Chapter 4
Animate Voices
J. Stuart Blackton (1875-1941) was an American film pioneer who is often cited as the father of the drawn animation film. He founded the Vitagraph Company and, building on the work of Méliès, created a combination stop motion and drawn animation film titled The Enchanted Drawing, made around 1900. In this film, Blackton sketched on a blackboard a character smoking a cigar. Blackton then plucks the cigar off the board, transforming it into a real cigar as the drawn face reacts. From here, Blackton went on to direct Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906. Needless to say, this frame-to-frame drawn animation was quite time consuming, perhaps even more so than puppet animation in that the characters needed to be redrawn ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access