The history of film animation began in the 1890s with the earliest days of silent like films and continues through the present day.
The first animated film was created by Charles-Émile Reynaud, inventor of the praxinoscope, an animation system using loops of 12 pictures. On October 28, 1892 at Musée Grévin in Paris, France he exhibited animations consisting of loops of about 500 frames, using his théatre optique system – similar in principle to a modern film projector.
The first animation on standard picture film was Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by J. Stuart Blackton in the year 1906. It features a cartoonist drawing faces on a chalkboard, and the faces coming to life.
Fantasmagorie, by the French director Émile Cohl (also called Émile Courtet), is also noteworthy; it was projected for the first time on August 17, 1908 at ‘Théâtre du Gymnase‘, in Paris. Émile Courtet later went to Fort Lee, New Jersey near New York City in 1912, where he worked for French studio Éclair and spread its technique in the US.
The first puppet-animated film was The Beautiful Lukanida (1910) by the Russian-born ethnically-Polish Director Wladyslaw Starewicz (Ladislas Starevich).
The first animated feature film was El Apóstol, made in 1917 by Quirino Cristiani from Argentina. He also directed two other animated feature films, including 1931‘s Peludopolis, the first to use synchronized sound. None of them, however, survive to the present day; the earliest-surviving animated feature, which used colour-tinted scenes, is the silhouette-animated Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) from German Lotte Reiniger and French/Hungarian Berthold Bartosch. Walt Disney‘s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, often considered to be the first animated feature when in fact at least eight were previously released, was the nevertheless first to use Technicolor and the first to become successful within the English-speaking world.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “History of Animation“.