Animation has a long history, of its rise and falls, the major developments and how several production houses and studios contributed to achieve this beautiful and prosperous era of digital animation.
Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used sequential photographs to analyze animal and human movement. Many devices such as thaumatrope, praxinoscope and zoetrope were invented in the early 19th century to create illusion of motion by making still images appear to move. Many new inventions took place after that and then animation jumped to a new phase- cartoon drawings.
In the 1930’s when animators such as J. Stuart Blackton and Winsor McCay in the U.S. and Emile Cohl in France were making animated films composed entirely of drawings.
Around 1923 , Walt and Roy Disney founded Disney studios which would dominate the animation industry till date. They produced mind boggling cartoons like Willie the steamboat, Mickey mouse, Snow white and the seven dwarfs etc. . Disney studios paved the way for most animated features in the beginning by always striving to find new ways to push the technology and budgets in order to make a richer and more appealing animated film. It was also around this period that Warner Bros. and MGM (founded by Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising respectively) joined this flourishing industry. Not only did the artists in these animation houses produce finely drawn films, but they emphasized unique, specific characters and movement that revealed the characters' personalities. Unlike live-action filmmakers, these animators ignored the rules of physics and created fantastic worlds. Throughout these years, artists tried to develop a realistic, naturalist style of animation in the early 1930s. Most of these cartoons were constantly distorted beyond all rationality, defying every law of physics for comedic effect.
In the 1990’s popular cartoons such as Batman, superman were produced, and the animators infused the series with a distinct visual style caombined with the deep characterizations and strong stories.
Since the 1970’s and 1980’s, animation was profusely used in creation some of the major blockbuster Hollywood movies like Aliens, Star wars, Batman, Superman and the list goes on. Also watching the business done by each movie, immence effort was made to develop the technique of animation which led to creation of a major breakthrough- 3D. Disney/Pixar produced its first fully CGI movie- Toy Story
Which bagged huge number of awards and served the new revolution in this field. Several movies were subsequently created which had immense amount of CG involved in them.
But most of the accolades were won basically by the leader of these studios and the artists who actually were behind the spectacular drawings and animation never enjoyed the limelight. Had Disney animators Vladimir Tytla and Freddie Moore been alive during the renaissance their names might well have been numbered among Da Vinci and Michelangelo. For all their accomplishments, however, they remain totally eclipsed by the titanic figure of Walt Disney. "Animation should be an art...what you fellows have done with it is making it into a trade....not an art, but a trade....bad luck.” These were the words of Winsor McCay, father of the animated cartoon. His prophecy did come true as these studios were bagging huge amounts of money and hence more and more cartoons were produced (which included daily TV cartoons too) , poorer in quality and animation. And now in the present day, thousands of movies are being made which use CG and bag millions of money! Animation has taken a total shift from 2D to 3D, with very rare mount of movies being made using the 2D technique.
