Task 3

When someone says animation or cartoons the first name that comes to mind is Walt Disney. I grew up with his cartoons and animated films and wanted nothing more than to work with his company when I grew up.

Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago Illinois, but his family soon moved to Marceline Missouri where he spent most of his childhood.  Walt was one of five children. With a strict father and very little money Walt was encouraged by his mother and older brother to pursue his dream in the arts.

Walt Disney created the first full-length animated musical feature, Snow white and the Seven Dwarfs, on December 21,1937. It premiered at the carthay Theatre in Los Angeles. The next five years Walt Disney studios created Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi, which was just the beginning.

 

 

Even thirty some years after Walt Disney’s death, we are still grasping his ideas and creations in animation.

 

Walt Disney was not the first person on the animation scene though. The first animated film ever made was 'Humorous Phases of Funny' by cartoonist J. Stuart Blackton in 1906. It is the earliest surviving example of an animated film, which used single the fame method and was projected at twenty frames per second.

 

 Humorous Phases of Funny (1906)

'Little Nemo in Slumberland' (1911)

Winsor McCay, New York Herald comic-strip animator and sketch artist was a very influential part of animation history. McCay wasn’t the first to create an animation, but he helped to define the new industry. He was the first to establish the method of animation graphics. His first animation was of one of his comic strip characters, Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1911, which consisted of 6,000 frames.  But, his first successful cartoon character was Gertie, a brontosaurus in Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914, which was created with 10,000 drawings including the background images.

 

'Gertie the Dinosaur' (1914) 

 

The first animated feature, that can be verified, is 'The Adventures of Prince Achmed', 1926 by German filmmaker and avant-garde artist Lotte Reiniger. It was based on the stories of the Arabian nights. Because the animations were silhouetted, used paper cut outs and they were done in Germany, Reiniger’s work is often overlooked in the animation world. He was very creative in his use of wax and sand on the film stock, very innovative.

 

Traditionally animated films are photographs of drawings, first drawn on paper. To create the illusion of movement, each drawing is sketched a bit different from the one before it. The drawings are traced or photocopied onto transparent sheets of acetone paper, which are filled in with paints on the opposite side of the line drawings. The final drawings are photographed separately onto motion picture film against a painted background by a rostrum camera. Some examples of traditional animations include Pinocchio, 1940, United States, Animal Farm, 1954, United Kingdom and Akira 1988, Japan.

The traditional animation process became outmoded by the beginning of the twenty first century. Today, drawings are scanned in or drawn directly in a computer program. There are many programs used to color the drawings. The final animated work is output to several different mediums, including 35-millimeter film and digital video. The look of the traditional animated work is still preserved and the character animators’ work has remained the same for the past seventy years. Animated films, which were produced with computer technology, include Lion King, 1994, US, Spirited Away, 2001, Japan and Les Triplettes de Belleville, 2003.

 

With computer animation has become quite a science. Lucasfilm was launched in 1979. The graphics division of Lucasfilm, LTD. was then purchased by Steve Jobs in 1986 and established as an independent company, “Pixar”. Pixar is an animation studio with technical, creative and production capabilities that have created a whole new generation of animated films, computer animated films. Partnering with Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar created and produced several films including Toy Story, 1995, A Bug’s Life, 1998, Toy Story 2, 1999, Monsters, Inc. 2001, Finding Nemo, 2003 and The Incredibles, 2004.

Many individuals are creating their own animations and mixing media as well, like  ‘Procrastination’ by Johnny Kelly.

I definitely think animation will become more interconnected, like Andy Martin’s work in Earth Bonding Point, with use of painting, photography, graphics, computer illustrations and typography all together to create animations. I think there is a great potential for exploration in this area of animation.

The film ‘Waking Life’, directed by Richard Linklater is a digitally enhanced movie. This film is a great example of exploration in mixed media. It was shot with digital video and then a team of designers using computers drew stylized lines and colors over each frame of the film (a bit like rotoscope style) to create this dream-like animation, which conveys the odd topic of lucid dreams and the meaning of life exceptionally.

In the future animation will be more interactive. There are films now that give the viewer choices of the outcome. I think the same will occur in animation, but all through the animation the participant will be able to make changes and choose the outcomes throughout the entire animation film, a bit like a video game.

I think in the future of animation there will be more experimenting with holograms. Creating entire animation films that are projected onto a three dimensional viewing field would be fantastic. Maybe even having an interactive feature that can have multiple outcomes.

 

Sources:

 http://www.filmsite.org/animatedfilms.html

 http://www.justdisney.com/walt_disney

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar

 http://www.pixar.com/

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation

 Earth Bonding Point by Andy Martin

 ‘Procrastination’ by Johnny Kelly

 ‘Waking Life’ directed by Richard Linklater