The Persistence of Vision: A Brief Study of Optics and Technical Physics in Animation's Pre-History
Before I begin with true discussion of animation for this blog, I feel the need to give an overview of the technical advancements that were instrumental in the genesis of the truly "moving drawing". This can be an overly dry and technical part of animation's history, but vital in understanding the breakthrough in media and entertainment that it has become.
Animation is an intricate optical illusion that requires tricking the brain into thinking there is life where there is only rapidly changing images. Animation can also be considered to be the art of making inanimate objects appear to move, which casts an even wider net around the necessary foundations of what was needed before Émile Cohl could even imagine Fantasmagorie.
In early human history, Stone Age Man's paintings on cave walls in Spain depicted a boar with multiple legs, the paint smeared and erased in such a way to create the appearance of running movement. Egyptians created sequential artworks in murals in order to tell a story. Shadow play, puppetry, magic lanterns, and types of mechanical automata are also a type of historical animation, creating the illusion of objects or characters moving on their own, which was also key in developing a certain suspension of disbelief.
Modern animation theorists more correctly attribute the optical illusion of "persistence of vision" to what is called the phi phenomenon, which is the brain's ability to fill in the gaps in perceiving movement. Observations of this phenomenon were made following study of afterimages and motion blurs from light trails and strobing lights. We have spent a great span of human generations trying to paint this "feeling" of movement until the sciences and inventors of the 19th century gave us the tools to actually capture it.
The thaumatrope is a simple device, first published about in 1825, of a cardboard disc attached to two strings. With a drawing on both sides of the disc, spinning the device would result in primitive animation through the use of afterimages. A common image pairing is a picture of a bird that seems to magically appear in a birdcage when the thaumatrope is spun.
In 1829, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau invented the anorthoscope to better understand the Stroboscopic effect.
This, if you have seen it happen before with cars on a highway, or maybe airplane propellers, is the same phenomenon that makes forward-spinning wheels look like they are spinning backwards.
Further studies then led to his development of the phenakistoscope in 1832. These, were, essentially, the first GIFs! Short sequences of looping animation.
In 1834, William George Horner invented the zoetrope, which was conceived as a parlor toy, as the pictures used to line the rotating drum could be changed!
English inventor John Barnes Linnett patented the first flip book, or kineograph, in 1868. Flip books were more easily accessible to the general public, and is often cited as the inspiration for a lot of early film animators.
While camera technology was moving forward, Émile Reynaud improved upon the zoetrope, creating the praxinoscope in 1877, which was basically the zoetrope with projection capabilities and a mirrored core. (Pictured in the first image of this post!)
Eadweard Muybridge's famous 1878 chronophotography study, The Horse in Motion, was originally commissioned by industrialist and famous university founder Leland Stanford in an effort to analyze the gaits of his horses.
During his work from 1880 through 1895, Muybridge's pictures were then painted on discs and projected using his own iteration of the praxinoscope called the zoopraxinoscope. Many animators who are interested in horse locomotion can refer to this key piece of history. I know I do.
This was instrumental to the development of the motion-picture camera, all happening during this period of technological growth in the Victorian era. Additional major contributions from French artist Louis Le Prince, American inventors Thomas Edison and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson, and French inventors and filmmakers the Lumière brothers all culminated in the advent of cinema.
This opened the floodgates for a deluge of experimentation with the medium, leading to some of our first true examples of animation on film--- J. Stuart Blackton's 1900 The Enchanted Drawing and 1906's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. These were created using a mixture of live-action and stop-motion/cut-out animation in the former, and entirely stop-motion photography in the latter. This was the beginning of The Silent Era of animation.
Somewhat recently recovered in 2004 from a collection of films and projectors from an old family in Kyoto, Japan, the three-second long Katsudō Shashin shows some of Japan's interest in this early art form.
It's unknown who the original artist is, but experts believe it was created between 1905 and 1912, which means it could possibly predate Western animated films from the time period, but it is certainly the oldest existing example of animation from Japan.
The first animated film using hand-drawn animation is the aforementioned Fantasmagorie, created in 1908 by French animator Émile Cohl. It was made from seven hundred drawings, shot on twos, for two-minutes of mesmerizing, morphic motion. With amazing flow, it's stream-of-consciousness narrative focuses on just how much line can change shape.
Along with the growing popularity of Sunday comics in the newspapers, the earliest animators were comic illustrators. Rube Goldberg, (whom you know for creating illustrations of all those wacky, intricate machines for simple tasks), Bud Fisher (the creator of Mutt and Jeff), and George Herriman (the creator of Krazy Kat) are among the most well-known. The man whose work stood out among the rest in those very early years was a fella named Winsor McCay. His work is special and deserves his own blog post.
That concludes all the necessary information and history that lead to the first animations on film. I would be remiss as an amateur animation archivist if I failed to include even a brief explanation of the science and devices that contributed to the creation of the medium. For my next long post, perhaps I can take the time to pay homage to my friend Gertie the Dinosaur.
For now, please enjoy:
The Enchanted Drawing (1900) --- J. Stuart Blackton
Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) --- J. Stuart Blackton
and Fantasmagorie (1908) --- Émile Cohl
Thank you so much for your visit to my Animation Archive! Please stop on by again and I'll share even more history and knowledge of the Art of Animation with you! Like this post if you read it all the way through, and reblog it if you learned something interesting you want to share with others! Come back soon!
Episode 41 of the Phi Phenomenon Podcast - 'Meeting People is Easy' w/ Dir. Grant Gee
“On today’s episode we talk how Gee managed to sustain the heightened style of a music video through the feature’s length, using overlapping images, an emphasis on lyricism, non-sync sound, all trying to mimic not just the band’s sound but also the visual style of Thom Yorke and designer Stanley Donwood.”
The illusion of movement is actually caused by the phi phenomenon.
“The phi phenomenon is the optical illusion of perceiving a series of still images, when viewed in rapid succession, as continuous motion. Max Wertheimerdefined this phenomenon in 1912.[1] The phi phenomenon and persistence of vision together formed the foundation of Hugo Münsterberg's theory of film[2] and are part of the process of motion perception.
--
Persistence of vision, which is popularly taught as the reason for motion illusion, is in reality merely the reason that the black spaces that come between each "real" movie frame are not perceived, which makes the phi phenomenon the true reason for motion illusion in cinema and animation, including the phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and others.”
