Saturday, May 08, 2021

One Hundred Years of Animation



Animation has come a long way from hand-drawn stick figures on celluloid. You may argue about which era was best for content and aesthetics, but you have to be impressed at the evolution of techniques, materials, and technology that shape our extensive catalog of animated media. This supercut follows animation over its more than 100-year history. (via Digg)

 

3 comments:

Debra She Who Seeks said...

Who doesn't love animation!

Bicycle Bill said...

If you look at it logically, there's really been very little change since the first person drew the first 'cartoon' by creating a series of drawings which, when viewed rapidly in sequential order, created the illusion of movement.  The PROCESSES by which this was done - moving from freehand to using rotoscope to motion capture, increasing the number of images per movement to reduce the 'herky-jerky' effects, moving from a pen and India ink to paint on celluloid to digital bits of information in a computer file ... those are the only things that seem to change.

It has been said that all magic (illusions such as done by Penn and Teller or David Copperfield), regardless of the illusion, can be distilled down to the same basic effects. When Seigfried and Roy made their assistant disappear the their white tiger appear, at the fundamental level it's the same trick David Copperfield uses to make HIS assistant disappear and be replaced by Copperfield on a motorcycle. The famous "Metamorphosis" was an illusion created by Houdini in the 1920s. But really, it's all a series of simple illusions — a handcuff escape, a bag escape, and a trunk escape. The only 'improvement' is the way people are trying to perform the final bit of the illusion faster and faster.  
It's how they put their own personal touch on producing the effect — or how they string multiple effects together to overload the viewers' senses so they are unable to boil it down to its simplest elements — that makes the difference.

And it's the same with animation.  It's still just a version of a flip-book; just gone high-tech.

-"BB"-

Jim Murrey said...

I'm glad that Ralph Bakshi got a small representation at least.