Pioneers of Animation

The Three godfathers of Animation! 

There are three main people in animation from the 1900's are:
- George Melies
- Lotte Reiniger
- Winsor McCay
George Melies was a film maker who was very famous in the early days of cinema. He was one of the first to filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time lapse photography, dissolves and hand-painted colour in his work, he was also the first to discover the substitution of special effects which is called stop trick in 1896. Melies to most famous films were 'A Trip to the Moon' (1902) and 'The Impossible Voyage' (1904).


This is an example of one of his famous pieces, 'A Trip to the Moon'

Lotte Reiniger was a german silhouette animator and film director in the 1910-1970's. in 1918 she animated Wooden Rats. the first film she directed was Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart, 1919).







This is an example of one of her work called 'Cinderella'






Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator, his most famous work was the comic strip 'Little Nemo' which begun in 1905, also the animated cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914.  Winsor's comic strip work has influenced generations of artists and also created a standard followed by Walt Disney and others later in the decade. McCay also created many short animated films in which every frame consisted of hand drawn work done by himself and his assistants.


This is an example of one of his famous pieces, 'Gertie the Dinosaur'

Persistence of Vision

Persistence of Vision means that the eye gets tricked into thinking that a series of pictures is a moving image, as each photo is shown for a very short period of time and each image is changed ever so slightly to make it look like a moving image.

There are a few examples of 'Persistence of Vision' such as:

- Zoetrope

- Kinetoscope

- Mutoscope

- Thaumoscope

- Phenakiscope

This is an example of a Zoetrope.

Zoetrope is a cylinder with slits in and certain images, this cylinder gets span round to give you the illusion of the still images moving. The earliest Zoetrope was created in China around 180 AD by Ting Huan. Then the modern zoetrope was invented in 1833 by William George Horner, a british mathematician. William named this the 'daedalum' which has a reference to the Greek myth of Daedalus. This didn't become popular until the 1860's.
Zoetrope means the wheel of life.
It can also be used for many other things, such as something over a period of time, or a story or many other things.
This is an example of a life story: