Animated Films Through Its Time

Welcome back, my fellow film lovers! Before animated films became what is known and seen today, they were first introduced among designs of the common era and well-developed inventions used to capture the precise movement of animation. In this blog post, I will discuss how animated films were made throughout time, along with the inventions and ideas used.

Animation in the Past 

What is animation in the filming industry and how was it first developed?

Animation is a technique used to process 2D and 3D still images and convert them into moving pictures. Through animation, a story is told within the characters’ liveness and movement of action. As early as 30,000 B.C., animation began as a vision of motion through drawings. For instance, a primary bronze-aged pottery bowl discovered in Shahr-e Sukhteh has expressed and illustrated goats leaping, emphasizing an element of movement. This allows one’s eyes to follow the action to understand its representation. 

To expand the interpretation of images, the magic lantern, invented in 1650 as a projector to use pictures on sheets of glass as an illusion of movement, represented the start of projected animation. In 1832, the phenakistoscope, invented by Joseph Plateau, was created to capture continuous movement for an illusion using a spinning cardboard disk. From these two essential inventions, the portrayal of animation has moved further by mixing photograph motion. 

How were the first group of animated films portrayed?

The early 20th century, also known as the Silent Era, introduced the first animated cartoons under the support of Bray Studios. In 1906, the first animated film, The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, focused on experimenting with stop-motion animation. This form of animation involves taking a picture of an object and repositioning it to take repeated pictures to gather a finalized moving picture.  

In 1908, Fantasmagorie was the first animated film created by Émile Cohl that used a hand-drawn technique. Cohl made this film by placing the drawings on an illuminated glass plate and tracing each drawing on top of each one by moving the position slightly.    

What was the golden age of animation?

The Golden Age in America was marked by the rise of cartoon animation, starting from the late 1920s. Animated cartoons began to take over the industry as sound developed. Towards the 1930s and 1940s, studios such as Walt Disney Animation Studios and the Warner Bros. Cartoons began to strive. Some of the characters that have become the most significant of this age are Snow White, Cinderella, Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, Popeye, and many others.

How has the invention and ideas for creating animated films changed?

The world of animation grew mainly from the modern-day invention of CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). In this technique, the drawings are illustrated with 3D modeling. Some of the more modern-day work consists of Toy Story and Big Hero 6. 

Thank you for reading my eighteenth blog post. I hope you enjoyed reading about how animated films were first brought to the attention of others before any invention was created and how new techniques were developed to form the films we love today. In the next blog posts, you will learn more about the filming industry and read more movie interviews.