A broader understanding of the developement of Animation.

Earlier attempts of animation were really experiments. Animation was first discovered from the still drawings of cave paintings, where animal legs and arms change position on different frames, almost like a story board. An example from 5,200 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta. It has five images across showing a goat leaping to a tree.



Another good example of an early experiment of animation is the famous Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci where the limbs swings, showing movement.





Animation has then been developed through the years, such as zoetrope which was created in China by Ting Huan in 180 AD. It is a device that cycles many individual images and created the illusion of a moving image.
The zoetrope first gave rise to the concept of moving a physical object to create the illusion of animation. From here, people were inspired to develop the technique and make animations by taking still images and play them in quick succession in motion.

 

By 1868 the flip book was discovered by Joseph Barnes Linnet. The Flip book brought us closer to the modern animation like the zoetrope which creates the illusion of motion by flipping the book with squealed images at a particular speed.


James Stuart Blackton was one of the people that invented Stop-motion animation, he created the first American animated film ‘Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in the 1906 where he made a time lapse drawing his character on a blackboard and used camera trick to animate his illustrations by rubbing and redrawing the character in a different position.

By 1914, the famous Winsor McCay has released his Cell animation ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ which is the first animation that feature a character with an appealing personality which could relate to modern animations such as ‘Simon’s Cat’ in 2010
In 1934, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first feature length film that was based by the Brothers Grimm fairytale. It was the first full length cel-animated feature in motion picture history and produced in full colour, produced by the famous Walt Disney (founder of the greatest animation company Disney) Disney has become very successful by their animations such as Snow White, Pinocchio and Dumbo in the 1940’s. 

By the year 1990's Pixar has created the first CGI film called Toy Story. It is a 3D modeling almost like a vitrual stop motion that combines the two worlds can be considered to be computer aided animation but on 2D computer drawing. This has been a big hit in animation because it is like characters are coming to life.