There's no doubt that people love visual entertainment. From the dawn of man, the cro-magnons were painting little drawings on the rough walls of caves. Skipping ahead a few thousand years, mankind eventually learned how to put these rough drawings onto paper, with pen and pencil. This was a big hit around the block, and more and more artists started showing up. These people were pretty good at this “art” thing, and their works inspired more people to paint and draw. Moving through some centuries, in 1908, this guy named Émile Cohl created the first hand drawn animation named Fantasmagorie. It’s just stick figures moving around goofily, but it was like nothing people had ever seen.
There would be more attempts at animation, all of which moved the medium forward. John Bray founded a studio which created a thing called “cels”. These allowed animations to be far more complex, since drawings could have layers now. This got more people into the industry, and more advancements led to the start of Walt Disney Studios. It didn’t take long for Disney to take over the whole animation medium.
Disney began to produce full length movies, revolutionizing animation with every film they made. Animation became this mass produced thing, created by thousands of people with the same passion. Animation made it so basically anything you can think of can become reality, it’s not limited by the live action rules. Animated films were usually way more creative than normal films, and inspired people like me to get interested in art and animation. It was a pretty special thing, watching these drawings come to life and entertain millions, and also make millions of dollars.
These films would prove to bring in the big bucks, but were still mostly for kids (which is a reason they do so well). This changed in the early 90s to 2000s where animations were becoming raunchier and not tailored to kids as much, since creators wanted to twist the concept of “animation is for kids”. A good example is the 1972 film Fritz the Cat, which is an adult only cartoon. Adult animation with channels like Adult Swim became very popular, and foreign animation like anime increasingly gained traction. As technology improved, so did potential for what people could make. 3D animation started to take off and basically replaced 2D animation for a while there. The reason being is that 3D is easier in several ways, but 2D is way more flexible.
At this point, most companies were making their animations digitally since it avoided a lot of the obstacles that came with traditional animation. With this ease of accessibility, the 2010s had a wave of pretty trashy animation. Even from big companies, animation became so factory-like that mediocre shows or movies were coming from the top dog studios. Of course, there was still a lot of good stuff during this era, a notable one being the Spider-Verse movie. It was basically the first of its kind, mixing 3D and 2D into an awe inspiring addition to the Marvel franchise.
Animation has peaked time and time again and now independent animators or studios are making low budget animations that look beautiful, thanks to modern technology. It’s pretty mindblowing how far the industry has come, and I look forward to the future of it. Unfortunately, with things like AI and soulless corporations, we may get more junk along the way. But I’m not gonna stop loving these moving drawings. I think I want to make some of my own one day.
