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List of years in animation

This article lists some notable events in animation, animated films and shows from 1854 to the present day.

1850s

  • 1854 – In London, the Welsh photographer John Dillwyn Llewelyn exhibited several early instantaneous photographs of the seaside. In 1855, he demonstrated these photographs at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. His works were well received by critics, with detailed analysis of how well the waves were pictured. Llewelyn probably was an early adopter of the use of an automatic shutter, though the start date for this practice is uncertain.
  • 1855 – In 1855, the Austrian-German physiologist Johann Nepomuk Czermak published an article about his Stereophoroskop and other experiments aimed at stereoscopic moving images. He mentioned a method of sticking needles in a stroboscopic disc so that it looked like one needle was being pushed in and out of the cardboard when animated. He realized that this method provided basically endless possibilities to make different 3D animations. He then introduced two methods to animate stereoscopic pairs of images, one was basically a stereo viewer using two stroboscopic discs and the other was more or less similar to the later zoetrope. Czermak explained how suitable stereoscopic photographs could be made by recording a series of models, for instance to animate a growing pyramid.
  • 1856 – Publication of Majama’ al-Bahrayn (1856) by al-Yaziji. It is a modern example of the maqama genre of picaresque short stories. The illustrations of the genre tend to share formal qualities with the art of shadow play. Shadow plays are considered a precursor to silhouette animation.
  • 1857 – In 1857, the earliest known illustration of a vertical biunial magic lantern, probably provided by E.G. Wood, appeared in the Horne & Thornthwaite catalogue. Biunial lanterns, with two projecting optical sets in one apparatus, were produced to more easily project dissolving views.
  • 1858 – In 1858, the physicist Joseph-Charles d'Almeida published descriptions of two methods that he had successfully developed to project stereoscopic images. The first was an anaglyph method with red and green glasses, the second used the stroboscopic principle to alternately present each picture to the corresponding eye in quick succession. D'Almeida had started work on combining this method with the principles of the phenakistiscope.
  • 1859 – On April 7, 1859, the Belgian civil engineer and inventor Henri Désiré du Mont filed a Belgian patent for nine different versions of his Omniscope, of which most would show stereoscopic animation from stroboscopic discs or from cylinders with pictures on the outside. One version was built inside a peep-box and had a lens focusing a light-beam to project the image on a frosted glass screen. Another design combined two zoetropes with Charles Wheatstone's reflecting stereoscope in between.

1860s

  • 1860 – On 27 February 1860, Peter Hubert Desvignes received British patent no. 537 for 28 monocular and stereoscopic variations of cylindrical stroboscopic devices, much like the later zoetrope. His devices included a version that used an endless band of pictures running between two spools which was intermittently lit by an electric spark. Desvignes' Mimoscope later received an honourable mention "for ingenuity of construction" at the 1862 International Exhibition in London. It could "exhibit drawings, models, single or stereoscopic photographs, so as to animate animal movements, or that of machinery, showing various other illusions."
  • 1861 – In 1861, the American engineer Coleman Sellers II received US patent No. 35,317 for the kinematoscope, a device that exhibited "stereoscopic pictures as to make them represent objects in motion". In his application he stated: "This has frequently been done with plane pictures but has never been, with stereoscopic pictures". He used three sets of stereoscopic photographs in a sequence with some duplicates to regulate the flow of a simple repetitive motion, but also described a system for very large series of pictures of complicated motion.
  • 1862 – The English inventor Peter Hubert Desvignes received an Honourable Mention "for ingenuity of construction" at the 1862 International Exhibition in London for his Mimoscope. He had created several monocular and stereoscopic variations of cylindrical stroboscopic devices, much like the later zoetrope. His device could "exhibit drawings, models, single or stereoscopic photographs, so as to animate animal movements, or that of machinery, showing various other illusions." Desvignes "employed models, insects and other objects, instead of pictures, with perfect success." The horizontal slits allowed a much improved view, with both eyes, of the opposite pictures.
  • 1863 – On 1 January 1863, The Illustrated London News reported on a magic lantern production of Cinderella at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, in which the showman Henry Langdon Childe was involved in painting slides, following the designs of Henry George Hine.
  • 1864 – According to the 1864 narrative of the British mathematician Charles Babbage, the thaumatrope was invented by the Irish geologist William Henry Fitton. Babbage had told Fitton how the astronomer John Herschel had challenged him to show both sides of a shilling at once. Babbage held the coin in front of a mirror, but Herschel showed how both sides were visible when the coin was spun on the table. A few days later Fitton brought Babbage a new illustration of the principle, consisting of a round disc of card suspended between two pieces of sewing silk. This disc had a parrot on one side and a cage at the other side. Babbage and Fitton made several different designs and amused some friends with them for a short while. They forgot about it until some months later they heard about the supposed invention of the thaumatrope by John Ayrton Paris.
  • 1865 – Edmund Johann Krüss, representing the optical equipment company Krüss Optronic, received a patent for his version of the magic lantern. The device was a forerunner of movie projectors.
  • 1866 – The inventor William Ensign Lincoln applied for a U.S. patent for his zoetrope, as an assignor to the board game manufacturing company Milton Bradley and Co.. The patent was granted to him in April 1867. Lincoln had invented the definitive version of the zoetrope in 1865, when he was about 18 years old and a sophomore at the Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Lincoln's patented version had the viewing slits on a level above the pictures, which allowed the use of easily replaceable strips of images. It also had an illustrated paper disc on the base, which was not always exploited on the commercially produced versions. On the advice of a local bookstore owner, Lincoln had sent a model to Milton Bradley and Co. in an attempt to market the animation device.
  • 1867 – The inventor William Ensign Lincoln is granted a U.S. patent for his zoetrope, as an assignor to the board game manufacturing company Milton Bradley and Co.. This animation device was also patented in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on June 7, 1867 (application March 6, 1867) under no. 629, by Henry Watson Hallett (as a communication to him by Milton Bradley), and in the Second French Empire by Charles William May (filed May 14, 1867).
  • 1868 – The physicist James Clerk Maxwell had an improved zoetrope constructed. Instead of slits, his version used concave lenses with a focal length equaling the diameter of the cylinder. The virtual image was thus seen in the centre and appeared much more sharp and steady than in the original zoetrope. Maxwell drew several strips that mostly demonstrated subjects relating to physics, like the vibrations of a harp string or Helmholtz's vortex rings threading through each other. An article about the "Zootrope perfectionné" was published in the French science magazine Le Cosmos in 1869, but Maxwell never marketed his animation device.
  • 1869 – Thomas Ross developed a small and transparent phenakistiscope system, called Wheel of life, which fitted inside a standard magic lantern slide. A first version, patented in 1869, had a glass disc with eight phases of a movement and a counter-rotating glass shutter disc with eight apertures. The discs depicted ice skaters, fishes, a giant's ladder, a bottle imp, and other subjects. Ross introduced an improved version of his animation device in 1871.

1870s

  • 1870 – The Philadelphia-based engineer Henry Renno Heyl presented his Phasmatrope to 1500 persons at a church entertainment evening at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. This modified magic lantern had a wheel that could hold 16 photographic slides and a shutter. The wheel was rotated in front of the light source by an intermittent mechanism to project the slides successively, probably with a speed of 3 fps. The program contained three subjects: All Right (a popular Japanese acrobat), Brother Jonathan, and a waltzing couple. Brother Jonathan addressed the audience with a voice actor behind the screen and professed that "this art will rapidly develop into one of the greatest merit for instruction and enjoyment." The pictures of the waltzing couple survived and consist of four shots of costumed dancers (Heyl and a female dancing partner) that were repeated four times in the wheel. The pictures were posed. The waltzing animations were screened with an appropriate musical accompaniment by a 40-person orchestra. Heyl's only known other show was a screening on 16 March 1870 at the Franklin Institute.
  • 1871 – During the Siege of Paris (1870–1871) by the Prussian Army, the inventor René Dagron proposed to the French authorities to use his microfilming process to carry the messages by carrier pigeons across German lines. Dagron photographed pages of newspapers in their entirety which he then converted into miniature photographs. He subsequently removed the collodion film from the glass base and rolled it tightly into a cylindrical shape which he then inserted into miniature tubes that were transported fastened to the tail feathers of the pigeons. Upon receipt the microphotograph was reattached to a glass frame and was then projected by magic lantern on the wall. The message contained in the microfilm could then be transcribed or copied. By 28 January 1871, when Paris and the Government of National Defense surrendered, Dagron had delivered 115,000 messages to Paris by carrier pigeon.
  • 1872 – In 1872, Leland Stanford, a businessman, race-horse owner, and former governor of California hired the photographer Eadweard Muybridge for a portfolio depicting his mansion and other possessions, including his race-horse Occident. Stanford also wanted a proper picture of the horse at full speed. He was frustrated that the existing depictions and descriptions seemed incorrect. The human eye could not fully break down the action at the quick gaits of the trot and gallop. Up until this time, most artists painted horses at a trot with one foot always on the ground; and at a full gallop with the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear, and all feet off the ground. There are stories that Stanford had made a $25,000 bet on his theories about horse locomotion, but no evidence has been found of such a wager. However, it has been estimated that Stanford spent a total of $50,000 over the next several years to fund his investigations on animal locomotion. Stanford would initially fund Muybridge's experiments with chronophotography, an important step in the development of motion pictures.
  • 1873 – The pioneer animator Charles-Émile Reynaud starts holding free magic lantern shows in the style of François-Napoléon-Marie Moigno. Reynaud had previously worked as an assistant of Moigno.
  • 1874 – In 1874, Jules Janssen made several practice discs for the recording of the passage of Venus with his series Passage de Vénus, which he intended to record with his photographic revolver. He used a model of the planet and a light source standing in for the Sun. While actual recordings of the passage of Venus have not been located, some practice discs survived and the images of one were turned into a short animated film after the development of cinematography. The images were purportedly taken in Japan by Janssen himself and the Brazilian engineer Francisco Antônio de Almeida by using Janssen's photographic revolver. The revolver could take several dozens of exposures at regulated intervals on a daguerreotype disc. The Janssen revolver was the instrument that originated chronophotography, a branch of photography based on capturing movement from a sequence of images. To create the apparatus Pierre Janssen was inspired by the revolving cylinder of Samuel Colt's revolver.
  • 1875 – the physiologist Sigmund Exner showed that, under the right conditions, people will see two quick, spatially separated but stationary electrical sparks as a single light moving from place to place, while quicker flashes were interpreted as motion between two stationary lights. Exner argued that the impression of the moving light was a perception (from a mental process) of the motion between the stationary lights as pure sense. This is an explanation of the optical illusion of illusory motion known as the beta movement. The illusion of motion caused by animation and film is sometimes believed to rely on beta movement, as an alternative to the older explanation known as persistence of vision.
  • 1876 – The popular science magazine La Nature publishes a series of articles about optical illusion devices. The articles inspire the magic lantern performer Charles-Émile Reynaud to start developing his own animation device, the praxinoscope. He received a patent for his device in 1877.
  • 1877 – Charles-Émile Reynaud patented the praxinoscope, an animation device that improved on the zoetrope. Like the zoetrope, the praxinoscope used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors that intermittently reflected the images. The praxinoscope allowed a much clearer view of the moving image compared to the zoetrope, since the zoetrope's images were actually mostly obscured by the spaces in between its slits. Reynaud mentioned the possibility of projecting the images in his 1877 patent, but did not complete his praxinoscope projection device until 1880.
  • 1878 – Charles-Émile Reynaud received an honourable mention at the 1878 Exposition Universelle for his praxinoscope. He started production on the device and was able to quit his teaching job after its financial success. The device was initially offered at Le Bon Marché stores.
  • 1879 – Charles-Émile Reynaud registered a modification to the praxinoscope patent to include the Praxinoscope Théâtre, which utilized the Pepper's ghost effect to present the animated figures in an exchangeable background. Later improvements included the "Praxinoscope à projection" (marketed since 1882) which used a double magic lantern to project the animated figures over a still projection of a background.

1880s

  • 1880 – The Zoopraxiscope of Eadweard Muybridge was introduced in 1880 at the California School of Fine Arts. Muybridge did project moving images from his photographs with his Zoopraxiscope, from 1880 to 1895, but these were painted on discs and his technique was no more advanced than similar earlier demonstrations (for instance those by Franz von Uchatius in 1853). The first discs were painted on the glass in dark contours. Discs made between 1892 and 1894 had outlines drawn by Erwin Faber photographically printed on the disc and then colored by hand, but these discs were probably never used in Muybridge's lectures.
  • 1881 – Eadweard Muybridge first visited Étienne-Jules Marey's studio in France and viewed stop-motion studies before returning to the United States to further his own work in the same area. The Chronophotography of Muybridge and Marey was a predecessor to cinematography and the moving film. It also had a profound influence on the beginnings of Cubism and Futurism. Chronophotography involved a series or succession of different images, originally created and used for the scientific study of movement.
  • 1882 – Eadweard Muybridge lectured at the Royal Institution in London in front of a sell-out audience, which included members of the Royal Family, notably the future king Edward VII. He displayed his photographs on screen and showed moving pictures projected by his zoopraxiscope.
  • 1883 – Eadweard Muybridge met with William Pepper and J.B. Lippincott to discuss a plan for a scientific study focused on the analysis of animal and human movement. The university contributed $5,000, seeing the proposed project as important research that would benefit anthropology, physiology, medicine, and sports. The project was based on Muybridge's work with the zoopraxiscope, and would result in the production of Animal Locomotion (1887).
  • 1884 – Opening of the amusement center Eden Musée in New York City. It featured a changing selection of specialty entertainment, including magic lantern shows and marionettes. The magic lantern was not only a direct ancestor of the motion picture projector as a means for visual storytelling, but it could itself be used to project moving images. Some suggestion of movement could be achieved by alternating between pictures of different phases of a motion, but most magic lantern "animations" used two glass slides projected together — one with the stationary part of the picture and the other with the part that could be set in motion by hand or by a simple mechanism.
  • 1885 – From spring 1884 to Autumn 1885, Eadweard Muybridge and his team produced over 100,000 images, mostly at an outdoor studio on the grounds of the University of Pennsylvania's northeast corner of 36th and Pine, recording the motions of animals from the veterinary hospital, and from humans: University professors, students, athletes, Blockley Almshouse patients, and local residents. Thomas Eakins worked with him briefly, although the painter preferred working with multiple exposures on a single negative, whereas Muybridge preferred capturing motion through the use of multiple cameras. Since 1879, Muybridge was working on the zoöpraxiscope (animal action viewer), a projection device that created cyclical animations of animal movement, incorporating technologies from photography, the magic lantern and the zoetrope. The photographer created painted sequences on the glass zoöpraxiscope discs that were based on his motion-study photographs to produce an early form of animation. Muybridge used these to illustrate his lectures that were presented to audiences in the U.S. and Europe, marking his contribution to photography and film in relation to the "experience of time within modernity."
  • 1886 – Henri Rivière created a form of shadow theatre at the Chat Noir under the name "ombres chinoises". This was a notable success, lasting for a decade until the cafe closed in 1897. He used back-lit zinc cut-out figures which appeared as silhouettes. Rivière was soon joined by Caran d'Ache and other artists, initially performing d'Ache's drama L’Epopee. From 1886 to 1896, Rivière created 43 shadow plays on a great variety of subjects from myth, history and the Bible. He collaborated with many different artists and writers, but made the illustrations for only 9 of the productions himself. He concentrated on improving the technical aspects of the production by using enamelling and lighting to create extremely delicate effects of light and colour. The Ombres evolved into numerous theatrical productions and had a major influence on phantasmagoria. The technique is considered a precursor to silhouette animation.
  • 1887 – Publication of Animal Locomotion, a chronophotographic series by Eadweard Muybridge. It comprised 781 collotype plates, each containing up to 36 pictures of the different phases of a specific motion of one subject (over 20,000 images in total). The series is a result of Muybridge's interest in motion studies and his work on the zoopraxiscope. Historians and theoreticians have proposed that Muybridge's work on animal locomotion influenced a number of other artists, photographers and filmmakers, including Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Eakins, Walt Disney, among others.
  • 1888 – On December 1, Charles-Émile Reynaud files a patent for his animated moving picture system Théâtre Optique. The patent was issued on 14 January 1889. Reynaud in the 1888 patent: "The aim of the apparatus is to obtain the illusion of motion, which is no longer limited to the repetition of the same poses at each turn of the instrument, as is necessary in all known apparatus (Zootropes, Praxinoscopes, etc.), but Having, on the contrary, an indefinite variety and duration, and thus producing real scenes animated by unlimited development. Hence the name of Optical Theater given by the inventor to this apparatus" (translated from French).
  • 1889 – On January 14, Charles-Émile Reynaud receives a French patent for his animated moving picture system Théâtre Optique. He also received a British patent for the system on February 8. The system was displayed at the world's fair Exposition Universelle (May–October, 1889) in Paris.

1890s

  • 1890 – Charles-Émile Reynaud creates the film Le Clown et ses chiens (The Clown and His Dogs) for his Théâtre Optique. It would not be exhibited to an audience until 1892.
  • 1891 – Charles-Émile Reynaud creates the film Pauvre Pierrot (Poor Pete). The film consists of 500 individually painted images, and originally lasted for about 15 minutes. It would not be exhibited to an audience until 1892.
  • 1892 – Charles-Émile Reynaud signed a contract with the Musée Grévin, allowing him to start regular public screenings of his films at the museum. The first public screening took place on October 28. Reynaud received 500 francs () per month and 10% of the box office. The contract disadvantaged Reynaud, as he paid for the maintenance of the system and was required to oversee all of the daily showings.
  • 1893 – Eadweard Muybridge produced a series of 50 different paper 'Zoopraxiscope discs' (basically a version of the phenakistiscopes), with pictures drawn by Erwin F. Faber. The discs were intended for sale at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. They seem to have sold very poorly, and surviving discs are quite rare. The discs were printed in black-and-white, with twelve different discs also produced as chromolithographed versions. Of the coloured versions, only four different ones are known to still exist (with a total of five or six extant copies).
  • 1894 – Autour d'une cabine (Around A Cabin), directed by Émile Reynaud. It is an animated film made of 636 individual images hand painted in 1893.The film showed off Reynaud's invention, the Théâtre Optique. It was shown at the Musée Grévin from December 1894 until March 1900.
  • 1895 – Release of the film The Execution of Mary Stuart, directed by Alfred Clark. It is the first known film to use special effects, specifically the stop trick. Stop motion is closely related to the stop trick, in which the camera is temporarily stopped during the recording of a scene to create a change before filming is continued (or for which the cause of the change is edited out of the film). In the resulting film, the change will be sudden and a logical cause of the change will be mysteriously absent or replaced with a fake cause that is suggested in the scene. The technique of stop motion can be interpreted as repeatedly applying the stop trick.
  • 1896 – Auguste Berthier published an article about the history of stereoscopic images in French scientific magazine Le Cosmos, which included his method of creating an autostereogram.
  • 1897 – The Captain and the Kids is created by Rudolph Dirks and debuted December 12, 1897. ; William Harbutt developed plasticine in 1897. To promote his educational "Plastic Method" he made a handbook that included several photographs that displayed various stages of creative projects. The images suggest phases of motion or change, but the book probably did not have a direct influence on claymation films. Still, the plasticine product would become the favourite product for clay animators, as it did not dry and harden (unlike normal clay) and was much more malleable than its harder and greasier Italian predecessor plasteline.
  • 1898 – The German toy manufacturer Gebrüder Bing introduced their toy "kinematograph", at a toy convention in Leipzig . Other companies soon start production of toy cinematographs and production of cheaper films by printing lithographed drawings. These animations were probably made in black-and-white. The pictures were often traced from live-action films (much like the later rotoscoping technique).
  • 1899 – French trick film pioneer Georges Méliès claimed to have invented the stop trick and popularized it by using it in many of his short films. He reportedly used stop-motion animation in 1899 to produce moving letterforms.

1900s

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

2020s

See also

References

External References