The art of giving the illusion of motion to static drawings, objects, and puppets by photographing them in successive positions. In modern live-action motion pictures, 24 frames of film are exposed for each second of the action unfolding in front of the camera. But when making animated movies, filmmakers expose just one frame of film at a time, whereupon the drawing, object, or puppet it records is slightly changed for the next frame. Many kinds of animated films have been made, but the technique has most often been centered on drawings.
Successful attempts to bring drawings to life were made during the 19th century, the most well known being the Zoetrope - a wheel with drawings that moved when the wheel was spun. But these were not animated films in the modern sense of the word. The first truly animated movie was made in 1906 by J. Stuart Blackton. It was a one-reeler called Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, and it immediately established the cartoon as a vehicle for comedy.
The first major American cartoon character to emerge out of the primitive beginnings of animation was, appropriately, a dinosaur. Winsor McCay created Gertie the Dinosaur in 1909 and went on to make the realistic and moving imagery of 1918's The Sinking of the Lusitania. The 1920s was a popular era for animated short subjects. They were regularly shown between features in movie theaters all over the country, and, as popular characters were created and sustained from one animated short to the next, more and more were devised in the hope of coming up with the next Coco the Clown, Felix the Cat, or Krazy Kat. Such was the impetus behind the young Walt Disney, who arrived in Hollywood in 1923. He created a combination live-action and animated series called Alice in Cartoonland and then tried another character in Oswald the Rabbit. It wasn't until 1928 that Disney finally broke out of the pack with his new creation, Mickey Mouse. But even Mickey didn't fully catch on until Disney broke through the sound barrier in 1928 with Steamboat Willie, synchronizing the visuals with a bouncy musical soundtrack.
The combination of sound, music, and animation proved to be electric. Disney's Silly Symphonies capitalized on this discovery, and virtually every other animation house belatedly tried to copy his success, the most notable example being the Warner Bros.' Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes. Although others such as Max Fleischer (creator of Popeye) made successful cartoons, in most respects, Disney essentially left his competition in the dust, moving forward with innovation after innovation, bringing three-color Technicolor to his animated shorts as early as 1933, inventing the multiplane camera for greater clarity, depth, and detail, and pushing forward to make ambitious, critically and commercially successful animated features as early as 1938 with the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, followed by Pinocchio (1940) and his belatedly appreciated masterpiece, Fantasia (1940), among many others.
Disney's success was nearly his undoing. A bitter strike against his thriving company sent a brigade of top-flight animators loose who set up shop in competition with their old employer in 1943. The new firm, UPA (United Productions of America), went on to create characters such as Gerald McBoing Boing and Mr. Magoo. Because of limited resources, they developed a far more economical visual style that was exceedingly spare, but they made up for that with a more sophisticated, wittier content than the increasingly saccharine Disney product.
The rise of television, particularly Saturday morning television, sounded the death knell for animated short subjects. Cartoons were available in great quantities on TV and had necessarily less appeal to theater owners looking to fill their bills. Animated movies, however, made solely by Disney, held their own during the 1950s and 1960s but they became fewer and further between.
Animation, at least for theatrical distribution, seemed like a dying art form until the Beatles made Yellow Submarine (1968), indicating for the first time that a feature-length animated movie need not be geared strictly to very young children. That lesson was taught yet again with a vengeance by Ralph Bakshi, who made the first X-rated animated feature, Fritz the Cat (1971). The film caused a storm of controversy but its iconoclastic style, energy, and undeniable creativity made it a hit. Bakshi continued to make often angry, idiosyncratic animated features throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, but even they became less popular over time with mass audiences, and once again, the animated feature seemed to slip into decline.
It was resurrected yet again with enormous box-office success during the mid- to late 1980s. After the modest success of producer Steven Spielberg's An American Tail (1986), Spielberg and Disney studios collaborated on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). This combined live-action and animated feature, made with the latest advances in computer animation, was a colossal hit both with critics and audiences. A resurgence of interest in animated features continued at a veritable breakneck pace with Disney's return to wholly animated films with Oliver & Company (1988), and with the Lucas/Spielberg production of the The Land Before Time (1988), a film about baby dinosaurs - a fitting reminder of Gertie the Dinosaur and animation's early days.
The mid-1980s saw the beginnings of what would become an inexorable threat to the classical modes of handdrawn animation. Like a fox in the henhouse, computer-generated imagery (CGI) invaded a handful of Disney animated features, beginning with The Great Mouse Detective (1985) - the first cartoon to contain CGI effects - and continuing with Oliver and Company (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). CGI sequences had already appeared in earlier Disney live-action films, including the prologue of The Black Hole (1979) and much of Tron (1980). The technology was born, for all intents and purposes, in 1971 when the pioneering team of Robert Abel and Associates began to make CGI commercials. In theaters and film festivals appeared a pioneering series of computer-generated short films from John Lasseter's Pixar Productions, of which The Tin Toy (1988) won an Oscar.
It was only a matter of time before Pixar and Disney teamed up to produce what would become a series of wildly successful (and profitable) CGI films, beginning with John Lasseter's Toy Story (1995) - for which Lasseter won an Oscar - followed by its sequel, Toy Story 2 (1999). They were the first CGI features of their kind, completely computergenerated, featuring characters, sets, and props that were never touched by a human hand, let alone a pencil or a paintbrush. Even if the work on the human characters - including the boy Andy and his ferocious neighbor, Sid - wasn't entirely convincing, the effects of the toy characters were amazing. They not only moved, they also moved precisely the way jointed figures like Woody and Buzz Lightyear should move, that is, spasmodically and clumsily. The two films' seriocomic tragedy lay in the fact that Buzz yearns to be human - until he finds the tag “Made in Taiwan” stamped on his body. Monsters, Inc. (2001), another Disney-Pixar production, was helmed by Pete Docter, the former supervising animator of Toy Story 2. Its story of the creatures of Monstropolis who come to steal the nightmares of little children proved to be more delightful than frightening for its audiences young and old.
It was becoming clear to Disney that CGI technology was rapidly eclipsing conventional, hand-drawn animation. Since Tarzan (1999), its last truly successful animated feature, the studio's attempts in the traditional mode have not fared well at the box office. Atlantis (2001) and Return to Never Land (2002) were commercial failures. Treasure Planet (2002), a science fiction adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, also failed, although it displayed an ingenious combination of hand-drawn images with CGI techniques in the character of Long John Silver (half of whose body was hand drawn and the other half computer generated).
Meanwhile, Disney's closest rivals, Dreamworks and Warner Bros. Animation, quickly followed suit with, respectively, The Prince of Egypt (1998), a box-office dud, and Space Jam (1993), which trotted out the Warner Bros. stable of cartoon characters for a basketball game with a live-action Michael Jordan. Far more successful was Dreamworks's Shrek (2001), a satiric swipe at fairytale creatures and cartoon characters, a box-office phenomenon that spawned a sequel and a host of media tie-ins in print and television.
Paradoxically, perhaps, the one traditional animation technique that survived the 1990s was stop-motion animation. Pioneered in the very earliest days of cinema in the work of Emile Cohl and Willis O'Brien, it matured in the film fantasies of the 1940s and 1950s by Ray Harryhausen and George Pal. The 1990s saw several standout box-office hits in the stop-motion process, including two from the team of Tim Burton and Henry Selick, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996), the latter containing a live-action prologue adapted from Roald Dahl's novel. The array of creatures was astonishing, including in the former the fearsome, wormy “Oogie-Boogie” and in the latter a centipede with a back problem, a spider with a Marlene Dietrich–like voice, and a grasshopper with a monocle. Also, the team of Nick Park and Peter Lord, who created the fabulously successful Wallace and Gromit series, created one of the most critically acclaimed of recent stopmotion efforts, Chicken Run (2000).
Meanwhile, a few brave, traditionally animated films continue to appear and even to hold their ground. Outstanding among them was The Iron Giant (1999), a cold-war update on British poet laureate Ted Hughes's allegory of a little boy's unusual friendship with a mysterious, 50-foot-tall metal man; and Disney's Lilo and Stitch (2002), a breezy and amusing science fiction tale by newcomers Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, set in Hawaii to the music of Elvis Presley.
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