Animation
Animation is a filmmaking technique whereby pictures are generated or manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animation has been recognized as an artistic medium, specifically within the entertainment industry. Many animations are either traditional animations or computer animations made with computer-generated imagery. Stop motion animation, in particular claymation, is also prominent alongside these other forms, albeit to a lesser degree.
Animation is contrasted with live action, although the two do not exist in isolation. Many filmmakers have produced films that are a hybrid of the two. As CGI increasingly approximates photographic imagery, filmmakers can relatively easily composite 3D animated visual effects into their film, rather than using practical effects.
General overview
can be very detailed 3D animation, while 2D computer animation can be used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth, or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop motion technique to two- and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts, puppets, or clay figures.An animated cartoon, or simply a cartoon, is an animated film, usually short, that features an exaggerated style. This style is often inspired by comic strips, gag cartoons, and other non-animated art forms. Cartoons frequently include anthropomorphic animals, superheroes, or the adventures of human protagonists. The action often revolves around exaggerated physical humor, particularly in predator/prey dynamics, where violent pratfalls such as falls, collisions, and explosions occur, often in ways that would be lethal in the real life.
During the late 1980s, the term "cartoon" was shortened to toon, referring to characters in animated productions, or more specifically, cartoonishly-drawn characters. This term gained popularity first in 1988 with the live-action/animated hybrid film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which introduced ToonTown, a world inhabited by various animated cartoon characters. In 1990, Tiny Toon Adventures embraced the classic cartoon spirit, introducing a new generation of cartoon characters. Then, in 1993, Animaniacs followed, featuring the three rubber-hose-styled Warner siblings, Yakko Warner, Wakko Warner, and Dot Warner, who are trapped in the 1930s, eventually escaped and found themselves in the Warner Bros. water tower in the 1990s.
The illusion of animation—as in motion pictures in general—has traditionally been attributed to the persistence of vision and later to the phi phenomenon and beta movement, but the exact neurological causes are still uncertain. The illusion of motion caused by a rapid succession of images that minimally differ from each other, with unnoticeable interruptions, is a stroboscopic effect. While animators traditionally used to draw each part of the movements and changes of figures on transparent cels that could be moved over a separate background, computer animation is usually based on programming paths between key frames to maneuver digitally created figures throughout a digitally created environment.
Analog mechanical animation media that rely on the rapid display of sequential images include the phenakistiscope, zoetrope, flip book, praxinoscope, and film. Television and video are popular electronic animation media that originally were analog and now operate digitally. For display on computers, technology such as the animated GIF and Flash animation were developed.
In addition to short films, feature films, television series, animated GIFs, and other media dedicated to the display of moving images, animation is also prevalent in video games, motion graphics, user interfaces, and visual effects.
The physical movement of image parts through simple mechanics—for instance, moving images in magic lantern shows—can also be considered animation. The mechanical manipulation of three-dimensional puppets and objects to emulate living beings has a very long history in automata. Electronic automata were popularized by Disney as animatronics.
Etymology
The word animation comes to the Latin word animātiō, meaning 'bestowing of life'. The earlier meaning of the English word is 'liveliness' and has been in use much longer than the meaning of 'moving image medium'.History
Before cinematography
Long before modern animation began, audiences around the world were captivated by the magic of moving characters. For centuries, master artists and craftsmen have brought puppets, automatons, shadow puppets, and fantastical lanterns to life, inspiring the imagination through physically manipulated wonders.In 1833, the stroboscopic disc introduced the principle of modern animation, which would also be applied in the zoetrope, the flip book, the praxinoscope and film.
Silent era
When cinematography eventually broke through in the 1890s, the wonder of the realistic details in the new medium was seen as its biggest accomplishment. It took years before animation found its way to the cinemas. The successful short The Haunted Hotel by J. Stuart Blackton popularized stop motion and reportedly inspired Émile Cohl to create Fantasmagorie, regarded as the oldest known example of a complete traditional animation on standard cinematographic film. Other great artistic and very influential short films were created by Ladislas Starevich with his puppet animations since 1910 and by Winsor McCay with detailed hand-drawn animation in films such as Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur.During the 1910s, the production of animated "cartoons" became an industry in the US. Successful producer John Randolph Bray and animator Earl Hurd, patented the cel animation process that dominated the animation industry for the rest of the century. Felix the Cat, who debuted in 1919, became the first fully realized anthropomorphic animal character in the history of American animation.
Image:FelixTheCat-1919-FelineFollies silent.ogv|thumb|Feline Follies with Felix the Cat, silent, 1919
American golden age
In 1928, Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, popularized film-with-synchronized-sound and put Walt Disney's studio at the forefront of the animation industry. Although Disney Animation's actual output relative to total global animation output has always been very small, the studio has overwhelmingly dominated the "aesthetic norms" of animation ever since.The enormous success of Mickey Mouse is seen as the start of the golden age of American animation that would last until the 1960s. The United States dominated the world market of animation with a plethora of cel-animated theatrical shorts. Several studios would introduce characters that would become very popular and would have long-lasting careers, including Walt Disney Productions' Goofy and Donald Duck, Fleischer Studios/Paramount Cartoon Studios' Out of the Inkwell' Koko the Clown, Bimbo and Betty Boop, Popeye and Casper the Friendly Ghost, Warner Bros. Cartoon Studios' Looney Tunes' Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny, Tweety, Sylvester the Cat, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, MGM cartoon studio's Tom and Jerry and Droopy, Universal Cartoon Studios' Woody Woodpecker, Terrytoons/20th Century Fox's Mighty Mouse, and United Artists' Pink Panther.
Features before CGI
In 1917, Italian-Argentine director Quirino Cristiani made the first feature-length film El Apóstol, which became a critical and commercial success. It was followed by Cristiani's Sin dejar rastros in 1918, but one day after its premiere, the film was confiscated by the government.After working on it for three years, Lotte Reiniger released the German feature-length silhouette animation Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed in 1926, the oldest extant animated feature.
In 1937, Walt Disney Studios premiered their first animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, still one of the highest-grossing traditional animation features as of 2020. The Fleischer studios followed this example in 1939 with Gulliver's Travels with some success. Partly due to foreign markets being cut off by the Second World War, Disney's next features Pinocchio, Fantasia, Fleischer Studios' second animated feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town failed at the box office. For several decades, Disney was the only American studio to regularly produce animated features, until Ralph Bakshi became the first to release more than a handful of features. Sullivan-Bluth Studios began to regularly produce animated features starting with An American Tail in 1986.
Although relatively few titles became as successful as Disney's features, other countries developed their own animation industries that produced both short and feature theatrical animations in a wide variety of styles, relatively often including stop motion and cutout animation techniques. Soviet Soyuzmultfilm animation studio, founded in 1936, produced 20 films per year on average and reached 1,582 titles in 2018. China, Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic, Italy, France, and Belgium were other countries that more than occasionally released feature films.
Television
Animation became very popular on television since the 1950s, when television sets started to become common in most developed countries. Cartoons were mainly programmed for children, on convenient time slots, and especially US youth spent many hours watching Saturday-morning cartoons. Many classic cartoons found a new life on the small screen and by the end of the 1950s, the production of new animated cartoons started to shift from theatrical releases to TV series. Hanna-Barbera Productions was especially prolific and had huge hit series, such as The Flintstones , Scooby-Doo and Belgian co-production The Smurfs. The constraints of American television programming and the demand for an enormous quantity resulted in cheaper and quicker limited animation methods and much more formulaic scripts. Quality dwindled until more daring animation surfaced in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s with hit series, the first cartoon of The Simpsons, which later developed into its own show and SpongeBob SquarePants as part of a "renaissance" of American animation.While US animated series also spawned successes internationally, many other countries produced their own child-oriented programming, relatively often preferring stop motion and puppetry over cel animation. Japanese anime TV series became very successful internationally since the 1960s, and European producers looking for affordable cel animators relatively often started co-productions with Japanese studios, resulting in hit series such as Barbapapa, Wickie und die starken Männer/小さなバイキング ビッケ , Maya the Honey Bee and The Jungle Book.