About Frame by Frame

Most accounts of animation history begin somewhere convenient. American histories begin in 1928. Histories of anime begin in 1963. Histories of computer animation begin in 1995. Each of these is a reasonable place to start a conversation and a poor place to start an understanding, because the interesting question is almost always what came before and what it made possible.

This project takes the opposite approach. It treats animation as a single continuous development from seventeenth-century projected images through nineteenth-century optical devices, the first drawn films, the industrialization of the cel, sound, color, television, the national schools that grew up outside Hollywood, computer graphics research, and the stylistic reopening of the last decade. Every entry is placed on one line, in order, so the connections are visible.

How it is organized

There are four ways into the same material, and they all lead to the same records.

• The timeline holds every documented event in chronological order, and can be filtered by period, country, technique and production type, or searched by keyword.
• Decade pages give each period an editorial introduction explaining what changed and why, followed by the events belonging to it.
• Topic histories follow a single tradition end to end, for readers who want the development of stop motion or television animation as a continuous argument rather than as scattered dates.
• Milestone pages take eighteen turning points and examine them at length, because some events genuinely require more than a paragraph.

What each record contains

Every event carries the same structured fields: a date as precise as the evidence allows, a summary, the historical context that produced it, the technique involved, the artist, studio or institution responsible, the country or region, an account of why it mattered to the industry, what it made possible afterwards, the sources consulted, and links to related events. The intention is that a reader can evaluate the claim rather than simply accept it.

Standards

Nothing here is invented. Where a date is disputed among historians, the record says so rather than choosing a side and presenting it as settled. Where an event is significant but the surviving evidence is thin, that limitation is stated. Several early works discussed on this site no longer exist in any form, and the record treats documentation and surviving prints as different kinds of evidence.

The full account of how research is conducted, which sources are preferred and how disagreements are handled is set out in Sources and methodology and Editorial policy.

Illustrations

Every illustration on this site was made for it. There are no film frames, character images, posters or promotional materials anywhere on these pages, because reproducing them would require permissions this project does not hold. The drawings depict apparatus, methods and production concepts: viewing drums, slotted discs, layered artwork, puppet armatures, exposure sheets, geometry and shading. They are original work and they are meant to explain something rather than decorate a page.

Independence

What it is not

This is not a review site, a ranking, a fan encyclopedia or a database of every animated production ever released. Events are included when they changed what the medium could do, how it was made, who it reached or how it was understood. A great many excellent films are therefore absent, and their absence is not a judgment of quality.

If you believe something is wrong, missing or misattributed, the corrections process is the fastest way to reach the people who can fix it.