Animation (how animation works)

Have you ever watched a movie and seen a drawing get up and dance? Or maybe you’ve seen a clay puppet walk and talk all on its own. It seems like magic, but it’s really me at work. Hello there. I’m Animation. I’m the secret trick that makes still pictures look like they are moving. It all works because of a cool team effort between the pictures and your amazing brain. If you see lots of pictures very, very fast, your brain holds onto each one for just a tiny second. When the next picture shows up, your brain blends them together, and poof. The drawing of the bouncing ball looks like it’s really bouncing. It’s just like a flipbook. One drawing at a time doesn’t move, but when you flip the pages quickly, the character runs across the page.

Long, long ago, before there were movie theaters or even electricity, people knew I was special. Back in the 1800s, they created wonderful toys to bring me to life. Around the year 1827, a toy called the Thaumatrope became popular. It was a simple paper disk with two strings. On one side, someone would draw a little bird, and on the other side, they would draw an empty cage. When you twirled the strings super fast, the disk would spin, and it looked like the bird was magically inside the cage. A few years later, in 1834, a clever man named William George Horner invented a toy called the Zoetrope. This was a round drum with little slits you could peek through. Inside, there was a strip of paper with drawings of a horse, each one a little different. When you spun the drum and looked through the slits, the horse looked like it was galloping for real. These toys showed everyone my secret power.

As time went on, people wanted to share me with more than just one person at a time. They wanted to put me on a big screen. In 1908, an artist in France named Émile Cohl created one of the very first cartoons, called 'Fantasmagorie'. He drew a funny little stick figure who went on a wild adventure. Then, in 1914, a man named Winsor McCay introduced the world to a lovely dinosaur named Gertie. She was special because she didn’t just move; she had a personality. She could be happy or sad, and people loved her. My next big step happened on November 18th, 1928, when a creative man named Walt Disney made a cartoon called 'Steamboat Willie'. It starred a cheerful mouse and was one of the first cartoons to have sound. Then, on December 21st, 1937, he made the very first full-length animated movie, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'. For the first time, people could watch one of my stories that was as long as a regular movie.

Today, I am everywhere, and I come in all different shapes and styles. Sometimes, artists still draw me by hand, creating thousands of pictures to make a single cartoon. Other times, they use clay figures and move them just a tiny bit for each picture in a style called stop-motion. And now, computers help me do amazing things. In 1995, a movie called 'Toy Story' came out, and it was the first big movie made entirely with computers. It showed that I could tell stories about anything, even toys that come to life when people aren’t looking. From the simplest spinning toy to the biggest movie on the screen, my job is to help storytellers and artists bring their most wonderful and imaginative ideas to life. And that includes you, too. Any idea you have can become a story with a little bit of my magic.