A century and a quarter of moving drawings. From Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie to Spider-Verse — the inventors, the studios, the techniques, and the artists who made the form.
A series of slightly different still images shown in rapid sequence, exploiting persistence of vision to produce the illusion of continuous motion.
The medium is older than cinema. Pre-cinematic devices — the thaumatrope (1825), phenakistoscope (1832), zoetrope (1834), praxinoscope (1877) — all animated drawings before photographic film existed.
This deck moves through animation's history in three movements: the inventors and silent era; the rise of Disney and the studio system; and the contemporary digital landscape. Plus dedicated leaves on Eastern animation traditions, technique, and the artists who matter most.
The 19th-century optical toys that anticipated cinema were studies in human visual perception. Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope (1832) demonstrated that the eye perceives 16+ frames per second as continuous motion. William George Horner's zoetrope (1834) made the same effect viewable by multiple people simultaneously. Émile Reynaud's Praxinoscope Théâtre (1879) and his subsequent Théâtre Optique (1888) — the first projected animated images on hand-painted film strips — preceded the Lumière brothers' photographic cinema by seven years.
Reynaud's Pauvre Pierrot (1892) is arguably the first animated film ever publicly screened. He destroyed most of his films in despair when photographic cinema overtook his projects in the late 1890s.
James Stuart Blackton — Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906), the first animated film on standard 35mm. Drawn-on-blackboard animation.
Émile Cohl — Fantasmagorie (1908), 700 drawings, 75 seconds. Generally considered the first true animated cartoon.
Winsor McCay — newspaper cartoonist (Little Nemo in Slumberland) who animated Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918). The first animator to demonstrate character personality and weight.
The Fleischer brothers — Max and Dave Fleischer. Out of the Inkwell (1918), Betty Boop, Popeye, the early Superman cartoons. Invented the rotoscope (1915) for tracing animation over live-action footage. Their New York studio competed with Disney through the 1930s.
Walt Disney's first studio (Laugh-O-Gram, Kansas City, 1921) failed. He moved to Hollywood in 1923 with his brother Roy and produced the Alice Comedies (combining live-action with animation) and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (1927) — until his distributor took the rights. The lesson — own your IP — set the studio's strategy permanently.
The Disney response: Mickey Mouse (1928, in Steamboat Willie), the first synchronised-sound cartoon. The Silly Symphonies series (1929–39) experimented with full Technicolor (Flowers and Trees, 1932) and the multiplane camera (The Old Mill, 1937).
The Silly Symphonies were R&D for the studio's real ambition: a feature-length animated film.
Hollywood called it Disney's Folly. Walt Disney was investing $1.5 million (~$33 million in 2026) and three years of studio output in a single 83-minute animated feature. No animated feature had ever succeeded commercially in the West.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (December 1937) was the highest-grossing film of all time when released. It established that animated features could be commercial and adult and emotionally serious. The animation principles — rounded character design, exaggerated weight and motion, the "squash and stretch" of organic forms — became Disney's house style and the global default for character animation.
The film also established the studio's nine old men — the senior animators (Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Marc Davis, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, Wolfgang Reitherman, Milt Kahl, John Lounsbery, Les Clark) — whose techniques were codified in Thomas & Johnston's The Illusion of Life (1981).
1937–1942: Snow White, Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942). Five features in five years; each technically more ambitious than the last.
The studio's resources were vast. Pinocchio's underwater scenes alone consumed thousands of person-hours. Fantasia integrated classical music with experimental animation in a way no studio has attempted at that scale since.
The strike of 1941 — animator dissatisfaction over unequal pay, credit, and unionisation — fractured the studio. Many strikers left to found rival operations: UPA (United Productions of America) in 1943, which would invent the modernist limited-animation style. Disney's golden age effectively ended in 1942; what came after was a holding pattern through the war and a slow recovery in the 50s.
Warner Bros' Termite Terrace (1933 onward) — Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, the Road Runner. Directors Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett built a counter-tradition to Disney: faster, rougher, more anarchic, more verbal. Avery's What's Opera, Doc? (Jones, 1957) is the masterpiece.
MGM — Tom and Jerry (William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, 1940 onward; seven Academy Awards) and Tex Avery's MGM cartoons (Red Hot Riding Hood, 1943).
Fleischer Studios — Betty Boop, Popeye; absorbed by Paramount in 1942.
The 1940s–50s American studio landscape produced more high-quality animation than any subsequent era; the artists, working under tight budgets and weekly schedules, achieved a craft level the medium has rarely matched.
The post-strike studio UPA (United Productions of America) developed a deliberate counter-aesthetic to Disney's full animation: flat colour fields, modernist graphic design, limited motion (suggesting, not rendering, every movement). Their work was cheaper to make and could move at the pace of the modern world.
Major UPA shorts: Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950, Academy Award), Mr. Magoo series, Robert Cannon's Christopher Crumpet.
UPA influenced an entire generation. Hanna-Barbera's TV cartoons (The Flintstones, 1960; The Jetsons, 1962) used UPA-style limited animation to make television animation economically viable. UPA's design vocabulary became the visual language of 1950s graphic design generally — Saul Bass title sequences, magazine illustration, advertising.
Animation by physical-object photography rather than drawn frames. Three subgenres dominate.
Puppet animation — armature-supported figures filmed frame by frame. Ladislas Starevich (Russian-French) is the silent-era master; his The Cameraman's Revenge (1912) used dead-insect puppets. Jiří Trnka's Czech puppet films (1945–65). Ray Harryhausen's creature work (Jason and the Argonauts, 1963) defined fantasy-film effects until CGI displaced it.
Claymation — figures sculpted from modelling clay, reshaped between frames. Will Vinton's Closed Mondays (1974, Academy Award), the California Raisins. Aardman Animations's Wallace and Gromit (Nick Park, 1989 onward) — six Academy Awards by 2025.
Object animation — Jan Švankmajer (Czech surrealist; Alice, 1988) and the Brothers Quay.
The state-supported Soviet animation industry (Soyuzmultfilm, 1936–) produced a body of work largely unknown in the West but technically and artistically rich. Yuri Norstein's Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and Tale of Tales (1979) are widely considered among the greatest animated short films ever made. Norstein's The Overcoat (after Gogol, in production since 1981) is the most-anticipated unfinished animated film of the era.
Czechoslovakia: Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction (1958), Trnka's puppet work. Hungary: Marcell Jankovics. Yugoslavia: the Zagreb School of animation (1956–), influential through the 1960s and 70s.
Most of these works are now available on YouTube; the gap between their reputation in their home traditions and their visibility in English-language animation discourse remains large.
Japanese animation dates to the 1910s, but the modern industry begins post-war. Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) — manga artist of Astro Boy (1952) — founded Mushi Production in 1961 and produced the first weekly TV anime, Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), in 1963. Tezuka's signature style — large eyes, simplified bodies, expressive faces — became the dominant anime visual vocabulary.
The 1960s–70s saw the explosive growth of TV anime. Toei Animation (1948–) produced the early features Hakujaden (1958, the first Japanese animated colour feature). The 1970s gave Lupin III, Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), Galaxy Express 999.
The 1988 release of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira introduced anime to global audiences as adult cinema. The animation budget (10 billion yen, the largest of any anime feature to that date) and technical detail (327 colours, mostly hand-mixed) set a new bar.
Hayao Miyazaki (born 1941) and Isao Takahata (1935–2018) co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 after their Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) succeeded. The studio has since produced 23 features.
The Miyazaki canon: Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), Porco Rosso (1992), Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001, Academy Award; the only non-English-language animated feature to win Best Animated Feature for 21 years), Howl's Moving Castle (2004), Ponyo (2008), The Wind Rises (2013), The Boy and the Heron (2023, Academy Award).
Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Only Yesterday (1991), Pom Poko (1994), The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) — the studio's other lineage, less internationally famous, often artistically more daring.
Beyond Ghibli, the contemporary anime industry is enormous and varied. Mamoru Hosoda — The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), Wolf Children (2012), Mirai (2018), Belle (2021). Makoto Shinkai — Your Name (2016, the highest-grossing anime film for years), Weathering with You (2019), Suzume (2022).
Satoshi Kon (1963–2010) — Perfect Blue (1997), Millennium Actress (2001), Tokyo Godfathers (2003), Paprika (2006); the unfinished Dreaming Machine. The most psychologically inventive director the medium has had.
The TV anime industry is now culturally dominant. Series like Attack on Titan (2013–23), Demon Slayer (2019–), Jujutsu Kaisen (2020–) reach global audiences instantly through streaming. Production studios MAPPA, ufotable, and Wit Studio set the visual bar.
1989–1999. The Little Mermaid (1989) — directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, after a decade of Disney commercial decline — re-established the studio as a force. Beauty and the Beast (1991) was nominated for Best Picture, the first animated feature so honoured. Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994 — the highest-grossing traditional 2D animated film for decades), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), Tarzan (1999).
The decade's success was driven by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken's Broadway-style musical scores, Don Hahn's producing, and a generation of animators (Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg) trained by the surviving Nine Old Men. Ashman's death in 1991 marked the beginning of the era's decline.
Founded as Lucasfilm's Computer Division (1979), spun off as Pixar (1986), purchased by Steve Jobs. The early focus was 3D-rendering hardware and software (RenderMan, 1989). Pixar's first commercial feature, Toy Story (1995), was the first fully computer-animated feature and a commercial hit.
The Pixar canon (Disney Pixar after the 2006 acquisition): A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010), Inside Out (2015), Coco (2017), Soul (2020), Inside Out 2 (2024).
Pixar's brain trust system — informal peer review by senior directors — and its commitment to story-revision over schedule (the famous "stop production and fix it" decision on Toy Story 2, 1998) have been the studio's structural advantages. Whether the model survives John Lasseter's 2018 departure and the post-2020 corporate pressures is an open question.
DreamWorks Animation (founded 1994 by Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen). Initially traditional animation; pivoted to CGI after Shrek (2001) — the first film to win the new Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Subsequent franchises: Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, The Boss Baby, Trolls.
Blue Sky Studios — Ice Age (2002) and franchise; closed by Disney in 2021.
Illumination (Paris-based, owned by Universal) — Despicable Me (2010), Minions, The Secret Life of Pets, Sing. Cheap to produce, marketable, dominant in the family-film theatrical market.
Laika (Portland, OR) — stop-motion features. Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012), Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), Missing Link (2019).
The American animation industry treated animation as primarily children's content for most of its history. The exceptions were independent (Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat, 1972, the first X-rated animated feature) or imported (Don Bluth's The Land Before Time; Watership Down, 1978).
The Simpsons (1989–) shifted television animation toward adult sitcom. Subsequent: South Park (1997–), Family Guy (1999–), Bob's Burgers (2011–), BoJack Horseman (2014–20).
The 2010s–2020s saw a wave of animated features made for adults: Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman, 2015), The Breadwinner (Nora Twomey, 2017), Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021 — the first film nominated for documentary, animated, and international features simultaneously), Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024).
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Sony Animation, 2018) — directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman — broke from the Pixar-house-style realism that had dominated CGI for two decades.
The film's innovation: visible 2D techniques (Ben-Day dots, hand-drawn lines, multi-frame motion) integrated into 3D animation; intentional rendering at lower frame rates than realistic CGI to evoke the comic-book panel; multiple character designs reflecting different graphic-design traditions in a single film.
The sequel Across the Spider-Verse (2023) extended the technique. The two films together opened the door for a wave of stylised CGI: The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021), The Bad Guys (2022), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), Nimona (2023). The "Pixar look" is no longer the assumed default for major animated features.
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's The Illusion of Life (1981) codified the twelve principles that the Disney studio had developed empirically across decades.
1. Squash and stretch. 2. Anticipation. 3. Staging. 4. Straight-ahead and pose-to-pose. 5. Follow-through and overlapping action. 6. Slow in and slow out. 7. Arc. 8. Secondary action. 9. Timing. 10. Exaggeration. 11. Solid drawing. 12. Appeal.
The principles describe the perceptual physics of animated motion: how to make a drawn or rendered image feel like it has weight, momentum, and intention. They are taught at every animation school and apply equally to 2D drawn, 3D CGI, and stop-motion work.
The 2018 Spider-Verse innovation was, in part, deliberately violating principles 6 and 9 (smooth motion, frame-by-frame timing) to evoke the static-frame language of comics.
The standard animated-feature pipeline takes 3–5 years and proceeds in roughly this order:
1. Story and script. Concept art, treatment, screenplay. 2. Storyboarding. The film is drawn as a sequence of static panels with intended dialogue and action. 3. Animatic. Storyboards edited into a timed video with placeholder dialogue. The film exists as a rough cut before any animation is done. 4. Character and environment design. 5. Modelling and rigging (CGI) or character art development (2D). 6. Layout. 3D camera-blocking or 2D scene-staging. 7. Animation. The principal craft labour. 8. Lighting and effects. 9. Rendering. 10. Compositing and editing.
Pixar features typically render at the resolution and quality the medium will support. Coco's lighting alone consumed millions of CPU-hours.
Animation has supported a continuous line of independent and experimental work alongside the studio system. Norman McLaren (Canadian, NFB) — drew directly on film stock; Neighbours (1952, Academy Award). Caroline Leaf — sand and paint-on-glass animation. Don Hertzfeldt — Rejected (2000), It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012), World of Tomorrow (2015–).
The festival circuit (Annecy, Ottawa, Hiroshima, Zagreb) sustains the independent and short-film economy. Annecy is the major international festival; the Cristal d'Annecy is the most-watched single award in the field.
Online: Vimeo Staff Picks, the New Yorker's Screening Room, MUBI all curate animated short work. The cost-of-entry for serious independent animation has dropped substantially with software like Toon Boom Harmony, Procreate Dreams, Blender (free, professional-grade), and OpenToonz.
The line between animation and visual effects has blurred. By 2026, mainstream live-action films are substantially CGI: every Marvel and Star Wars film since 2010 contains far more digitally generated imagery than photographed footage. The 2019 Lion King remake was photorealistic CGI marketed as "live-action."
The Academy Awards distinguishes the two by self-identification (the producers decide whether to submit for Best Animated Feature) but the technical pipeline is essentially identical. The same studios — Industrial Light & Magic, MPC, Framestore, Weta FX — do both.
What still distinguishes animation as a category: the absence of any photographed footage; the assumption that the visual style will be stylised rather than photoreal; the audience's expectation that the medium is acknowledging its artifice.
2D production: Toon Boom Harmony (industry standard), TVPaint, Adobe Animate (descendant of Macromedia Flash), OpenToonz (Studio Ghibli's tool, open-sourced). Procreate Dreams brought professional-grade animation to iPad in 2023.
3D production: Autodesk Maya (industry standard for character animation), 3ds Max, Houdini (effects, simulation). Blender (free, open-source) has become production-grade in the 2020s; Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) was a Blender-produced feature that won at Annecy.
Rendering: Pixar's RenderMan, Arnold (Maya's default), V-Ray, Cycles (Blender), and the real-time engines Unreal and Unity that have been making inroads into film production through "virtual production" pipelines.
AI-assisted animation: Diffusion-based tools (Runway, Midjourney, Sora) have produced startling demos but remain unreliable for long-form professional production as of 2026. The labour-displacement concerns are substantial; the contractual and legal landscape is still being negotiated industry-by-industry.
Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life (1981). The canonical text on Disney-tradition animation principles.
Richard Williams, The Animator's Survival Kit (2001, expanded 2009). The most-cited contemporary how-to of character animation.
Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc. (2014). Memoir-management book by Pixar's co-founder; useful insight into how a creative organisation actually functions.
John Canemaker, Walt Disney's Nine Old Men (2001). The lives and craft of the senior Disney animators.
Susan Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle (2005). The major Western academic work on anime.
Maureen Furniss, Animation: The Global History (2017). The most comprehensive single-volume history.
↑ Disney Animation's Golden Era, explained
Watch · Hayao Miyazaki interview
Watch · The history of Pixar
Streaming. Disney+ has the Disney/Pixar/Studio Ghibli (US/most-Western) catalogues. HBO Max has classic Warner Bros animation. Crunchyroll has anime. The Criterion Channel curates art-house animation. Mubi runs occasional animation seasons.
Festivals. Annecy (France, June) is the major international animation festival. Ottawa (Canada, September), Zagreb (Croatia), Hiroshima (Japan). The Annecy short-film selection is the single most-curated annual sample of new animation worldwide.
Museums. The Walt Disney Family Museum (San Francisco). The Studio Ghibli Museum (Mitaka, Tokyo). The Suginami Animation Museum (Tokyo). The Cartoon Museum (London). The Academy Museum (Los Angeles, opened 2021) has substantial animation holdings.
Three pressures shape animation in the late 2020s.
AI generation. Diffusion-model video generation has made stark progress 2022–2026. Whether AI-generated animation will displace traditional production or remain a pre-visualisation and storyboard tool is unsettled. The labour and authorship questions are unresolved.
Real-time and game-engine production. Unreal Engine's Virtual Production has been used for The Mandalorian's LED-wall sets (2019–) and is increasingly used for animated production pipelines. The boundary between game and film animation continues to dissolve.
Stylised CGI as default. The post-Spider-Verse landscape suggests the realistic-CGI assumption that dominated 2000–2018 has ended. The next decade's animated features will probably look more visually varied than any since the 1990s.
Animation is the only film medium in which everything you see is a deliberate choice. There is no found image, no camera that captured what happened to be in front of it. Each frame was constructed by someone who chose every line, colour, gesture.
This makes animation a uniquely revealing form. The medium cannot hide its decisions. A bad live-action shot can blame the weather; a bad animated shot is always the animator's. The corollary: when an animated film achieves real beauty — Miyazaki's wind through grass, Pixar's rendering of light through atmosphere, Spider-Verse's choreographed fight — the achievement is total. Every element of the image is doing exactly what someone intended.
That is why the form survives. It is a medium of total authorship in a world that increasingly knows what authorship is.
Animation — Volume IV, Deck 12 of The Deck Catalog. Set in Inter. Black ground; Pixar-orange and Spider-Verse cyan accents; Saul Bass yellow seal.
A century and a quarter of moving drawings across thirty leaves. The medium keeps reinventing itself.
↑ Vol. IV · Art · Deck 12