This little montage came back into my life a few weeks ago. I am pretty sure I saw it several years ago, but since it popped up in my YouTube feed I thought I’d feature it in a Fun Friday article. It’s sort of a highlight reel for the best of animation up until 2017.
A couple of takeaways:
A world without animation?
You don’t really think about it but there wasn’t any animation at all until about 1890, because there wasn’t any movie production. There used to be flipbooks, where each moment in time was on one page of a book and you flipped through it at high speed. That must have been somewhat more entertaining than making a doll out of corn silk, but not much.
Styles change, and then they change back.
I don’t know if it’s just me but it’s like every cartoon made before about 1935 is pretty much terrifying. I mean, the weird, dead eyes of the characters are the stuff of nightmares. It makes you really understand why Snow White won an Oscar. It’s not just that it was a feature-length animated film, one of the first, but it’s also one of the first that won’t scare the bejeezus out of you. Hollywood continued to make animated films that looked like a horror-story acid trip through the 1950s but it seems like they were eventually eclipsed by less scary stuff when people realized cartoons are for kids.
The style of old animation seems to have made a comeback in some circles, though. If you’re a gamer you’re familiar with Cuphead for example. But at least to me, bringing back the style doesn’t make it less creepy.
Animation used to be a purely human pursuit
At the same time, you really come to see that there were some really beautiful things being done with animation, and you have to realize at some level that there was practically nothing mechanical about it. Sure, there were cameras and some of them had motors, but hand-drawn animation has to be one of the most loving and yet tedious things in the world. Draw the same picture 20 times with only a slight difference in movement. Back then, a master animator would draw a few frames and mostly unsung heroes would flesh out the inbetween frames. These “tweeners” have names largely lost to history and yet they’re responsible for the masterpieces of animation that live on today.
Starting in the 1990s, computers began to slide in. To my knowledge, it was the 1990s Aladdin that started using CGI as a basis for hand-drawn animation. The CGI images themselves were not good enough quality for animation, so they were used only as a reference for perspective. I think The Lion King did the same thing.
When computers came in, the results looked spectacular, but it’s easy to see in retrospect that a lot of the heart went out of it. we’re now at a point where computers can render perfectly realistic things (like the 2020s Lion King) but it somehow feels like a step back.
Disney dominated then, maybe as much as they do now
You also see that Disney really dominated animation for a large part of the 20th century. They did change things quite a bit during the 20th century. They drove innovation. However it’s not until the 1970s when you see a lot of other experimental animation that things really get going. The pseudo-3D stuff you see back then was all hand drawn. Still, it set the stage for computer-generated imagery in the 1990s and up until today. Today even traditional animation relies heavily on computers to do the tedious stuff. In the meantime CGI has crossed over. It’s no longer a way to show us something really fantastic. Now most CGI is all about creating the world we think we’re already seeing.
I hope you enjoy this video as much as I did.
