History of Animation: 20th Century

Cel Animation

Transparent sheets on which animation was hand-drawn or painted on. This allowed the background layer to be repeated without being drawn again, saving time in production. This enabled films to be made more cost-effectively. The other layers are placed on top of each other.

It's interesting to see how the backgrounds are hand painted as this is a technique I could use in my own project.

Rotoscoping - 1915

This concept was developed by Max Fleischer in 1915. This technique involved animators tracing over footage of film, frame-by-frame. This lead to more fluid, life-like animation.

Fleischer's cartoons were also the first to incorporate sound, including dialogue and trumpet sound effects to synchronise with the visuals. This was then followed by Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928), which features sounds from the characters and a musical soundtrack.

Three-strip Technicolour - 1924

This was an advancement of the two-strip technicolour which only featured the red and green spectrum. This new technique used three strips of black and white film with light shining through the camera lens also adding a magenta filter. Walt Disney was the first to use this process in the cartoon Flowers and Trees (1932).

Stop-Motion

This is an animation technique that transforms an object, making it appear to move on its own. Dolls or clay figures are often used since they're usually easier to re-position. An early example of this is The New Gulliver (1935).

Anime

Anime is a term which refers to Japanese animated productions.