Don’t you feel ecstatic to have met Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Popeye, Tom & Jerry, Scooby Doo and the Powerpuff Girls?
Remember those days when watching cartoons back to back with a bowlful of popcorn, used to be your only mission in childhood?
It is only because of animation that we smile a little brighter and laugh a little harder until our stomach hurts.
Without it, our perception of innocence would have been different!
Aren’t you interested to know how it all started?
So, let’s go back to history and take a quick look at Animation’s timeline.
In those days
The earliest traces of animation were found in the Paleolithic cave paintings with animals having multiple sets of legs. Archaeologists believe that the impression could be mapped back to at least 5000 years…a vase found in Iran had five images of a goat leaping to grab a leaf from a tree.
It is a glory to understand how far animation has come from the ancient days.
Coming on paper
Several centuries later, the illusion of motion was brought to life by inventions like Magic Lantern, Flipbook, Phenakistoscope, Thaumatrope and few more, but one major element was missing a sound. But in a short film, released in 1928, synchronized sound found its way. That movie was Steamboat Willie by Walt Disney.
Eventually, monochrome took a backseat 5 years later and colors were added to Flowers and Trees (1932) by Walt Disney, again.
Walt Disney became the biggest animation company in the world. This happened after the first ever, full feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs released in 1937, and made a whopping $416 million.
Stop Motion
The combination of live action and stop motion was around the time. However, Aardman is the only well-known animation company that produces feature length stop motion movies to this day. The Adventures of Mark Twain released in 1985 directed by Will Vinton, is the first ever completely stop motion/clay animated film. This film only made in 6 major cities despite of being a theatrical release.
Even though, Stop Motion is less popular with movies, the man and his dog keep stop motion’s charm alive. They called the characters, Wallace and Gromit.
Time to go technical
Pixar Animation Studios, comes first in the list of creating animation, purely based on a computer with countless short films. This was before they joined Disney to create the first ever computer animated feature length film Toy Story 3. It had a grossing over $300 thousand, before making a $1 billion in the box office. This created history.
Pixar Animation Studios is now the most successful computer based animated videos company in the world.
They say, history makes a man wiser. In the case of animation, history has made animation, more creative, informative and experimental to reach a greater mass in various creative ways.
