Essay On The History Of Animation

Animation is a concept for visual storytelling that has been around for roughly 30000 years, these early forms of animation where done in the form of cave paintings, usually drawn with multiple limbs to suggest movement. This essay is going to be about how animation has changed from the late 1800s to 2017 by looking at how it has progressed to what we know animation to be today through the advancement of technological that have ultimately popularized the genre today. it all started back in 1898, Two men named J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith produced and created a small animation using stop motion and Albert’s Daughter’s Dolls and toy. This stop motion was called ‘The Humpty Dumpty Circus’ and is widely considered to be the earliest film

Stuart Blackton created an animation called ‘Humorous Phases of Funny Faces’ In 1906. The animation is a short silent animated cartoon much like a lot of ‘films’ at the time. Blackton’s hand can be seen drawing on a chalkboard in real time, However, Blackton disappears and the animation starts, with the image seemingly drawing itself on the chalkboard. The entire animation is three minutes long and is shot at twenty frames per second, giving a total of 3600 total frames. The animation was drawn in the style of newspaper cartoons of the time. (Crow, 2014) and (Kehr, 1998). This animation is quite like a short animation created in 1908 by a French Graphics designer, Cartoonist and animator, Émile Cohl called ‘Fantasmagorie’. This animation is considered by many film historians to be one of the earliest examples of a hand drawn animation, even though J. Stuarts Blackton’s animation pre-dates this animation by roughly two years the first part of his animation is drawn on video, Émile Cohl’s animation is entirely hand-drawn frame by frame from the start of the animated short to the end. Émile used the negative technique on his animation, the animation looks to be shot on blackboard but it was shot on white paper in negative. In total, Émile drew 700 drawings and pieced them together to create his animation. (Review, n.d.) and (Colman,

This animation was already way into the production phases as a black and white cartoon. Walt Disney meet a man called Herbert Kalmus, who had done a lot of testing on this technique called ‘The Three Strip Technicolor tests’. Walt Disney concluded that this is exactly what his animated cartoon needed and promptly scrapped his black and white version of the cartoon in favour of three strip technicolour. Walt Disney made the decision to have all silly symphonies cartoons in technicolour, however he left already successful cartoons such as Mickey Mouse in black and white and they did not need the colour to make them more successful, however in 1935, Disney moved most of its Cartoons to technicolour (Animation,