153 sourced events
Three and a half centuries of the medium on a single line: projected images before photography, optical toys, the first drawn films, the industrial studio, sound, color, television, the national schools, computer graphics, and the deliberate return to the handmade. Open any record for its context, technique, sources and connections.
153 of 153 events
A Dutch scientist drew a series of glass-slide designs showing a skeleton removing its own skull, intended to be projected in sequence by lamplight — one of the earliest known plans for a projected moving image.
A Belgian-born showman staged projected ghost performances in Paris using a wheeled lantern that moved toward a translucent screen, making painted figures appear to swell and rush at the audience.
Roget described the illusion produced when a moving wheel is viewed through a series of vertical slits, and presented his analysis to the Royal Society in London.
A card printed with a bird on one side and an empty cage on the other, spun on twisted strings, merges into a single image — the simplest commercial demonstration that vision combines successive pictures.
A slotted disc printed with a cycle of drawings, spun in front of a mirror, produced the first genuinely animated sequences — repeating actions of ten or sixteen phases viewed through the passing slits.
A slotted cylinder holding a replaceable paper strip allowed several people to watch the same animated cycle at once, without a mirror and without holding the device to the face.
An American patent for the slotted viewing drum led to industrial production of the zoetrope as a household toy, sold with printed strips of gymnasts, animals and running figures.
A bound stack of pages, each carrying a slightly altered drawing, produces animation when riffled with the thumb — no mechanism, no mirror and no fixed loop length.
Replacing the zoetrope's slits with a central ring of mirrors produced a brighter, steadier and undistorted image, and made the animated picture pleasant to look at for the first time.
A battery of cameras triggered in sequence beside a track at Palo Alto captured the phases of a galloping horse, settling a long-running argument about whether all four hooves leave the ground.
A rifle-shaped camera recorded twelve exposures per second onto a single rotating plate, allowing a moving subject such as a bird in flight to be analyzed from one instrument.
Reynaud projected long hand-painted picture bands to a paying Paris audience, presenting short comic stories with music and live sound effects — the first public exhibition of projected animation.
A paid program of short actuality films at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris established photographic cinema as a commercial medium.
A short film in which matchstick figures assemble a message appealing for matches for troops has been dated by some historians to the Boer War of 1899 and by others to the First World War.
A vaudeville lightning sketch artist draws a face on an easel; the drawing changes expression and hands him objects that become real when he takes them.
A stage magician's science-fiction fantasy combined painted sets, substitution splices, dissolves and miniatures into a sustained narrative of unprecedented length and ambition.
Chalk figures drawn on a blackboard blink, smoke and rearrange themselves, filmed partly frame by frame and partly with cut-paper elements moved between exposures.
Cutlery, furniture and food move by themselves in a hotel room, filmed a frame at a time with a precision that astonished audiences and mystified working filmmakers.
Roughly seven hundred drawings, photographed on negative so that ink lines read as white on black, produce a continuously transforming stick figure moving through a dream logic of shifting objects.
Guests at an automated hotel are undressed, groomed and unpacked by luggage and brushes that move on their own, animated frame by frame with unusual smoothness.
McCay hand-drew and hand-colored four thousand sheets of rice paper to make his comic-strip characters stretch, merge and dance inside a live-action framing story about a cartoonist's bet.
A domestic infidelity comedy performed entirely by articulated insect puppets, filmed with careful staging, cutting and character performance rather than as a novelty demonstration.
A recurring boastful adventurer starred in regularly released shorts made by a division of labor: separate people for design, drawing, inking and photography.
McCay appeared on stage beside a projected dinosaur, issuing commands she obeyed, ignored or resented, and finishing by apparently stepping into the screen to ride away on her back.
Drawing moving figures on transparent celluloid sheets laid over a single painted background, held in alignment by registration pegs, eliminated the need to redraw static elements for every frame.
A device projecting live-action film frame by frame onto a drawing surface allowed animators to trace recorded movement, producing naturalistic action at a fraction of the observational effort.
A satirical feature about the Argentine president, animated with jointed cardboard cutouts over drawn backgrounds, ran roughly seventy minutes — the first known animated feature film.
A clown climbs out of an inkwell into the animator's live-action studio, combining rotoscoped movement, hybrid compositing and a recurring self-referential premise.
Twenty-five thousand drawings reconstruct the 1915 torpedoing of a passenger liner, an event no camera recorded, in a twelve-minute film presented as documentary evidence rather than entertainment.
A black cat with a plastic body and a detachable tail, capable of turning his own features into tools and vehicles, became the first globally merchandised animated character.
Hand-tinted abstract shapes expand, collide and dissolve in time with a live string accompaniment, in a film with no characters, no objects and no narrative.
After a bankruptcy in Kansas City, the Disney brothers began producing the Alice Comedies in California — shorts placing a live-action child inside an animated world.
The Song Car-Tunes series invited theater audiences to sing along with a bouncing ball tracking the lyrics, with several entries released using an optical sound-on-film process.
Jointed dinosaur models with built-up muscular bodies were animated a frame at a time and composited with live-action footage across a full-length adventure film.
Hand-cut lead and cardboard silhouettes, animated on a backlit glass table over tinted backgrounds, tell a feature-length tale drawn from the Thousand and One Nights.
A successful series character created by the Disney studio was retained by its distributor in 1928, along with most of the studio's animators, when contract terms were renegotiated.
A seven-minute short in which action, music and effects are locked together frame by frame opened at the Colony Theatre in New York and made synchronized sound cartoons a commercial certainty.
Skeletons dance in a graveyard to an original score in a film with no continuing character and no plot, built entirely around the relationship between music and movement.
The first Looney Tunes release established a series built around the studio's music catalog, produced by an independent unit selling shorts to a major distributor.
A caricatured nightclub singer, initially drawn with canine features, evolved within a year into the first animated character conceived as an adult woman with her own series.
The first commercially released film in full three-strip Technicolor was an animated short, which went on to win the first Academy Award for an animated subject.
An eighteen-inch articulated model, animated a frame at a time and composited with live action through rear projection and matte painting, carried the emotional center of a major studio release.
Circles in graded color advance and recede in choreographed waves, made as a commissioned advertising film and among the earliest abstract animation produced in color.
A supporting character from a daily comic strip was adapted into an animated series whose rhythm depended on muttered improvised dialogue as much as on visual gags.
A Soviet feature placed a live-action boy among hundreds of animated puppets with interchangeable heads, allowing crowd scenes of a complexity not previously attempted in the technique.
The Soviet Union consolidated its scattered animation workshops into a single state studio charged with producing animated films for a national audience.
A feature-length puppet adaptation of the medieval Reynard fables, animated largely by a father-and-daughter team over several years, first screened in Berlin in 1937.
A vertical rig holding painted glass layers at different distances from the lens produced genuine parallax as the camera moved, giving flat artwork convincing depth.
The first American cel-animated feature premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre after three years of production, combining multiplane depth, rotoscoped reference and sustained dramatic acting.
The second American animated feature used extensive rotoscoping for its human lead against caricatured Lilliputians, made on a compressed schedule at a new studio in Miami.
A cat-and-mouse chase built almost entirely from physical action, without dialogue, launched a series that would win seven Academy Awards over two decades.
An earlier rabbit design was rebuilt as a relaxed, confident wisecracker who wins by remaining calm, establishing the character's voice, posture and comic method.
Eight animated sequences set to classical works, ranging from pure abstraction to mythological narrative, premiered with a custom multi-channel sound system installed theater by theater.
A five-month walkout over union recognition, pay disparity and screen credit divided the largest animation studio in the world and ended in a federally mediated settlement.
A series of lavishly budgeted shorts combined rotoscoped human movement, dramatic lighting, deep shadow and cinematic staging to treat a comic-book hero with complete seriousness.
A satirical short depicting a nightmare of forced factory labor under fascism won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film and became a widely circulated piece of wartime persuasion.
A series of instructional shorts for military audiences used comedy, rhyme and a hapless recurring soldier to teach security, hygiene and equipment discipline.
A studio formed largely by artists who had left the 1941 strike produced a political campaign film in flat, poster-like design, rejecting the prevailing illusionist style.
A navy-commissioned feature using animal characters to depict a military operation was completed in the final months of the war and screened to limited audiences.
With European markets closed and the studio carrying wartime debt, feature releases became compilations of shorter segments rather than single sustained narratives.
A return to a unified narrative feature, heavily planned with live-action reference and a songbook designed for radio and record sales, restored the studio to financial stability.
A serialized cliffhanger produced specifically for television used minimal movement, held drawings and dialogue-driven comedy to fit a budget a fraction of theatrical scale.
A short about a boy who speaks in sound effects, told with flat color fields, floating backgrounds and radically simplified movement, won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.
A government film producer established a dedicated animation unit in the 1940s and expanded it through the following decade, funding personal and experimental work outside commercial constraints.
Two men fight over a flower in a parable filmed by photographing live actors one frame at a time, making human bodies move with the impossible physics of animated objects.
An unseen animator erases, repaints and rescales a duck who argues directly with the brush tormenting him, in a short whose entire subject is the apparatus of animation.
Feature-length puppet films drawing on national legend used carved wooden figures with fixed expressions, relying on lighting, posture and camera movement to convey emotion.
A weekly anthology mixing new material, library films and studio promotion put animation in American homes every week and financed a major construction project.
The first animated feature produced in CinemaScope required rebuilt camera rigs, wider layouts and a rethinking of staging for a frame more than twice as wide as it was tall.
A major Japanese film company acquired and expanded an animation workshop with the stated ambition of producing color animated features for international release.
A modeling-clay figure who could enter books and reshape himself moved from a short film to network television, establishing clay animation as a children's broadcast format.
After MGM closed its animation unit, its two directors founded a studio built entirely around broadcast economics, delivering their first series within the year.
An adaptation of a Chinese legend became Japan's first feature-length color animated film and was released internationally, including in the United States.
A festival devoted entirely to animation began in the French Alps, giving short and independent work a dedicated international venue outside the commercial distribution system.
A half-hour animated situation comedy about a suburban family in a stone-age setting aired in evening prime time with a laugh track, sponsors and an adult audience in mind.
A modified photocopying process transferred animators' pencil drawings directly onto cels, eliminating hand inking and making a feature with dozens of spotted dogs economically feasible.
A future-set companion to the studio's stone-age comedy became the first program broadcast in color on its network, though most households still watched it in black and white.
A weekly half-hour series adapted from Tezuka's comic established a production system capable of delivering serialized animated drama on a broadcast schedule and a very small budget.
A doctoral project allowed a user to draw directly on a display with a light pen, creating geometric objects with constraints that the system maintained as the drawing was manipulated.
An hour-long puppet-animated holiday special, produced in Japan for an American network, became an annually repeated broadcast event.
A special using real children's voices, a jazz score, no laugh track and a deliberately unhurried pace drew an enormous audience despite network doubts about all three choices.
A feature built from pop art, Art Nouveau revival, collage and psychedelic color rejected studio naturalism entirely in favor of illustration and graphic design.
A feature with a morally complex heroine, collective rather than individual heroism and unusually detailed layout work overran its schedule and underperformed commercially.
Networks consolidated original animated programming into a single weekend morning block aimed at children, sold to advertisers as a guaranteed audience.
An X-rated satirical feature about student politics and urban life in the 1960s was made independently on a low budget and became commercially successful.
A plaster cast of a hand was marked into polygons, measured by hand, digitized and rendered as a smoothly shaded moving surface, alongside comparable work on a human face.
Sequences representing an android's vision were produced by digitally processing scanned live-action frames into coarse colored blocks, requiring hours of computation per frame.
A film about consumption and starvation was made with software that interpolated between hand-drawn key positions, producing a continuous metamorphosis of line drawings.
A privately funded laboratory recruited leading graphics researchers and equipped them generously, with the stated goal of producing a computer-animated feature film.
A serialized science-fiction drama with a continuous plot, a countdown structure and mortal stakes found its audience through reruns and a theatrical compilation rather than first broadcast.
The animated hand and face produced at the University of Utah four years earlier appeared in a commercially released feature as displays inside a laboratory set.
A wireframe briefing animation of a trench approach, produced on a research system, appeared in one of the most widely seen films of the decade.
An adaptation of a novel about rabbits fleeing a doomed warren used watercolor-influenced backgrounds and unflinching depictions of violence in a film marketed to general audiences.
A television series treated its war machines as mass-produced military equipment inside a political conflict with casualties on both sides, rather than as heroic super-robots.
A major production company hired the leading computer graphics researchers of the period to develop digital editing, sound and image synthesis tools for filmmaking.
A feature begun in the 1940s and released against its director's wishes in unfinished form was reacquired, completed and released in its intended version thirty years later.
Roughly fifteen minutes of fully computer-generated imagery, produced by four separate companies with incompatible systems, were combined with backlit live-action photography.
A two-minute short shown at a graphics conference applied traditional animation principles — squash and stretch, anticipation, motion blur — to computer-generated characters for the first time.
A studio was formed to produce director-led animated features outside the television production system, following the success of an independently financed film the previous year.
A knight formed from the panes of a stained-glass window steps out of the glass and attacks, rendered entirely by computer and composited into live-action photography.
The computer graphics group of a film company was purchased and spun out as a separate business, initially selling specialized imaging hardware while continuing animation research.
Two desk lamps, distinguished only by size and movement, play with a ball in a two-minute film that establishes character, relationship and emotional register without faces or dialogue.
Two features released together — one a wartime tragedy about children starving, the other a gentle rural fantasy — demonstrated the emotional range a single studio could hold.
A published specification separated the description of a scene from the software that rendered it, and introduced a programmable shading language for defining surface appearance.
Animated characters were integrated into moving live-action photography with matched lighting, cast shadows and physical interaction, using motion-controlled cameras and multi-pass optical compositing.
A dense science-fiction feature used an exceptionally high drawing count, pre-recorded dialogue for accurate lip movement, and elaborate lighting and effects animation.
A fairy-tale feature built on a stage-musical song structure, with a theatrical composer and lyricist writing character-driven numbers, returned hand-drawn animation to large audiences.
A half-hour animated family comedy developed from short segments on a variety show became a network's flagship program and ran for decades.
Scanned pencil drawings were colored, composited and output to film entirely within software, retiring the physical cel from feature production for the first time.
The first animated film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture combined hand-drawn character animation with a computer-generated ballroom rendered as a moving three-dimensional set.
Character and background art were painted on black paper so that darkness was the base layer rather than an added shadow, producing an unusually cinematic look on a television schedule.
A twenty-four-hour channel built initially on library cartoons soon began commissioning original series, many of them developed from individual shorts by their creators.
Full-body digital dinosaurs in daylight, animated by artists using systems adapted from stop-motion armatures, convinced audiences and the industry that computer creatures were viable.
A puppet-animated musical feature used replacement heads and faces, motion-control camera moves and a large purpose-built stage operation over three years of shooting.
A half-hour clay-animated comedy thriller with meticulous set construction, model-railway chases and performance built on the smallest facial adjustments won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.
A philosophical science-fiction feature combined traditional cel work with digitally composited displays, distortions and camera effects to depict a networked consciousness.
Every frame of an eighty-one-minute feature was generated by computer, with a story built deliberately around plastic toys because rigid, manufactured surfaces were what the technology could render convincingly.
A vector-based animation tool with a small file format allowed animated shorts and series to be published and viewed over slow domestic internet connections.
An epic set in medieval Japan, dealing with industrial expansion and ecological destruction without simple antagonists, became the highest-grossing film in the country at the time of release.
Competing insect-themed computer-animated features released seven weeks apart confirmed that the form was a commercial category rather than a single studio's specialty.
A series created by a marine biologist and animator, built on hand-drawn character animation and an idiosyncratic visual sense, became one of the most widely distributed animated programs ever made.
A feature built around computer-generated humans intended to be indistinguishable from photographed actors, with individually simulated hair and detailed skin shading, failed commercially.
A hand-drawn feature about a girl working in a bathhouse for spirits became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history and, in 2003, the first non-English-language animated feature to win the Academy Award.
A dedicated competitive award for animated features was introduced and first presented to a computer-animated comedy, with hand-drawn and stop-motion films among the nominees.
An actor's recorded body movement was used as the foundation for a fully animated digital character, refined by animators and given facial performance keyframed by hand.
After a run of underperforming drawn features, the largest American studios converted or shut their traditional animation departments and moved feature production entirely to computer animation.
A feature with a cast of stylized human characters required simulated hair, muscle deformation, cloth and skin shading at a scale not previously attempted in computer animation.
Free hosting and playback of user-uploaded video allowed individual animators to publish work to a global audience without festivals, broadcasters or distributors.
A puppet-animated feature was captured entirely on digital still cameras, allowing animators to review each frame immediately rather than waiting for film to be processed.
The largest traditional animation company purchased the computer animation studio that had distributed through it, and placed that studio's leadership in charge of both units.
A largely black-and-white autobiographical feature about growing up during and after the Iranian revolution premiered at Cannes and shared the Jury Prize.
Thousands of replacement faces were three-dimensionally printed to give puppets a precise range of expression, in a feature also released in stereoscopic 3D.
Head-mounted facial capture, a virtual camera allowing the director to frame digital environments in real time, and a wide stereoscopic release together made animated characters and worlds the substance of a live-action production.
For the first time since 1992, an animated feature was nominated for Best Picture, following an expansion of the category to ten nominees.
Software developed for the short allowed artists to draw strokes over computer-animated characters, with the lines following the underlying three-dimensional surfaces through motion.
A physically based snow solver developed with academic collaborators simulated packing, powder and fracture, allowing snow to behave as a material rather than as an effect.
A hand-drawn feature built on flat, ornamental design drawn from Irish manuscript art and folklore received an Academy Award nomination, the studio's second.
Tens of thousands of printed face components, oversized practical puppets and extensive digital set extension produced a stop-motion feature of unusual scale and fluidity.
A body-swap romance structured around a natural disaster combined drawn characters with meticulously rendered digital backgrounds and became an exceptional international commercial success.
More than a hundred painters produced roughly sixty-five thousand oil paintings, each photographed as a single frame, to make a feature in the visual language of a specific painter.
Streaming platforms moved from licensing existing catalogs to commissioning original animated series and features, including substantial investment in Japanese production.
Hand-drawn line work over three-dimensional characters, printing artifacts such as halftone dots and misregistered color, deliberate chromatic aberration and characters animated on twos produced a feature that looked like a printed comic in motion.
Game engines and virtual reality tools allowed directors and cinematographers to scout, block and light entirely digital environments interactively rather than waiting hours for rendered frames.
Studios began withdrawing their animation catalogs from third-party licensing and placing them on services they owned, alongside newly commissioned original productions.
Custom software applied directional light, shadow and volume to two-dimensional drawings, giving hand-drawn characters a dimensional quality without converting them to three-dimensional models.
When physical production stopped worldwide, animation studios distributed their pipelines to home workstations and continued producing, becoming the only screen discipline able to operate at scale.
A studio feature planned for theatrical release opened instead directly to subscribers, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
An animated documentary about a refugee's concealed history became the first film nominated for Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature in the same year.
A puppet-animated adaptation set in interwar Italy, financed by a streaming service and shot across dozens of stages, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
A sequel gave each parallel setting its own rendering approach — watercolour washes, ink line, collage, printed dots — with characters carrying their native style into other worlds.
A hand-drawn feature released in Japan with almost no advance marketing won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, twenty-one years after the director's first win in the category.
A dialogue-free feature about animals surviving a flood, made by a very small team using freely available production software, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
A feature rendered with visible brushwork, softened edges and painted backgrounds treated the illustrated storybook rather than photography as its visual reference.
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