2Before Fantasmagorie (0–1908)
Archaeology
A forerunner is just a runner. He doesn’t – nor does he care to – predict what posterity, with hindsight, will call him.
Most of the actions, productions, and inventions that took place before the nineteenth century and look like something we now call animation were produced by forerunners. To what we now call animation, they have no cause-and-effect connection. They are purely anecdotic and thus useless to our historical discourse.
For the sake of completeness, we will look for a few examples from history.
On 30 December 2004, an article called ‘First Animation of the World Found in Burnt City, Iran’ was published.
This is the text:
An animated piece on an earthen goblet that belongs to 5000 years ...
Get Animation: A World History now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
