Animation’s Timeline

Timeline

  • 1824: Peter Mark Roget does research in physiology at the University of London, published in Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects. This book presented the idea that a succession of still images could create the appearance of motion.
  • 1832: Joseph Plateau develops the phenakistiscope.
  • 1889: Emile Reynaud (from France) patents the praxinoscope.
  • 1895: The age of movie camera and projector begins. Experimentors discover they can stop the crank and restart it again to obtain special effects. With this, James Stuart Blackton creates The Enchanted Drawing in 1900.
  • 1907: Emilé Cohl (from France) begins his animation career.
  • 1914: Windsor McCay produces what is considered to be the first popular animation, Gertie the Dinosaur.
  • 1915: John Bray patents the process of cel animation.
  • 1920: Otto Mesmer creates the character of Felix the Cat.
  • 1928: Walt Disney releases Steamboat Willie, resulting in the general consensus that cartoons are now seen as entertainment.
  • 1937: Snow White is released at cost of $1.5 million.
  • 1938: Fleischer Studios create Betty Boop and Popeye.
  • 1939: Warner Bros create the characters of Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny.
  • 1963: University of Utah; Ed Catmull develops an animation scripting language and creates an animation of a smooth shaded hand via computer generation.
  • 1972: Fred Parke creates first computer-generated facial animation.
  • 1982: Tron becomes the first movie to use CGI effects.
  • 1983: Bill Reeves at Lucasfilm publishes techniques for modeling particle systems as demonstrated in Star Wars.
  • 1987: John Lasseter at Pixar publishes a paper describing traditional animation principles.
  • 1993: Chen and Williams at Apple publish a paper on view interpolation for 3D walkthroughs.
  • 1993: Jurassic Park uses computer generated animation to create dinosaur models.
  • 1995: And it all culminates into today’s age of animation with the release of Toy Story, the first full-length three-dimensional CGI feature film.