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A HISTORY OF ANIMATION. MANY scholars write that the history of animation started over 30,000 years ago in the caves of France and Spain where Neanderthals drew running and vaulting animals to suggest “living” motion. Thanks to “Non Sequitur” writer and cartoonist Wiley Miller (who spent his
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MANY scholars write that the history of animation started over 30,000 years ago in the caves of France and Spain where Neanderthals drew running and vaulting animals to suggest “living” motion.
Thanks to “Non Sequitur” writer and cartoonist Wiley Miller (who spent his high school years in McClean,Virginia, and who graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University), today we know the true story about Neanderthals and the history of animation . . .
The history of animation has also been traced back to the early- to mid-1700s when Dutch scientists and brothers Pieter and Jan van Musschenbroek created the forerunner of the modern slide projector.
Their creation became known as the MAGIC LANTERN, which could project a series of slides. This is a photo of the oldest known existing lantern made around 1720 by Jan van Musschenbroek.
The wooden case stands on a height adjustable,base. Smoke and heat from the oil burning lampescaped from a tin chimney on top of the body.
A concave mirror and an ingenious lens arrangement projected a image visible up to a distance of ten metres.
IN 1824, Peter Mark Roget published Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects, which established four principles of animation:
1. The viewer’s vision must be restricted to one still picture at a time. 2. The eye blurs many images into one image if they are presented in quick succession. 3. A certain minimum speed is required to produce this blurring effect. 4. A large quantity of light is essential to create a convincing image.
In 1829, Belgian artist & scientist Joseph Plateau developed the PHENAKISTOSCOPE, a series of pictures mounted on a spinning disc.
Major cities of the world offered a hundred variations of this new “toy,” with moving pictures of running dogs, horses, monkeys, fish, and acrobats. These first animation devices were called a variety of names from ANIMATOSCOPE to ZOETROPE.
The PHENAKISTOSCOPE set the stage for the developmentsof the last decade of the nineteenth century: The invention of the camera (attributed to The Edison Company), the invention of film (attributed to Eastman Kodak Company), and the first successful film projection (attributed to the Lumière brothers in 1896).
One early version of “claymation” using stop-camera produced by the Thomas Edison Company in 1900 was Fun in a Bakery Shop.
IN 1883 IN NEW YORK CITY, Joseph Pulitzer bought the New York World, giving it a new flair and style. Competition for newsstand sales began in earnest.
Another New Yorker, William Randolph Hearst bought the Journal, and started to imitate Pulitzer’s style. As competition heated up, Pulitzer sought an edge. In 1893, he bought a four-color rotary press to print famous works of art for his New York World Sunday supplement. Though the art series was unsuccessful, Pulitzer’s Sunday editor, Morrill Goddard, talked Pulitzer into using the equipment for comic art similar to the work done in Judge, Puck, and Life, the most popular humor magazines of the time.
Goddard hired Richard Outcalt, a young American comic artist who created the first comic series, Down in Hogan’s Alley, published in 1895. Hogan’s Alley, as the series came to be called, attempted to burlesque current events using a group of neighborhood characters.
The setting for Hogan’s Alley was the city slums—squalid tenements and backyards filled with dogs, cats, and little tough guys. One of the street kids was a nameless, one-toothed, bald-headed boy dressed in a long, dirty nightshirt, the front of which was often used for additional commentary.
At the time, yellow ink had a tendency to smudge on newsprint. To experiment, a press foreman arbitrarily chose the bald-headed kid’s nightshirt on which to try out a quick-drying yellow ink. The Yellow Kid was born, and with him, some say, the comic strip.
The Yellow Kid was so popular that the close association of wild-headlines with this yellow-shirted character gave rise to the name “yellow journalism.” Many credit Outcalt and the comic strip artists following him as the ones who gave birth to animated art on film. Indeed, almost all of the early animators started as comic strip artist and were even traded from paper to paper like sports players.
Among the most famous of cartoonists was Winsor McCay, Max Fleisher, and George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat Goes A-Wooing (1916) and the Krazy Kat film series was animated by a different artist, Leon Searl.
Many historians credit French animator Emile Cohl with the first animated film. American animator and historian John Canemaker credits J. Stuart Blackton with the first two animated films: The Enchanted Drawing, and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.
In The Enchanted Drawing (1900), Blackton, then a cartoonist for the New York Evening World, is photographed in Thomas Edison’s New Jersey studio, performing a vaudeville routine knows as the “lightening sketch,” supplemented by stop camera tricks that bring the objects to life.
Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) used chalkboard sketches and then cut-outs to simplify the process. The flickering in the film was common to the earliest animation and resulted from the camera operator’s failure to achieve consistent exposure in manual one-frame cranking.
Winsor McCay put his newspaper-born Little Nemo on film in 1911. He gave us the first fluid animation, drawing on translucent rice paper, and using crude crossmarks for registration from frame to frame.
After his longtime assistant John A. Fitzsimmons developed a cel registration system (a forerunner of most peg systems used today), McCay introduced “animation cycles,” the repeated use of a series of cels. He used his cycle technique in How a Mosquito Operates, and the highly successful Gertie the Dinosaur.
The following fragment from Gertie on Tour (1921) was done in collaboration with McCay’s son John and Fitzsimmons. It may have been released as part of the 1921 Series Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.
Emile Cohl created the first animated series Phantasmagorie, a simple blackboard technique with stick figures. SOME MILESTONES IN ANIMATION INCLUDE: Raoul Barré established the first studio capable of producing animated cartoons in quantity. Max Fleisher filed for a patent for the Rotoscope, a device that allowed the animator to trace over live-action images
In Pat Sullivan’s studio, cartoonist Otto Messmer created Felix the Cat, the hottest cartoon property around during the 1920s.
But 1927 brought two things: sound on film, and the loss of Felix. Wonderful Felix, who walked and ran to piano music or whatever the theatre musicians happened to be playing, had a short lived career. Sullivan, who owned him, refused to believe that Felix needed sound accompaniment. A new animated animal star would take Felix’s place.
