What is animation?
Animation is best described as a Visual illusion that conveys motion.
before film existed "animations"were found far back in history, though these were static images often in sequence that tried to convey motion.
Early animations: the earliest "animations" discovered by archeologists are paleolithic cave painting that usually showed animals that were painting in ways that seemed to show their legs in motion, though people believe that this could just be the artist had chosen to change the position of the legs. but it's also considered that they are attempts to convey motion.
the image above was found on a 5200 year old earthen bowl found in iran that shows a slight story of a goat jumping to eat from a tree, it's pretty obvious that this conveys a story and even motion.
This image shows an egyptian mural found in a tomb. as you can plainly see the mural shows a very present sense of motion and it also shows the sequence of events, they are around 4000 years old and show wrestlers in training.
Even Leonardo da Vinci has given attempts at conveying motion.
Despite all this history these are all not really considered animations, this is due to the fact that the equipment needed to show the images in sequence was non-exsistant, so these examples of early "animation" are nothing but a sequence of frames/events.
(though it is interesting to know that people had attempted to create animations throughout history.)
Animation before film:
many devices have been created that are able to show a sequence of events in motions.
Magic lantern:
the magic lantern was a form of projector that had a translucent painting and a traditional lamp.
using the light produced from the lamp the image was projected.
Some of these lanterns contained moving parts that were able to provide animated movement.
Thaumatrope:
The thaumatrope was a toy used during the victorian ages, which was a small disc with two different images on each side that was attached to string and when the disc was spun it would flicker between both of the images and this conveyed motion between the two sides, these were usually two individual images that when combined together create a new image. (this is not really animation as such, but i think it's noteworthy at least)
An example of a Thaumatrope
Phenakistoscope & zoetrope:
a phenakistoscope, apart from being a word that would score a lot in scrabble is an early device that shows an animation which is a disc with images and a slot for the person to look through.
when spun and next to a mirror a person looks through the slot to see the animated image in clear motion.
the Zoetrope was fundamentally the same thing though which was invented in 1834. it's a circular spinning device that has a few frames printed onto the insides, it is then spun and a person looks through the slot to see the image spinning.
a very similar zoetrope was actually made in the year 180AD more than 1000 years beforehand.
an example of a common Zoetrope
Flip book:
the flip book is probably the most known of early methods of animation aside from film.
a flip book is a book with images on each page that alter slightly from page to page and you have to flip the pages fast to display them frame by frame and this creates animations
due to the fact that you could have a larger amount of images than that of a zoetrope or anything before it, this was able to produce significantly longer animations within the book, the boundaries of these again were pushed with the invention of the mutoscope which is essentially a flip book, however it had a larger amount of slides/frames than that of a common flip book which often made animations of around a minute.
Traditional animation:
Silent films:
true animation that wasn't just an optical illusion were created around the turn of the 20th century from around 1880's to the early 1900's this was when animation began to become a larger medium and garnered more popularity.
some of the most notable silent animations were the film "Fantasmagorie"which was created in 1908 by Émil Cohl in france and it's one of the earliest examples of a hand drawn animated film, it's generally considered to be the first animated film
another massively notable animation is Gertie the Dinosaur, created in 1914 by Winsor McCay.
it's considered the first animated film to feature a character with an appealing personality.
because it actually had a noticable main character it became distinguished from earlier animated films as it was the first to do so. there is also a scene where McCay walks behind the screen and onto the screen and the dinosaurs back, making it the first film to combine animation with live action footage.
