Animation nation

People are fascinated with motion. Still paintings, drawings, and photographs are good; but if they move, they are even better. Movies can be moving pictures of people or animals, of course, but movies can also be drawings that appear to move — what we call "animation."

The clearest and most concise definition of "animation" is on the Go Encyclopedia website. According to Go Encyclopedia, animation "is the filming of a sequence of drawings or positions of models to create an illusion of movement. It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision."

When we think of animation in movies, we just automatically think of Walt Disney. He was really the father of animation in the movies, but he didn't just wake up one morning and decide that he could make a series of still pictures appear to be in motion.

The oldest concept of animation that we have is a pottery bowl that was discovered in Iran. The bowl is about 5,200 years old. On the inside of the bowl is a series of five pictures of a goat and a pear tree. When the bowl is spun, it appears that the goat leaps up and snatches a pear from the tree.

But we have a great deal to thank the late Walt Disney for. He brought us Mickey Mouse in 1928 and never looked back. He also brought us Pluto, Donald Duck, Bambi, Goofy, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Lady and the Tramp — the list goes on!

Animation has, of course, changed over the years. In the beginning, each frame was drawn by hand including the background. The first advancement was technology that allowed the background to remain constant with the images changed. This is most commonly known as "Cell animation"

Today animation is almost all done with computers and is used in a variety of different ways. "Toy Story" was the first full-length, three-dimensional, computer-generated feature film, and the screenplay was written by Joss Whedon.