The Animator's Survival Kit - Chapter 1 Summary

The first chapter of Richard Williams' "The Animator's Survival Kit" is pretty much a brief history of how animation came to be. Since ancient times, people have been depicting movement in their drawings and work of art - it was only matter of actually making these drawings move, like we've done today.

Depicting movement in drawings have been done since ancient times - from cave paintings to Grecian urns - these drawings depict movement in a sequential order which suggests movement.

Figure I - example of a cave painting. Animal Cults of the Ancient People, 2012.

There have been attempts on animating since then. Athonasius Kircher's 'Magic Lantern' comes to mind - created in 1640 it was the first attempt at projecting images to a wall. What Kircher did was hang glass shards with drawings on them on a device, and by moving strings from above, the images began to move.

It was only in 1824, however, that Peter Mark Roget introduced the theory of persistence of vision - that our eyes temporarily keep an image of anything we've just seen. This a basis for animation - a series of still images that move when they are projected in a sequence.

From Roget's theory, many inventions were created, such as the thaumatrope and the zoetrope. These toys rely on the illusion of movement to project moving images.

In 1914 Winsor McCay, who was already famous for his work on Little Nemo in Slumberland and known for using animation as a form of art, created Gertie the Dinosaur, an interactive animation which he also starred in person, captivating the audience on how engaging the character was in the film.

From then on, animation began to slowly expand, beginning from the silent cartoons of Felix the Cat to Disney's Steamboat Willie in 1928. Then Disney went on to create Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full animated feature, which brought animation into the Golden Age, spearheaded by Disney.

After the second World War and the rise of television, animation began to grow cruder and simpler, allowing for animation production houses to produce more. The 'old way' of making animation was then largely forgotten in favor of quantity rather than quality, but today what has been applied in the golden age was beginning to resurface today.

It is important to understand how animation came to be at this point - it's essential to know how people did it and how it came to be, and why animation has become such a widely-known form of entertainment as well as a work of art today.