The view of animation as a medium for film took longer than one might expect. This was unexpected to me because animation can be seen to actually be the fundamentals of film; capturing movement, or giving an image the illusion of movement, by taking a series of photographs with the subject moving slightly between each photograph.
The transition of the use of animation in film from trick shots into moving drawings occurred, I believe, is because of appropriation. This is because no artist at the time simply came up with the concept of drawing a character and making it move, but often times copied other artists’ work and changed it to make it their own by incorporating their own ideas into an existing. This is the primary reason for more than one ‘Haunted House’ films (James Stuart Blackton’s film being built on top of other films of a similar story) and several performances of different artists interacting with their own moving pictures (such as Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay). Because these artists made constant changes to different animating techniques that already existed or was, for them, recently discovered, the form of animation evolved very quickly during the late 19th century up to World War I.
Eunhae Mary Park
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 