Context of practice Lecture: Animation, A Brief History

The word animation comes from the Latin word Animare, which means to give life to.

Animation is in fact artificially creating a series of images that fools the brain into thinking movement is taking place. This is known as the persistence of vision.

The very beginnings of animation can be found nearly 3000 years ago in the form of sequential image making. In short using images to convey the idea of a narrative or story.

The earliest form of animation we would recognise as such was created in 1650 by Christian Hugens and is known as a magic lantern. A development of this technology is the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope. The difference between these two being the fact that in the zoetrope the images were displayed vertically instead of horizontally so they could be viewed by a number of people at once, making animation a social art, something that people sought out for entertainment of an evening.

After this point the take off of film technologies animation received a push into the lime light and at the beginning was seen as an art form. "Not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn." Starting from works such as 'A Trip to the Moon' by Georges Melies (1902) and developed into a mainstream communication medium with the creation of Disney, who were the first to fully synchronised sound.

With the break out of war animation was also utilised for propaganda purposes, brining back the idea that animation could be used for more than simple entertainment but could have a relevant hard hitting message. Examples include 'The Brotherhood of Man' by UPA films and 'Raised for Death by Disney.
As funding for animation dipped cuts had to be made and for a while the quality of many animation pieces was sacrificed because of this. However, there will always be a message that is best sent home by the animation medium because of its application to real time and ability to create a clear and often gripping narrative.