Critical Debates in Design - task 3 : Animation

The pioneers of animation include Winsor McCay of the United States and Emile Cohl and Georges Melies of France. Some consider McCay's Sinking of the Lusitania from 1918 as the first animated feature film.

Early animations, which started appearing before 1910, consisted of simple drawings photographed one at a time. It was extremely labor intensive as there were literally hundreds of drawings per minute of film. The development of celluloid around 1913 quickly made animation easier to manage. Instead of numerous drawings, the animator now could make a complex background and/or foreground and sandwich moving characters in between several other pieces of celluloid, which is transparent except for where drawings are painted on it. This made it unnecessary to repeatedly draw the background as it remained static and only the characters moved. It also created an illusion of depth, especially if foreground elements were placed in the frames.

Walt Disney took animation to a new level. He was the first animator to add sound to his movie cartoons with the premiere of Steamboat Willie in 1928. In 1937, he produced the first full length animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

With the introduction of computers, animation took on a whole new meaning. Many feature films of today had animation incorporated into them for special effects. A film like Star Wars by George Lucas would rely heavily on computer animation for many of its special effects. Toy Story, produced by Walt Disney Productions and Pixar Animation Studios, became the first full length feature film animated entirely on computers when it was released in 1995.

Avatar was a movie which has virtually changed the face of the movie world. The film used cutting edge animation technology which gave the characters a more lifelike feel and most of all used a very advanced form of 3d animation.

This is where avatar innovated the movie industry. The film did not try and capture the audience's attention by showing off the power of the three dimensional capability but rather worked the element into the move subtly to enhance things like flying fight scenes. This made it so that the audience essentially forgot about the 3d dimension and was simply better immersed into the film.

This type of technology has been so popular that most of the major television manufacturers are scrambling to make televisions which can support the new media format.

In the future, the animation industry is about to take another leap forward in the development quality realistic images and animation, however, the content or the story is still more important than technology.