🎞️Origins & Evolution

Charles-Émile Reynaud's Théâtre Optique opened at the Musée Grévin in Paris on 28 October 1892 with Pauvre Pierrot and two other pantomimes, each hand-painted frame by frame onto a perforated band and projected behind a live piano accompaniment. It predates the Lumière brothers' first paying screening by three years, which makes projected animation, strictly speaking, older than projected film.

Émile Courtet, working as Émile Cohl, premiered Fantasmagorie at the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris on 17 August 1908: roughly seven hundred ink drawings on paper, shot one frame at a time and printed as a negative so the black lines read as chalk on a blackboard. Cohl was fifty-one, a caricaturist with no film background, and had been at Gaumont barely a year.

Winsor McCay premiered Gertie as a vaudeville act at Chicago's Palace Theater in February 1914, standing beside the screen with a whip, coaxing and scolding a dinosaur who obeyed, sulked and wept on cue. He drew about ten thousand sheets himself while an assistant, John Fitzsimmons, traced the background onto every one. At the finish McCay walked behind the screen and reappeared, drawn, riding on Gertie's back.

Earl Hurd filed a patent in December 1914, granted the following year, for drawing characters on transparent celluloid sheets laid over a single painted background; John Randolph Bray pooled it with his own registration patents. Overnight, animation stopped being one artist redrawing everything and became an assembly line of key animators, in-betweeners, inkers, painters and camera operators — the structure the trade still uses.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed, made in Potsdam over three years with roughly a quarter of a million frames exposed, is the oldest surviving feature-length animated film. Reiniger cut every silhouette freehand from black card, holding the scissors still and turning the paper, and with Carl Koch built a layered glass trick table that produced depth effects a decade before Disney's multiplane camera.

Premiered at New York's Colony Theater on 18 November 1928, the third Mickey Mouse short but the first released, it synchronised action to a pre-recorded track using a click-based bar sheet. Ub Iwerks had animated its predecessor, Plane Crazy, almost single-handed at a reported seven hundred drawings a day. From this point every animator worked to an exposure sheet counted in twenty-fourths of a second.

Premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on 21 December 1937, Disney's first feature cost about $1.5 million, was nicknamed Disney's Folly across the industry, and used around a quarter of a million finished drawings. Its multiplane camera work, rotoscoped human figures and in-house life-drawing classes under Don Graham set the standard other studios spent thirty years chasing.

Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Production put Astro Boy on Fuji TV on 1 January 1963 and had to deliver a new episode every week on a television budget. The answer was limited animation: held drawings, reused cel banks, three-frame mouth cycles, and as few as eight drawings a second. It created the industry that now employs most of the world's animators, on terms it has never fully escaped.

Disney's Computer Animation Production System, built with Pixar, replaced hand inking and painting outright on The Rescuers Down Under in 1990. Five years later Toy Story, directed by John Lasseter at Pixar and released in November 1995, became the first entirely computer-animated feature. Within a decade most Western studios had closed their hand-drawn units; Disney shut its Florida animation building in 2004.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018 deliberately animated its lead on twos while other characters ran on ones, and layered hand-drawn line work over CG, ending the assumption that computer animation had to look smooth and photoreal. In March 2025 Flow, made in Latvia by a small team using the free, open-source Blender, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.