C: Traditional Animation

The Traditional Animation:

Traditional animation, (or classical animation, cel animation, or hand-drawn animation) is an animation technique where each frame is drawn by hand. It was the process used for most animated films of the 20th century. 

(e.g. Mark Mayerson & his final mosaic of Pinocchio)

The individual frames of a traditionally animated film are photographs of drawings, which are first drawn on paper. To create the illusion of movement, each drawing differs slightly from the one before it. The animators' drawings are traced or photocopied onto transparent acetate sheets, which are on the side opposite the line drawings.

The completed character movements are photographed one-by-one onto motion picture film against a painted background by a rostrum camera.

The production of animated short films, typically referred to as "cartoons", became an industry of its own during the 1910s, and cartoon shorts were produced to be shown in movie theaters.

After the revolutionary of  devices to move pictures especially the flipping books, many other artists began experimenting with animation. By mid-1910s animation production in US already dominated by the techniques of hand drawn animation ( known as Traditional Animation) .

So here are a brief historical information on how traditional animation began:

Eadweard MuyBridge 1877:

Muybridge was born in Britain as Edward James Muggeridge, but lived for many years in the USA as Eadweard Muybridge. He was the first photographer to capture the movement of people and animals in photo sequences.

In the 1870s he began taking pictures of galloping horses. He experimented with a special shutter and an arrangement of 12 or 24 cameras in a row. 

Muybridge developed a method to project photographs onto a screen as 'moving pictures'. He also developed a fast camera shutter and used other state-of-the-art techniques of his day to make the first photographs that show sequences of movement. 











He made many photographic series (more than 100,000 photos). Some of them appeared in his book 'Animal Locomotion' (1887).

Galloping horse set to motion:

Muybridge continued his quest to fully catalog many aspects of human and animal movement, shooting hundreds of horses and other animals and of nude or draped subjects engaged in various activities such as running, walking, boxing, fencing, and descending a staircase.

Eadweard Muybridge was born and died in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England. The majority of his work as a professional photographer and innovator occurred in America.

Auguste and Louis Lumiere 1895:

Auguste and Louis Lumière were the sons of Antoine Lumière, a painter and pioneer photographer who founded a factory in Lyons, France, to manufacture photographic gelatin dry-plates in 1882. The brothers were born inBesanìon, France, August on October 19, 1862, and Louis on October 5,1864. The family business gave them a natural interest in photography and, working as a team, they made important contributions to both still photographyand motion pictures, as well as other scientific endeavors. But it is as theinventors of the modern cinema that the Lumières are perhaps best known. The Lumiere held their first private screening of projected motion pictures in 1895. 

Their first public screening of films at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This history-making presentation featured ten short films, including their first film, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds.

The above photo from their early work depicts workers leaving a factory.

Auguste and Louis Lumiere are credited with the world's first public film screening on December 28,
1895. 

The world's first film poster, for 1895

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory:

It is believed their first film was actually recorded that same year (1895) with Léon Bouly's cinématographe device, which was patented the previous year. The cinématographe — a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures — was further developed by the Lumières.


James Stuart Blackton:

J. Stuart Blackton was an Anglo-American film producer of the Silent Era, the founder of Vitagraph Studios and among the first filmmakers to use the techniques of stop-motion and drawn animation. He is considered the father of American animation.




He was born in Sheffield, in UK on 5 January 1875; his parents emigrated to the USA when the boy was ten. A natural talent for drawing found him a place on the staff of the New York World, writing and drawing a regular illustrated feature on personalities in the news.







He worked as a journalist and illustrator in New York, where he interviewed Thomas Edison, who was impressed enough with his drawings.



















He became friends with Albert E. Smith - who later became his business partner and headed Vitagraph Studios - in 1894 and they started a short-lived vaudeville act together. Blackton went to work as a reporter for the "New York Evening World" newspaper, and an interview with Thomas A. Edison one day in 1896 piqued his interest in the film business. He later quit his job at the paper and bought a Kinetoscope projecting machine from Edison. He and his ex-vaudeville partner Smith joined forces and exhibited films all over the city, a venture that proved so profitable they quickly moved from exhibition to production.
They made their first film in 1898 :The Burglar on the Roof 1898:

The transition to stop-motion was apparently accidental and occurred around 1905. According to Albert Smith, one day the crew was filming a complex series of stop-action effects on the roof while steam from the building's generator was billowing in the background. On playing the film back, Smith noticed the odd effect created by the steam puffs scooting across the screen and decided to reproduce it deliberately. 

By 1900 Blackton had developed his "chalk talk" quick–sketch act, which he had performed for various groups , into the first motion picture to feature animated sketches, "The Enchanted Drawing". 

The Enchanted Drawing 1900:

In 1906, Blackton directed Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, which uses stop-motion as well as stick puppetry to produce a series of effects. 

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces 1906:

In addition to being the first studio to experiment successfully with animated cartoons and make them commercially viable, the Vitagraph Company of America went on to become the first studio to build up a stable of stars, the first to film the classics from Shakespeare to Dickens, and the first to use the motion picture for propaganda purposes.

Most of the film uses life action effects instead of animation, but nevertheless this film had a huge effect in stimulating the creation of animated films in America and in Europe.

Emile Cohl 1908:

Émile Cohl  was a French caricaturist of the largely Incoherent Movement, cartoonist, and animator, called "The Father of the Animated Cartoon" and "The Oldest Parisian".

Emile Cohl known as the brilliant French graphic artist and pioneer of the animation film.Cohl (born Emile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet) first established himself as a caricaturist, cartoonist and writer in the 1880s/90s. In 1908 he joined the Gaumont film company, originally as a writer. He soon graduated to directing comedy, chase and féerie (magical films in the style of Georges Méliès) films, but then moved to making animation films.

Cohl worked with line drawings, cut-outs, puppets and other media. He also took the idea of animation one step further by cresting a character, Fantoche. His first animated film, Fantasmagorie (1908):

It is held to be the first fully animated film, employing 700 drawings on sheets of paper, each photographed separately. Cohl developed a distinctive personal style of animation, where a figure would metamorphose into some unexpected different image, taunting notions of reality and logical sequence.

Ladislaw Starewicz 1911:

Ladislaw Starewicz was a Russian and French stop-motion animator who used insects and other animals as his protagonists.

Starewicz had interests in a number of different areas; by 1910 he was named Director of the Museum of Natural History in Kovno, Lithuania. There he made four short live-action documentaries for the museum.  Inspired by a viewing of Animated Matches 1908 by Emile Cohl, Starewicz decided to re-create the fight through stop-motion animation: by replacing the beetles' legs with wire, attached with sealing wax to their thorax, he is able to create articulated insect puppets. The result was the short film Lucanus Cervus (1910), apparently the first animated puppet film with a plot and the natal hour of Russian animation.

The best-known film of this period, perhaps of his entire career, was Revenge of the Kinematograph Cameraman 1912, a cynical work about infidelity and jealousy among the insects.

Winsor McCay 1914:

Winsor McCay was born in 1867 in Canada. McCay had an interest in drawing from the moment he could hold a pen. His father was a real estate agent and encouraged him to become a businessman. 

McCay left school at the age of 21, and went to work at the National Printing Company of Chicago. Here he illustrated posters for Circuses and other promotions. After two years he moved to Cincinatti, creating advertising posters for the Kohl and Middleton Dime Museum. He began to create quite a name for himself as avery talented artist. 

In 1903 he produced sort of experimental comic strip entitled "Tales of The Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle", based on poems by George Chester. 

In 1905 McCay began "Little Nemo in Slumberland", an extremely popular strip that was made into a Broadway musical. This strip is considered by many to be McCay's masterpiece. 

McCay's popularity increased, and he began performing on Vaudeville. His act consisted of "Speed Drawing" various characters including those from his strips. 

MCay began to experiment with the idea of using animated pictures as part of his vaudeville act.

It was a huge success and captivated audiences everywhere he went.

He followed this experiment up with "How a Mosquito Operates", again a success.

Finally, in 1914 McCay developed "Gertie The Dinosaur".

Gartie was an instant success and is the first original character developed solely for the animated cartoon and not based on a pre-existing comic strip. Gertie was made into a feature film with a live-action prologue and epilogue and shown around the world.

McCay also made the first dramatic cartoon, The Sinking Of The Lusitania in 1918. A war propaganda film expressing outrage at catastrophe, it was a huge step forward in realism and drama. It was the longest animated film so far. It took 2 years of work and needed 25,000 drawings.


Pat Sullivan 1919:

Patrick Sullivan  was an Australian film producer and pioneer animator, best known for producing the first Felix the Cat silent cartoons. Sullivan became a film producer after moving to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. 

In 1915 Sullivan started a career in animation, eventually owning his own studio, where his first recorded effort seemed to be an animated version of 'Pa Perkins'. In 1917, he created an animation called 'The Tail of Thomas Kat', featuring the prototype of the later Felix. 

From 1919, more than a hundred 'Felix the Cat' cartoons were published, and the animated Felix appeared all over the world by the time of Sullivan's death in 1933.

Walter Elias Disney 1928:

Walt Disney, founder of the world's biggest and most famous comic enterprise, started his career at the age of sixteen by making illustrations for Life magazine. Soon after art school, he started his own animation company, called Laugh-O-Gram-Corporation. The first short films he made with Ub Iwerks ('Alice's Wonderland') were a combination of live-action and animation.  click here to watch it in Youtube

In 1923, Disney founded the Disney Studios, the precursor of the multi-national which it is today. Disney stopped animating and became a producer. Among the first successful productions were the 'Mickey Mouse' cartoons  in 1928 - the first cartoon with synchronized sound. 

These were short, humorous animations in which anthropomorphic animals moved in time to music.

Some of these animals became modern icons, and later appeared in their own publications, like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Weekly magazines.

The first film was 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' (1937), in which Disney experimented with revolutionary animation techniques.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Trailer:

Part from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs film:

Disney's Multi-Plane Camera:
Walt Disney invented the multiplane camera used for animation.The multiplane camera was used in the Walt Disney Studios during the thirties and forties to create countless animated pictures.

The multiplane camera is used in the traditional animation process that moves a number of pieces of artwork past the camera at various speeds and at various distances from one another. This creates a three-dimensional effect, although not actually stereoscopic.

Various parts of the artwork layers are left transparent, to allow other layers to be seen behind them. The movements are calculated and photographed frame-by-frame, with the result being an illusion of depth by having several layers of artwork moving at different speeds - the further away from the camera, the slower the speed. 

The multi-plane effect is sometimes referred to as a parallax process. An interesting variation is to have the background and foreground move in opposite directions.

He worked with the Technicolor company to implement their new full-color three-strip process, first used in the 1932 Disney short Flowers and Trees. 

Animation After 1930 and Later Trends:

In addition  a number of other cartoon studios thrived during the 1930s.Such as:

Fleischer Studios:

The company had its start when Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope, which allowed for extremely lifelike animation. 

Using this device, the Fleischer brothers got a contract with Bray Studio in 1919 to produce their own series called Out of the Inkwell, which featured their first characters, the as yet unnamed Koko the Clown, and Fitz the Dog, who would evolve into Bimbo in 1930. 

Out of the Inkwell became a very successful series. As the Bray theatrical operation started to diminish, the brothers began their own studio in 1921. 

Dave served as the director and supervised the studio's production, while Max served as the producer. The company was known as Out of the Inkwell Films, Incorporated, and later became Fleischer Studios in January, 1929.

Warner Brothers:

Warner's cartoon unit had its roots in the independent Harman and Ising studio. From 1930 to 1933, Disney alumni Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising produced a series of musical cartoons for Leon Schlesinger, who sold the shorts to Warner. 

Harman and Ising introduced their character Bosko in the first Looney Tunes cartoon, Sinkin' in the Bathtub, and created a sister series, Merrie Melodies, in 1931.Harman and Ising broke away from Schlesinger in 1933 due to a contractual dispute, taking Bosko with them to MGM. 

As a result, Schlesinger started his own studio, Leon Schlesinger Productions, which continued with Merrie Melodies while starting production on Looney Tunes starring Buddy, a Bosko clone. 

By the end of the decade, a new Schlesinger production team, including directors Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Robert Clampett, and Chuck Jones was formed. Schlesinger's staff developed a fast-paced, irreverent style that made their cartoons immensely popular worldwide.

Merrie Melodies "Bars and Stripes Forever" (1939):

The Golden Age of animation is a period that began with the advent of sound cartoons in 1928 and continued into the early 1960s when theatrical animated shorts slowly began losing to the new medium of television animation. 

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera:

By the beginning on the 1960s, the medium of television was beginning to gain more momentum, and the animation industry began to change as a result. At the head of this change were the tandem of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the creators of Tom and Jerry. 

The joint efforts of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera have had a powerful and lasting impact on television animation. 

Since the late 1950s, Hanna-Barbera programs have been a staple of television entertainment. Furthermore, a great many of the characters originally created by Hanna and Barbera for the small screen have crossed the boundaries into film, books, toys, and all manner of other media, becoming virtually ubiquitous as cultural icons. Due to its lack of dialogue, Tom and Jerry was easily translated into various foreign languages.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Stuart_Blackton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison
http://filmabinitio.blogspot.com/2010/06/first-animated-film-1906-humorous.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vancouverfilmschool/3593577610/in/set-72157623308190032
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_animation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumi%C3%A8re
http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/00376/facts.eadweard_muybridge_the_human_and_animal_locomotion_photographs.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsor_McCay
http://www.animazing.com/gallery/pages/history.html
http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/video/articles/59159.aspx
http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs229/animTimeline.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_American_animation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros.
http://www.dipity.com/pxz9642/Animation-from-1900-to-the-1920s/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_and_Jerry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischer_Studios