2D Animations

2D animation actually predates the motion picture industry many years as it first appeared in 19th century parlour toys like the zoetrope and the flip book. It fully came into its own with the advent of movies however traditional 2D animation uses coloured cells, each once depicting a single frame of film. Animators change each cell slightly for each new frame, giving the resulting image the illusion of movement. These animation strips were all hand drawn images that were rapidly displayed to cause the illusion of movement, these first animation would take long periods of time to create as every frame would have to be drawn and edited so that it would make the illusion of movement.

This was a very time consuming way of making film but was very popular, but there is another way to animate than the traditional way which is stop motion animation. Stop motion animation is where you will use objects and props instead of drawing each frame you will take an image then movie the prop and then repeat, the prince able is the same as the hand drawn one but this one is only as good as the props that you can produce. But even with that stop motion products like Wallace and gromit which.

As animation industry expanded with popularity, so too did the need for memorable characters similar to Gertie. Animator Otto Messmer created the first recurring animated star in 1919 with Felix the Cat which is still on TV today showing how successful this simple animation was. A decade later Walt Disney capitalized upon that trend by delivering a large diversity of beloved characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. Disney also proved to be an astonishing technical innovator with "Steamboat Willie" the 1928 cartoon which introduced Mickey Mouse was also the first cartoon produced in sound which was one of the largest invasions in the industry which reluotianlised the future of animation. In 1937, he surpassed all expectations with "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" the first feature-length animation motion picture released in the U.S.

As Disney's family friendly model grew in scope and popularity, rivals rose to provide a different type of animation. The Fleischer Brothers Max and Dave began with a series of Out of the Inkwell short that combined animation and live action. With their new arrange of characters like "Betty Boop" and "Popeye" these cartoons of the 30s and 40s used adult themes such as sexuality and political topics. But due to financial troubles and personal dissolution prevented the Fleischer’s from trumping Disney's and his inatev new styles of animation, but this wasn’t the only rival Disney had to face but the popular TV animators known as the Warner Bros. They were a lot more successful rival to Disney Warner Bros who used their extensive musical library as the basis for a series of Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies cartoons in the 1930s. Like the Fleischer’s, they adopted more adult sensibilities; they were spearheaded by animators like Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. Their characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig adopted a darker and more cynical attitude with a greater emphasis on slapstick and more adult references. The Warner’s business model proved extremely durable and their characters continue to appear in animation today and have been on TV for over 70 years. In the 1960’s sales of colour TVs sky rocketed and the TV animators stopped doing the TV shorts and started producing animations that lasted 30mins- to an hour.

Animator of today use advance software to assist them with the product of the animation, the software allows the animators to make a very clean and fast animation. Some of the old times of creating an animation would take months can now be done in days; the popular animated TV series known as South Park create a 20min episode in a week. Start on a Friday and then it’s aired the next Friday the tools that allow them to achieve them are software like flash and Maya which allow them to produce their work at a record pace. Small things to speed up time are sometimes used these often are shortcuts mainly used in small animations to save time and money, with the ability of cels the animations could use the same body part or prop and just add an extra image so the animator doesn’t have restart from scratch and this is very much still used today and this has become very easy to accomplish due to the libraries of images and props that computers can store these assets once created are saved and allowing the item to only need to be drawn once. A relatively new innovation in the software known as flash is the Bone Tool; this tool as stated by its name allows animators to give character a skeleton allowing the animation to have a more realistic feel to it as the character. With this you can still add some super human attributes to your creation by adjusting the setting of the tool.