Animation

The art of creating the illusion of motion from a rapid sequence of still images — typically twelve to twenty-four a second — each one made rather than filmed: drawn, sculpted, or computed into existence. It grew from nineteenth-century optical toys and pioneers like Émile Reynaud and Winsor McCay, through cel animation and stop-motion, into computer animation from the 1990s. A global medium spanning American studio features, Japanese anime, and European art film, it is labor-intensive and its credits are often disputed, as in the long argument over Ub Iwerks’s role in creating Mickey Mouse.

Nothing in an animated film actually moves. A drawing of a mouse cannot run. A clay figure cannot walk. What you see is a trick played on your own eyes. The animator makes a long series of still pictures, each one changed by a tiny amount, then shows them so fast — around a dozen to two dozen a second — that your brain fuses them into motion. This is animation, the art of faking life one frame at a time. The crucial fact is that every single frame is made, not filmed. A live-action camera records a world that already moved; an animator builds movement that never existed, drawing or sculpting or computing it into being. That is why animation can show anything at all. It is not a genre for children but a medium open to any subject, and it grew from cheap Victorian spinning toys into one of the most beloved and globe-spanning art forms on earth, from Japanese anime to the digital images now on every screen you own.