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A HISTORY OF ANIMATION

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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.

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Thanks to “Non Sequitur” writer andcartoonist Wiley Miller (who spent his high school years in McClean,Virginia,

and who graduated from VirginiaCommonwealth University), today we

know the true story about Neanderthalsand the history of animation . . .

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A concave mirror and an ingenious lens arrangement projected a image visible up to a distance of ten metres.

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IN 1824, Peter Mark Roget publishedPersistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects, which established four principles of animation:

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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.

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In 1829, Belgian artist &

scientist Joseph Plateau

developed the

PHENAKISTOSCOPE,

a series of pictures

mounted on a

spinning disc.

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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.

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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).

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One early version of “claymation”

using stop-camera produced by the

Thomas Edison Company in 1900

was Fun in a Bakery Shop.

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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.

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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.

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Goddard hired Richard Outcalt,a young American comic artist

who created the first comicseries, Down in Hogan’s Alley,

published in 1895. Hogan’sAlley, as the series came to becalled, attempted to burlesquecurrent events using a group of

neighborhood characters.

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The setting for Hogan’s Alley wasthe 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.

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At the time, yellow inkhad a tendency to

smudge on newsprint.To experiment, a press

foreman arbitrarilychose the bald-headed

kid’s nightshirt onwhich to try out a

quick-drying yellowink. The Yellow Kidwas born, and withhim, some say, the

comic strip.

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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.

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Among the most famous of cartoonists was Winsor McCay, Max Fleisher, and George

Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat. Krazy KatGoes A-Wooing (1916) and the Krazy Kat film

series was animated by a different artist, Leon Searl.

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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.

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In The Enchanted Drawing(1900), Blackton, then a

cartoonist for the New YorkEvening World, is photographedin Thomas Edison’s New Jerseystudio, performing a vaudeville

routine knows as the “lighteningsketch,” supplemented by stop

camera tricks that bring theobjects to life.

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Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)used chalkboard sketches and then cut-outs tosimplify the process. The flickering in the film

was common to the earliest animation andresulted from the camera operator’s failure to

achieve consistent exposure in manual one-frame cranking.

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Winsor McCay put his newspaper-born Little Nemoon 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.

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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.

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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.

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SOME MILESTONES IN ANIMATION INCLUDE:

Emile Cohl created the first animated series Phantasmagorie, a simple blackboard technique with stick figures.

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

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In Pat Sullivan’s

studio, cartoonist

Otto Messmer

created Felix the

Cat, the hottest

cartoon property

around during

the 1920s.

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But 1927 brought two things: soundon film, and the loss of Felix.Wonderful Felix, who walked andran to piano music or whatever thetheatre musicians happened to beplaying, had a short lived career.Sullivan, who owned him, refused tobelieve that Felix needed soundaccompaniment. A new animatedanimal star would take Felix’s place.