The history
190 years from a spinning paper disc to hand-drawn films lit like 3D.
Animation began as a toy: discs and flip-books that made drawings move. Film turned the toy into cinema, and pioneers invented the tools that are still on every animator’s desk: keys and in-betweens, pegs, cels and the multiplane camera. Studios in Hollywood, Tokyo and Mumbai made it an art and an industry, and computers took over the ink, the paint and the tweening, but not the drawing.
1868
Flip-book patent
John Barnes Linnett, England
1892
Projected animation show
Émile Reynaud, France
1908
All-drawn animated cartoon
Émile Cohl, France
1914–15
Cel animation patent
Earl Hurd, USA
1917
Animated feature (lost)
Quirino Cristiani, Argentina
1926
Oldest surviving animated feature
Lotte Reiniger, Germany
1937
Cel-animated feature
Snow White, Disney, USA
1956
Government animation unit in India
Films Division, Mumbai
1990
Fully digital 2D feature
The Rescuers Down Under, Disney and Pixar
1830 – 1900
Spinning discs, flip-books and Reynaud’s painted strips show that a sequence of drawings can look alive.
1833
1832–1833
Plateau put a ring of drawings on a slotted disc. Spin it in front of a mirror, look through the slits, and the figures move. Stampfer made a similar stroboscopic disc in Vienna at about the same time.
Why it mattered. It proved that a cycle of slightly different drawings, glimpsed one at a time, looks like motion.
1868
18 March 1868
Linnett patented the “kineograph”, a little book of pictures that seem to move when you flick the pages with your thumb. It is the earliest known flip-book patent.
Why it mattered. Every animator’s first tool is still a pile of paper flipped under the thumb.
1892
28 October 1892
Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique projected long strips of hand-painted pictures, with a separate background, for paying crowds. Pauvre Pierrot and two other films opened the show, which ran until 1900 and drew over 500,000 visitors.
Why it mattered. It was the first public show of projected animated pictures, three years before the Lumière brothers’ films.
1900 – 1928
Artists put drawings on film and invent the tools of the trade: keys, pegs, cels, the rotoscope and cut-outs.
1908
17 August 1908
Fantasmagorie is a stream of shape-shifting stick figures, drawn in black on paper and shot on negative film so it looks like chalk on a blackboard. Cohl made about 700 drawings, each shot twice: animation on twos.
Why it mattered. Film historians call it the first fully hand-drawn animated cartoon.
1914
8 February 1914
McCay drew a friendly dinosaur who seemed to obey his commands on stage. He drew the main poses first and the in-betweens after, reused cycles of drawings, and put registration marks on the paper. The film claimed 10,000 drawings, a number historians doubt.
Why it mattered. It gave a cartoon a personality, and its “split system” is the key-and-in-between method still used today.
1914
c. 1914
Barré punched holes in the bottom of every sheet and slid them over pegs fixed to the animation table, so each drawing sat exactly over the last. His studio was one of the first set up only to make cartoons.
Why it mattered. Peg bars are still on every animation desk, and digital programs copy them.
1914
December 1914 (patent granted June 1915)
Hurd patented drawing only the moving parts on clear sheets laid over one background painted on card. Early cels were made of cellulose nitrate, later acetate. Ink went on the front and paint on the back.
Why it mattered. Cels meant the background was painted once, not in every drawing. They ruled animation for 75 years.
1915
1915 (patent granted 9 October 1917)
Max Fleischer projected live-action film, frame by frame, onto glass and traced it. His brother Dave, in a clown suit, performed the moves that became Koko the Clown in the Out of the Inkwell series (from 1918).
Why it mattered. Tracing real movement gave cartoons lifelike motion. Studios still use video reference today.
1917
9 November 1917
El Apóstol was a 70-minute political satire made from cut-out figures, not drawings on paper. No copy survives: the last known print was lost in a fire.
Why it mattered. A feature-length cartoon came from Argentina two decades before Hollywood made one.
1926
Reiniger cut her characters from black card with hinged joints, moved them frame by frame over lit glass, and used layers of glass for depth. The Adventures of Prince Achmed took about three years.
Why it mattered. It is the oldest surviving animated feature, and a direct ancestor of today’s cut-out rigs.
1928 – 1956
Sound, colour, the multiplane camera and the first cel-animated feature turn cartoons into big-screen stories.
1928
18 November 1928
Steamboat Willie was one of the first cartoons with a fully synchronised soundtrack. Music and effects were planned beat by beat on sheets before the drawings were made.
Why it mattered. Sound meant timing to the frame, and soon lip sync, planned on bar sheets and exposure sheets.
1932
30 July 1932
Flowers and Trees was the first commercial film in three-strip Technicolor, with cels painted in full colour. It won the first Academy Award for an animated short.
Why it mattered. Colour made ink-and-paint departments, and colour styling, a big part of animation.
1937
5 November 1937
Disney’s vertical multiplane camera held up to seven levels of art on glass, with the camera above. Levels moved by different amounts to fake depth. It was first used on the short The Old Mill, which won an Oscar. Reiniger (1920s) and Ub Iwerks (1933) had built earlier versions.
Why it mattered. Parallax between layers gave flat drawings real depth, a trick every 2D program now copies.
1937
21 December 1937
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first cel-animated feature film. It cost about $1.5 million, a huge sum then, and used live-action reference, model sheets and the multiplane camera. Disney won an honorary Oscar: one statuette and seven small ones.
Why it mattered. It proved a drawn film could hold an audience for 80 minutes and make people cry.
1956 – 1989
India, Japan and many other countries build their own studios, and the craft’s rules are written down.
1972
After animating at Films Division from 1956, Ram Mohan founded Ram Mohan Biographics in 1972. He made films, title sequences and ads, taught generations of animators, and co-directed Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama (1993) with Japanese partners. He received the Padma Shri.
Why it mattered. He built Indian animation as an industry and a craft, and is widely called its father.
1974
This short film about birds and mice working together was shown again and again on Doordarshan. It won the National Film Award for Best Educational Film.
Why it mattered. It made animation part of growing up for a generation of Indian children.
1981
Two of Disney’s senior animators wrote down the 12 principles of animation: squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, straight ahead and pose to pose, follow-through, slow in and out, arcs, secondary action, timing, exaggeration, solid drawing and appeal.
Why it mattered. It became the “bible” of animation, taught to hand-drawn and 3D animators alike.
1985
15 June 1985
Ghibli became famous for hand-drawn films with painted backgrounds and careful acting, from My Neighbor Totoro to Spirited Away, while using computers only sparingly.
Why it mattered. It showed the world that hand-drawn animation could be art for every age.
1989 – today
Computers replace cels, tween rigs and power a TV boom, while artists keep drawing by hand.
1990
1989–1990
The Computer Animation Production System scanned pencil drawings and coloured them on screen, with digital multiplane moves. It was used for one shot of The Little Mermaid (1989), then for all of The Rescuers Down Under (1990). Disney stopped using cels.
Why it mattered. Digital ink and paint ended the cel era and won a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award in 1992.
1993
About 450 artists worked on Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama, with Indian animators guiding their Japanese colleagues on costumes and customs.
Why it mattered. A hand-drawn epic made by two countries together.
1994
Toon Boom grew into the maker of Harmony, software for drawing, rigging and compositing 2D animation. Its tools won Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards in 2005 and 2012.
Why it mattered. Much of the world’s TV animation, including many Indian series, is now made in software like this.
1996
May–December 1996
FutureSplash Animator let anyone key vector shapes and let the computer tween them. Macromedia bought it and named it Flash; Adobe renamed it Animate in 2016.
Why it mattered. Cheap cut-out and tweened animation spread from the web to television.
2008
6 April 2008
Chhota Bheem premiered on Pogo and became one of India’s most popular children’s shows, with films, games and merchandise. Indian channels began to commission their own series instead of only buying foreign ones.
Why it mattered. It showed that Indian studios could create hit characters of their own, not only work for others.
2016
26 March 2016
Toonz, first made in Italy in 1993 and customised for Studio Ghibli, was released free as OpenToonz. Ghibli had used it on films such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.
Why it mattered. Studio-grade 2D tools became free for anyone to learn on.
2019
8 November 2019
Klaus was drawn by hand, then given soft, volumetric light and texture with new tools, asking how 2D might have grown if studios had not switched to CGI. It won the BAFTA for best animated film.
Why it mattered. It proved hand-drawn features can still look new in the digital age.
Did you know?
Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) already used animation on twos: about 700 drawings, each filmed twice.
Gertie the Dinosaur’s title cards boasted of 10,000 drawings, but historians think the real number may be different.
Early cels were made of cellulose nitrate, the same flammable material as early film.
Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique shows ran from 1892 to 1900 and were seen by more than half a million people.
Walt Disney’s honorary Oscar for Snow White was one full-size statuette and seven small ones.
The people
1844 – 1918 · Inventor and animator · France
Projected long hand-painted animated films at the Musée Grévin from 1892.
1857 – 1938 · Cartoonist and animator · France
Made Fantasmagorie (1908), the first fully drawn animated cartoon.
c. 1867 – 1934 · Cartoonist and animator · USA
Drew Gertie the Dinosaur and worked out keys and in-betweens.
1880 – 1940 · Animator and inventor · USA
Patented drawing characters on clear cels over one background.
1883 – 1972 · Animator and inventor · Austria-Hungary and USA
Invented the rotoscope for tracing live action.
1899 – 1981 · Silhouette animator · Germany
Made the oldest surviving animated feature from hinged paper cut-outs.
1912 – 2004 and 1912 – 2008 · Animators and authors · USA
Wrote down the 12 principles in The Illusion of Life (1981).
1931 – 2019 · Animator, designer and teacher · India
Joined Films Division in 1956 and is called the father of Indian animation.
born 1941 · Director and animator · Japan
Co-founded Studio Ghibli and champions hand-drawn animation.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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