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Saturday, August 27, 2005

Animation History

"Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised forquick mass appreciation."
—Walt Disney
 
Animation History With the precursor of the horizontal presentation on the microfilm of today can be found in an Egyptian decoration of circa of wall 2000 B.C. In the successive panels it depicts the actions of two combatants in a variety of hooks. In one of the most famous illustrations of Vinci of da of Leonardo it shows how the members would look in various positions.it the angels of Giotto seem to take the flight in their reiterated movements. The rollers employed Japanese for saying continuous stories.


True animation cannot be achieved without first understanding a fundamental principle of the human eye: the persistance of vison. This was first demonstrated in 1828 by Frenchman Paul Roget who invented thaumatrope. It was a disc with stringor peg attahced to both sides. One side of the disc showed a bird theother an empty cage. When the discwas twirled the bird appeared in thecage. This proved that the eye retains images when it is exposed to a series of pictures one at a time.
 

Two other inventions helped to further the cause of animation. The phenakistoscope invented near Dish Of Joseph in 1826 was a circular card with slits around the edge. The viewer held the card up to a mirror and peered through the slits as the card whirled.T hrough a series of drawings around the circumference of the card the viewer saw a progression of images resulting in a moving object. The same technique applied to the zeotrope . In 1860 Pierre Desvignes inserted a strip of paper containing drawings on the inside of a drum like cylinder. The drum twirled on a spindle and the viewer gazed through slots ot the top of the drum. The figures on the inside magically came to life endlessly looping in an acrobatic feat.


The development of the motion camera and projector by Thomas With . Edison and others provided the first real practical means of making animation. 
Even still the animation was done in the simplest of means. Stuart Blacktona film published runs in 1906 authorized Phases of Humourous of the funny faces where he drew comical faces on a blackboard photographed them and the erased it to draw another stage of the facial expression. 
This "stop-motion" effect astonished audiences by making drawings comes to life.



In the early twenties the popularity of the animated cartoon was on the decline and movie exhibitors were looking elswhere for alternative entertainment media. The public was tired of the old formula of stringing sight gags together without including a story line or any character development. What the art of animation could accomplish was not yet evident in this period except for in the works of Winsor McCay like Dinosaur De Gertie 1914 . The principal achievement of Mccay was the fact that it had developed a character in its dinosaur something which previously only had been seen inside Otto Messmer Felix the cat . McCay's piece had a galvanizing effect on audiences. The notion of a dinosaur coming to life on the screen was astonishing. Of all the early animations Felix the cat developed the strongest personality of screen did not develop not drank more to count the turns visual crudes to amuse goes downwards for the ace of hearing opposed to develop has Person stronger of screen.

With this time many of the animations were based one primitive gags and violence which is still true of cartoons today. One character would beat another mercilessly only to cuts his victim instantly recover and return the favor. Perhaps the hero would swing his sword and reduce the villian to baloney slices only to cuts him reappear have yew magically rejoined. With big change came over the industry in the mid twenties: like rcialization. Big studios took over the smaller cottage industries and set standards for animation. With nimators were given quotas on the number of drawings they had to produce a day. Cartoons now had to manufactured in quantity and cheaply.

Without Disney's streamlined organization of talent and creative collaboration the animated cartoon could never have advanced as rapidly or as beautifully as it has....yet, as at the Bray and Sullivan studios, in the process many of the men responsible for the studio's achievements remain anonymous and forgotten.  
Had Disney animators Vladimir Tytla and Freddie Moore been alive during the renaissance their names might well have been numbered among Da Vinci and Michelangelo. For all their accomplishments, however, they remain totally eclipsed by the titanic figure of Walt Disney.Walt Disney's first important contribution to animation was to move his studio to Hollywood in 1923. Los Angeles had become the center of live-action filmmaking, but the animation industry remained rooted in New York with a few studios scattered throughout the Midwest, like Disney's.
Accompanying him on his move from Kansas City were Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, who would eventually found the Warner Bros. and MGM animation houses. These 3 studios were to become the leaders of the animation industry. Disney's decision to move to California was a pivotal turning point in the development of animation as a business.


Walt was the one who steered cartoons away from the "rubber hose" style of the silent era (dubbed thus because of the way characters moved without regard to anatomy, as if all their limbs were rubber hoses) and encouraged his artists to develop a realistic, naturalist style of animation in the early 1930s. He was the moving force behind such groundbreaking films as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), the first full-length animated feature, and "Pinocchio" (1940), a film whose intricate levels of technical brilliance many animators feel has never been surpassed.

Finally in the 1990s the artists in the television cartoon industry began to figure out how to work effectively with the limitations of the field. 1992 saw the debut of Warner Bros. "Batman: The Animated Series."


It was inevitable, in spite of Winsor McCay's warnings, that animation would become a "trade" in the form of the studio system.