⌛🪶 Animation: The Magic of Moving Pictures
A Visual History of Animation: From Sketches to Screen
Tom & Jerry, Despicable Me, Toy Story, Mickey Mouse, Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, The Simpsons, Pokemon, The Lion King, Minions, and many more.
I believe it is very likely that you have watched or heard at least one of the above —beautiful works of animation, to date. Many of you would have spent hours watching them with your friends and family. Today, I will take you on a journey that will cover this beautiful story of the origin and development of animation, right from the beginning.
Along the way, we will learn some of the principles of animation, a bit of science, and illusion.
Let’s start!
Basics, first!
Origin of the term
The word "animation" stems from the Latin "animātiōn", stem of "animātiō", meaning "a bestowing of life". The term was first used in the 16th century to refer to the concept of giving life or spirit to something.
What do we humans need, to do animation?
At a very basic level, any animation requires fast movement of images that are only slightly different from the previous one, to create the illusion of motion.
There are certain nuances, like just moving a series of images quickly will make the images appear blurred and this has to be countered by something — let’s call it, for now, an anti-blur device, which we will discuss later in the article.
From the above, we can figure out a step-by-step process that would require the development of an animated movie.
Draw a set of images
Move them fast in a sequence
Add an Anti-blur device
Do all the above at a scale
A good part of the time, till the early 20th century humans took in getting the first three steps right. Then it took just ~50 years to get the fourth step right. And afterward, the development involved “improvements” in each of the steps.
Let’s start the journey now!
Animation in mind, storytelling at hand
The above is an example of humans achieving step 1 of the process — drawing a set of images. While many people who come from film-making backgrounds consider this 5200-year-old work as the most primitive form of animation, there are others who disagree completely saying this has nothing to do with animation particularly.
Whatever the case, the person who drew these 5 images had the motion of the goat in mind. Breaking the motion into 5 intermediate “frames”, the pictures were most likely drawn.
Ancient cave paintings
Many paleolithic cave paintings show attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion to a still drawing. Here animals are sometimes depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions just like how we draw shaded or dashed lines to depict the motion happening in the next frame or future.
We even have examples of the classic animation effect of “dissolve” or “fade” being thought during paintings. In another series of cave paintings shown below, you can see the attempt being made of showing a disappearing animal.
A 4000-year-old mural work was found in Egypt, that features a very long series of images apparently depicting the sequence of events in a wrestling match.
Attempts of adding motion
Thaumatrope
A thaumatrope is an optical toy with a disk featuring pictures on each side, attached to two strings. Twirling the strings quickly between the fingers causes the pictures to blend into one due to the persistence of vision.
A sandstone plaque discovered in the paleolithic Isturitz Cave shows a reindeer on one side standing upright but probably wounded (with an arrow sign on its flank). Its rear members, stiffened, are sliding forwards. On the other side a reindeer, seemingly the same individual, is found lying down, its four legs folded under the body slipping away from the ground.
Persistence of Vision
Persistence of vision refers to the optical phenomena where even after an image has disappeared from our visual field, the brain retains an afterimage of the image for a brief moment. This afterimage blends with the next image we see, creating the illusion of motion. This phenomenon is considered one of the reasons that make animation possible.
A quick example of this phenomenon would be — a fast-rotating disc with a colored dot on it, will appear making a full circle of the same color.
Revolving lantern
In ancient China before 1000 CE, people used lanterns that could rotate and create moving images. These lanterns were called "trotting horse lamps." They were made of hexagonal, cubical, or round shapes, with paper cut-outs of horses and riders attached to a shaft. The lantern would be heated by a lamp, causing the air inside to rise and rotate the shaft.
The moving silhouettes were projected onto the thin paper sides of the lantern, creating the illusion of chasing each other. Some versions of the lamp even had extra movement in the figures' heads, feet, and hands by using fine iron wires. These lanterns were mostly used to show images of horses and horse riders.
Magic lantern
Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens is considered one of the possible inventors of the magic lantern. It is an early type of image projector consisting of a box with a light source, typically a candle or an oil lamp, and a lens at the front. A glass slide or a hand-painted image is placed in the middle of the box, in front of the light source. When the light is turned on, it passes through the image and is projected onto a flat surface, such as a wall or a screen.
The image on the slide is magnified and projected onto the surface, making it much larger and brighter than the original image. The lens in the magic lantern can be adjusted to focus the image, and the box can be moved closer or farther away from the surface to adjust the size of the image.
So how does this do animation?
Many techniques were developed to add motion to the projected images. These usually involved moving parts like limbs by hand or small mechanisms across a stationary slide which showed the rest of the picture. Popular subjects for mechanical slides included the sails of a windmill turning, a procession of figures, a drinking man lowering and raising his glass to his mouth, a head with moving eyes, a nose growing very long, rats jumping in the mouth of a sleeping man.
Phenakistiscope: The First Widespread Animation Device
Before we jump into understanding this beautiful device, we need to understand one important effect — the Stroboscopic Effect.
The stroboscopic effect is a phenomenon that occurs when a series of still images, or flashes of light, are presented in rapid succession, creating the illusion of motion.
To understand consider the wheel shown below. It is rotating in a clockwise direction. Consider the wheel rotating in a dark room and your friend flashing a torch light at a frequency such that at every flash, the wheel has rotated by 340 degrees. Now if you will look at the “yellow” marked spoke, the wheel will appear to rotate anti-clockwise.
If instead, your friend flashed the light such that the wheel rotated by 360 degrees at every flash, then the wheel would appear completely stationary!
Another example is shown below. The clock hand is rotating at the exact same speed. But due to different frequencies of light, the hand either appears to be moving fast, stationary or opposite.
So how is this all related to “animation”?
Animation works by creating the illusion of motion through a series of still images, just like the stroboscopic effect. In animation, individual drawings or frames are created, each slightly different from the previous one, and when they are shown in quick succession, they create the illusion of motion.
In today’s digital era, we have “FPS” (Frames per second), where multiple frames “flicker” in a second. In the early 19th century, to create this flicker and the stroboscopic effect, the light was blocked physically using slits or channels.
Phenakisticope was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion using this stroboscopic effect. The phenakisticope was invented almost simultaneously around December 1832 by the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau and the Austrian professor of practical geometry Simon Stampfer.
It consists of a spinning disk with a series of still images arranged around the perimeter. When viewed through slots in the disk over a mirror while it's spinning, the images appear to be moving smoothly.
Problems—
Most forms of phenakisticope required a mirror to view the animation.
Only one person could view the animation at a time.
Zoetrope
Zoetrope is basically a cylindrical variation of the phenakisticope.
It is made up of a cylinder with vertical cuts on its sides. The cylinder has a strip of pictures on the inside that are in a sequence. When the cylinder spins, you look through the cuts, and the pictures appear to move smoothly. The slits provide the stroboscopic effect and prevent the pictures from blurring together, and your brain perceives them as a series of moving images.
This solved the requirement for a mirror as now the animation can be viewed on the opposite wall of the cylinder from the slits. Also, more than one person could view the animation through the different slits. Zoetrope was invented by William Ensign Lincoln in 1865, almost 3 decades after phenakisticope had been invented.
Problems—
Only very basic animation with a limited number of images could be made. Animation lasting just 2-3 seconds, with 8-16 images. We needed more.
Although the animation “worked”, it still had those intermittent black bars appearing for a fraction of a second.
Flip book
A flipbook uses the principle of persistence of vision instead of the stroboscopic effect to create the illusion of animation. Instead of relying on slits or slots, a flipbook is a series of still images printed on the pages of a book. When you flip through the pages quickly, your brain combines the individual images into a smooth, continuous motion.
The different images don’t get blurred because here each image is getting replaced completely in one attempt and not getting slid over by the other. The flipbook was the closest thing to the current digital FPS system where each frame was just a different image on individual papers.
The first flipbook was patented by John Barnes Linnett in 1868.
Problems—
Although flipbook increased the number of images that could be used for animation by several times, we still needed more.
It was tedious and after several repeated uses of the flipbook, the animation quality suffered due to the wear and tear of the book and the reduction in the springiness of the papers.
More improvements
Praxinoscope
This was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud. It was an improvement over Zoetrope. Instead of slits, it had an inner circle of mirrors that rotated and reflected the images placed on the outer rim. As the mirrors rotated, they created the illusion of motion by rapidly displaying the images in succession.
Projecting Praxinoscope (We are developing fast!!)
Reynaud improved his Praxinoscope by adding a lens and projecting the reflection of the mirror.
Théâtre Optique (longer films!)
In 1888 Reynaud developed the Théâtre Optique, an improved version capable of projecting images on a screen from a long roll of pictures.
Using this device, Reynaud created 5 short-animated films.
Pauvre Pierrot (created in 1892),
Un bon bock (created in 1892, now lost),
Le Clown et ses chiens (created in 1892, now lost).
Autour d'une cabine (created in 1894)
A rêve au coin du feu (created in 1894)
This collection was named Pantomimes Lumineuses. Each of the short films lasted 10 to 15 minutes per film and contained 300 to 700 frames manipulated to create the animation. The series became very popular and between 1892 and 1900, Reynaud gave over 12,800 shows to more than 500,000 visitors at the Musée Grévin in Paris. He added live piano music, songs, and some dialogue accompanying the films, while some sound effects were synchronized with an electromagnet.
Let’s watch Pauvre Pierrot —the very first animated cartoon!
Sadly, Reynaud was not only a pioneer in the world of cinema but also an early casualty of the exploitation that rapidly spread throughout the industry. He was employed by the Musée Grévin under an incredibly unfair agreement. Despite the enormous success of Pantomimes Lumineuses, he received only a small share of the profits and eventually went bankrupt.
Frustrated and hopeless, he destroyed the Théâtre Optique and threw most of his films into the Seine river. Today, only fragments of "Pauvre Pierrot" and the 1894 film "Autour d'une Cabine" remain as evidence of his brilliance.
Zoopraxiscope
This animation device was invented by Eadweard Muybridge in 1879. It was capable of displaying more detailed and realistic images as it was based on actual photographs rather than hand-drawn illustrations (of Praxinoscope).
If you remember from our discussion on the Evolution of camera, George Eastman pioneered the use of photographic film and came up with a revolutionary Box Camera, called “The Kodak Camera”, in 1888.
So, you can now see two completely different and seemingly unrelated fields — animation and photography crossing each the paths of each other.
As we will see in our next article, the second part of this story, how both fields contributed to each other and led the development of extremely popular and engaging cartoons and animated films of the modern times.
Sound, 3D, special effects, lighting, multiple layers, mass production and much more!
Stay tuned for the second part of the story!
Feel free to ask any questions or share your thoughts on this article or any feedback you have. This publication is for made for you!