Father of animation

Animation is one of the most ubiquitous and all-permeating forms of visual communication today, seen everywhere from the multitude of TV channels dedicated solely to cartoons to the title sequences of our favorite movies to the reactive graphic interfaces our smartphones. And while most of us have a vague idea of how, when, and where it all began, we tend to take for granted the incredible visual wizardry possible today.

Émile cohl cause of death

With that in mind, here's a brief history of the beloved medium's beginnings through the seminal work of five early animation pioneers. To create the animation, Cohl placed each drawing on an illuminated glass plate and traced the next drawing, reflecting the variations necessary to show movement, over it until he had some drawings.

Since chalkboard caricaturists were common vaudeville attractions in the era, the characters in the film look as though they've been drawn on a chalkboard, but it's an illusion—Cohl filmed black lines on paper and printed them in negative to make his animations appear to be chalk drawings. Fantasmagorie and dozens of other influential early films can be found on Gaumont Treasures Vol.

Herald and His Moving Comics , also referred to simply as Little Nemo and featured here last week , contains two minutes of pure animation at around , using sequential hand-illustration in a novel way not seen in previous films. There's also a wonderful Kickstarter project out to resurrect McCay's last film, The Flying House —join me in supporting it.

Father of american animation

In the film, previously featured here , Blackton sketches a face, cigars, and a bottle of wine, then "removes" these last drawings as real objects so that the face appears to react. Although the stop-motion sequence isn't considered "true" animation in technical terms the way Little Nemo , which Blackton co-directed with McCay, is, the technique offered an early glimpse of what animation could become.

Blackton's films are included in The Origins of American Animation, —a fantastic collection of the work that sparked what became one of the most powerful and permeating movements in visual creativity. Though the work of English photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge isn't animation, his animal locomotion studies are among the earliest visual experiments with moving images, laying the foundations for later forms of videography.

In , Muybridge used the phenakistoscope —an early animation device that harnessed the "persistence of vision" principle to create an illusion of motion—to extend his visual studies to animation. For more on early animation, you won't go wrong with Donald Crafton's Before Mickey —the most ambitious history of animation from ever published.