Animation FEATURES
From Snow White to South Park, Monsters, Inc. to Minecraft, animation captures the imagination like little else. Most of us have a favourite animated film that we’ll carry with us forever. Gaming has long ago crossed into mainstream culture. Sitcoms like The Simpsons are just as acclaimed as their live-action counterparts.
But there’s more to animation than entertainment. Today, you’re just as likely to find animators in marketing teams as Hollywood studios. During the Covid-19 pandemic, you could see CGI virus animations on the news every day. According to Bloomberg, the global animation market is set to reach $640 billion by 2030.
So what it’s like to be an animator? How’s animation changed? And perhaps most importantly, what is animation?
In this article, we’re making like Ariel and taking a deep dive.
In short, animation means filming a rapid succession of closely related static images to create an impression of movement.
It’s based around an optical illusion called ‘persistence of vision’. Our eyes only retain images for one tenth of a second, so when we see them appear quicker than that, our brain merges them together.
To create this effect, most animations capture 12-24 individual images per single second of film. Before CGI techniques came into prevalence, these images were often hand-painted or drawn onto celluloid (cel) sheets.
This was painstaking work — and high-budget productions hired enormous animation teams to do it. 1994’s The Lion King, for example, employed 600 animators and technicians.
Today, animators are more likely to use CGI techniques, which removes some of the labour from the process, but is nonetheless a highly specialist technique.
Cartoons are animated films, often dealing in exaggerated visual style and wacky plotlines. They’re made using animation techniques but have a distinct history to other animation styles. They can be traced back to the satirical magazine/newspaper illustrations and comic strips of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Animatics are rough sequences of images used to help animators and directors plan shots, timings and scenes. They’re essentially an animated storyboard, commonly used in anything from cartoons to commercials.
To make an animatic, animators traditionally filmed individual drawings with a camera. Today are more likely to use programmes like Adobe Illustrator or After Effects.
Anime is a style of Japanese animation. It’s a highly diverse medium, but is often characterised by its imaginative plotlines, distinctive camera work and beautiful settings. You can see classic anime style in series like Pokémon or Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away.
To create stop-motion animation, animators physically manipulate objects in tiny increments to create the impression of movement. Examples of this low-budget but highly distinctive style include Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas or the early cutout motion work of Matte Stone and Trey Parker.
You can see moving 2D figures in zoetrope machines — one of the earliest animation devices. Zoetrope machines wowed Victorian audiences with a set of sequenced images within a rotating, slatted cylinder. Today, 2D animation is commonly associated with moving vector images created using Adobe Animate (formally Adobe Flash). Flash animation was a mainstay of mid 2000s online cartoons and games.
You’ll find CGI animation anywhere from your favourite videogames to the latest Pixar smash hit. Like 2D vector animation, CGI artists ‘rig’ their characters with a set of key movements in a technique closer to puppetry than traditional animation.
Motion graphics bring text, logos and other static designs to life. You’ll find motion graphics in TV ads, explainer videos and animated logos.
In the 17th century, magic lantern projectors presented audiences with moving figures on static backdrops. Two centuries later, Zoetrope and phenakistiscope devices created a series of quickly changing images to suggest movement for perhaps the first time.
By the early 20th century, filmmakers were taking advantage of camera technology to create animations from hand drawings and stop motion techniques. Emile Cohl’s 1908 Fantasmagorie is one of the best-known works of the era. Six years later, Earl Hurd created cel animation — the dominant animation technique for the next seven decades.
Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, the first outing for Mickey Mouse, was released in 1928. This was the start of a golden age of animation. The 1930s saw the launch of Disney characters from Goofy to Donald Duck, as well as Warner Bros’ Looney Tunes creations like Bugs Bunny. Within the next three decades, Disney released motion picture classics from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to The Jungle Book. In the 1960s and 70s, countercultural animators, puppeteers and stop-motion artists brought non-mainstream techniques to a mass audience. Terry Gilliam’s anarchic sequences in Monty Python’s Flying Circus blurred the line between cutout and collage. Elsewhere in the UK, Oliver Postgate’s stop-motion creations like The Clangers charmed viewers with a gentle world of mouse-like creatures who lived on the moon, spoke in whistles and ate only soup.
Cel animation would remain prominent way into the 1980s. Here, we see the Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbour Totoro making inroads with Western audiences. But by the end of the decade, advances in computer technology led Disney to adopt digital techniques in productions like The Rescuers Down Under.
Meanwhile, Pixar’s CGI short films like Luxo Jr. were gaining traction in tandem with the rise of 3D videogaming in Japan. Pixar’s first feature film, 1995’s Toy Story, was released to critical and commercial acclaim. The CGI era had begun.
Whether you’re a budding CGI artist or an OG claymation purist, you’ll need solid software to get started.
Ready to make a start on some animation tasks? We’ve got a range of great resources from our global creative community to help.
Animation is a dream job for many of us. But how do you get started? These simple steps can put you on the right path towards landing an in-house role, going freelance or just learning the skills you need to create for fun.
Whether you’re a studio animator, a creative freelancer or just a hobbyist, you’ll find the process of creating an animation follows a similar pattern. Let’s check it out.
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