Gertie, the first cartoon character
Windsor McCay created the dinosaur Gertie in 1914. With the help of numerous drawings, he brought them to life on a canvas. He interacted with the greedy dinosaur lady and created the first real cartoon along the way. What was a small clumsy step for his brontosaur was a giant leap in animation history. Because McCay marked the commercial breakthrough of the genre.
From Dinosaur to Mouse: Walt Disney
The Walt Disney films are known to everyone. With its Mickey Mouse, Disney brought the golden age to the animated film. His storytelling talent and the technical developments and inventions of the Disney Studios brought the animation well into the 1960s. Gradually he added sound and color to his films and in 1937 he produced the first full-length animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. This was followed by “Pinocchio”, “Bambi” and “Cinderella”, which are still among the best-known cartoons today.
The manual work is replaced piece by piece
Animation is a form of 2D animation , animation on the plane. The draftsman has almost limitless possibilities. You can develop very detailed and realistic figures or create imaginative and abstract beings. You can override the laws of nature, animals get voices, objects get faces – there are no limits to creativity.
Behind it are a lot of hand-drawn sketches, one for each phase of movement. To avoid having to redraw the background every time, the characters were drawn on transparencies. These were then placed on the appropriate background and each individual sketch was photographed. It was not until the 1990s that this procedure was at least partially replaced by the computer. The key scenes of the chief draftsman were scanned and then digitally colored and combined with the background.
The third dimension – with stop-motion technology in space
The stop-motion technique was already used in the two-dimensional cartoons: movements are generated by lining up individual images. But this also works with three-dimensional elements. Objects such as dolls, Lego bricks or model vehicles can always be moved and photographed piece by piece. In the finished film, this looks like a fluid movement. Plasticine models can be created for figures. This is how Nick Park’s «Wallace & Gromit» came about. This technique was used in real films to animate monsters, such as the giant ape in «King Kong and the White Woman».
The first fully computer-animated film: Toy Story
With the film “Toy Story” in 1995, John Lasseter created a milestone in 3D computer animation. It was the first film that was really produced exclusively with the computer. 100 computers created around 110,000 individual images for the entire film. The fact that the movements at that time still seemed a bit robot-like and not quite so fluid is not at all negatively noticeable when choosing the toy as the main character. In the meantime, the technology has been perfected to such an extent that people and hairy animals can also be animated realistically with the computer.
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