ice Age was released with animals that had never been animated before, such as a sloth, woolly mammoth and saber-toothed tiger. These films also became another roaring success.
Meanwhile, the possibilities with animation are endless. Animation studios such as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar studios and DreamWorks animation still make realistic and impressive films today.
Consider the movie Avatar, the first part of which came out in 2009. In this film, they used Motion Capture for the first time: a way to transfer movements of the cast into animation, generated entirely by a computer. In December 2022, 13 years after the first film, part two was released.
Besides being used to make cool movies, animation is also used nowadays to translate a product, service or story to the target audience. After all, images attract a larger audience than text, and animation offers endless possibilities. Read more about the advantages of animation in our other blog.
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