The History of Animation

Although animation has only become technical over the past century the concept itself has been in existence for many thousands of years which honestly surprised me to how far back it went.

From Richard Williams' Survival Kit book he briefly mentions about the history of animation, mentioning that over 35,000 years ago people were painting animals on cave walls with 4 different pairs of legs to signify motion of them. To me it's very interesting that we've reached this far back to see people observe and record movement of nature and it makes us think about if this was something that a lot of other people were doing or if this was coming from the mind of a minority.

If we go further ahead into time and reach 1600BC we see animation of Egyptian Goddesses being carved in different positions of a column, in which walking around it would make it seem as if she was moving. In my eyes this is where we're starting to look at the different 'frames' of animation being created which correlates with how we create animation now.

During these thousands of years the art of movement has most likely been created so many times to the point that recording every bit of history and reviewing it would be near impossible. However, with the thanks to Richard Williams and these lectures I've learnt how animation has improved over these years and how it will improve over the many years in the future.