A history of animation

It was animation that gave birth to cinema. Animating in fact means creating the illusion of movement from a sequence of still images. A movement is broken down into a series of drawings that are then projected so quickly that the eye is unable to distinguish each movement separately and, instead, sees continuous movement. This is the principle behind the invention of optical toys, followed by Émile Reynaud's pantomimes and later the animated photographs of the Lumière brothers.

Basically, all films are animated films. The Lumière brothers and those after them let their cameras roll, but a few patient artists have continued to make their films frame by frame out of different materials : paper, dolls, paint, clay... and more recently computer pixels.

Texts : Simon Gilardi, Denis Walgenwitz. Translation : Gill Gladstone. Production : Ciclic, partnered by the Conseil général d'Eure-et-Loir, 2014.

Bibliography (in french) : cf. the first entry of the frieze in full screen