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Here's a question you've probably never asked yourself: how far back in history does animation really go?
Chances are, you aren't an animation nerd like us here at Broadcast2World and don't think about this often. Still, the answer would likely surprise you: animation is actually much older than television itself.
This piece traces that surprisingly old history as an art form — from its ancient roots through to where the technology is headed next.
Animation falls under the umbrella of what's called visual storytelling, sequential storytelling, or narrative art — in the most basic sense, telling a story using a sequence of images. That means comic books and graphic novels are technically in the same family as animation. It's worth understanding this before diving into how and when animation first came into being.
We all know animation has been around a long time. But its history isn't measured in decades, or even centuries — it's measured in millennia. Take this 4,000-year-old Egyptian mural depicting a wrestling match: it's a series of images that tell a story on a timeline, and as your eyes scan from one to the next, your mind senses motion — much the same way modern comics depict action.
Some experts argue even Egyptian hieroglyphics are a form of visual storytelling. Whether or not you count that as "real" animation is more a philosophical question than a technical one — the core mechanism of narrative art has always been the same; only how it's rendered has changed.
People have been telling stories with visuals for millennia. One especially close cousin, shadowgraphy — "cinema in silhouette," hand-drawn shadows telling a story — has been around since ancient times and shares a lot with puppetry.
In 1659, scientist and astronomer Christiaan Huygens invented a device called the Magic Lantern to project moving images. Fast forward to 1832, and the invention of the Phenakistoscope by Belgian mathematician Joseph Plateau — arguably the first machine to create the illusion of movement, predating television, the video camera, and the cinema projector by a full century.
The early animated films that followed were crude, made with simple, primitive devices. The first real system was the Théâtre Optique, invented by Émile Reynaud and patented in 1888. His films — including Pauvre Pierrot, below — each contained 300–700 individually painted frames and ran 10 to 15 minutes.
It's widely regarded that "Fantasmagorie" is the first animated short film ever made, created by French animator Emile Cohl in 1908:
The first animated cartoons were all hand-drawn using Cel Animation — a transparent sheet of cellulose nitrate and camphor used to draw objects, then superimposed over painted backgrounds to cut down on frames and production time. Colonel Heeza Liar (1914), from John Bray Studios, was the first cartoon series made this way:
Steamboat Willie (1928) was the first animated film to include sound, and the first appearance of Mickey Mouse:
Rather than drawing thousands of individual frames, stop-motion animation "photographed" miniature clay or plasticine sets, moved by hand between frames. It's slower to produce and needs skilled sculptors, but has a uniquely charming look nothing else replicates — notable examples include A Nightmare Before Christmas, Wallace and Gromit, Thunderbirds Are Go, and South Park.
One of animation's biggest challenges is making characters move and emote like real actors. Motion capture solved this by filming a real performance and mapping it onto a CGI model. One of the earliest examples was the 1989 video game Prince of Persia, where the creator filmed his friend's moves and traced them onto the character frame by frame. Scaling that to Hollywood took another two decades — James Cameron's Avatar was the first major film to pull it off at scale, discussed further below.
The late 1960s saw the first experiments in pure computer-graphics animation — uncharted territory at the time. Computer animation history begins with Hummingbird (1967), the first truly computer-generated animated film, built from 30,000 images and 25 motion sequences:
Pixar's Toy Story (1995) was the first entirely computer-animated feature film, pushing the era's technology to its absolute limits and opening the door to mainstream 3D animation. The CGI polish that transformed Hollywood from there is now affordable enough for a 90-second business video — modern explainer video production borrows that same visual quality without the blockbuster budget.
Animation, especially computer-generated visuals, dominates live-action special effects too. Terminator 2 remains one of the most iconic examples:
Everything culminated with James Cameron's two-decades-in-the-making Avatar, using motion capture and CGI at a scale that required 2,000 servers, 35,000 processor cores, and 104 terabytes of RAM to render:
The future of animation is being shaped by rapid innovation in both media and technology. Processing power keeps multiplying, and tech that felt like science fiction a decade ago — live-streaming, 3D, 360-degree video, VR, augmented reality — now sits in the palm of your hand, often rendered and streamed in real time. Toy Story blew minds on release; that level of animation now renders on a smartphone.
At the same time, the tools themselves have democratized: anyone with a computer and a creative spirit can start producing animated work, and YouTube and Vimeo are full of independent creators whose output rivals well-funded studios. That includes AI and AI-generated video content — controversial, but clearly here to stay.
Marcus is a distinguished artist with a deep-rooted passion for visual storytelling, specializing in video marketing and animation. Outside of his professional sphere, Marcus is an avid biker, often taking to the open roads to find inspiration for his creative ventures.
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