ETInformation

Animation is a graphic representation of drawings to show movement within those drawings. A series of drawings are linked together and usually photographed by a camera. The drawings have been slightly changed between frames so when they are played back there appears to be one movement within the drawings. Pioneers of animation include Winsor McCay of the United States and Emile Cohl and Georges Melies of France. Some consider McCay's //Sinking of the Lusitania// from 1918 as the first animated feature film. Early animations, which started appearing before 1910, consisted of simple drawings photographed one at a time. It a long time as there were hundreds of drawings per minute. The development of celluloid around 1913 quickly made animation easier to manage. Instead of lots of different drawings, the animator now could make one background and put moving characters in between several other pieces of celluloid, which is transparent except for where drawings are painted on it. This made it unnecessary to repeatedly draw the background as it remained static and only the characters moved. Walt Disney took animation to a new level. He was the first animator to add sound to his movie cartoons with the premiere of //Steamboat Willie (mickey mouse)// in 1928. In 1937, he produced the first full length animated feature film, //Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs//. With the introduction of computers, animation took on a whole new meaning. Many feature films of today had animation incorporated into them for special effects. A film like //Star Wars// by George Lucas would need lots of computer animation for many of its special effects. //Toy Story//, produced by Walt Disney Productions and Pixar Animation Studios, became the first full length film animated entirely on computers when it was released in 1995.

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