Animation Writing and Development

Chapter 2

The History of Animation

Beginnings

There are those who claim animation goes back as far as cave drawings that flickered in the light of early fires and danced on the walls like spirits coming to life. However, it wasn’t until 1824 in the United Kingdom that Peter Mark Roget—the same Roget responsible for the first thesaurus—published Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects. His findings that each image is held on the retina of the eye for fractions of a second before the next image replaces it led to further study of this phenomenon: the perception of movement occurring when images replace each other rapidly. Think of a flipbook.

Others experimented with this phenomenon. In 1825 John A. Paris of England made a simple optical ...