The Teachers' Animation Toolkit

WORKSHEET: SKETCHING A HISTORY OF ANIMATION
Teachers’ note:
The following is intended as the basis for an introductory 
presentation on the history of animation.
We recommend viewing of some of the short clips listed in 
A Brief History
, below. The resources section provides additional 
study links online.
It can also be engaging to follow this presentation with some of the 
practical exercises built around Victorian toys. The handouts are 
self-explanatory, but it helps to provide the suggested preambles, to 
place the toys in historical context. By making one or more of these, 
students can easily grasp the principle known as ‘persistence of 
vision’.
Resources:
Video clip:
 Animation History Presentation:
Handout:
 Animation History:
Publication:
 Understanding Animation
by Paul Wells, Routledge 
1998 (available on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/
Understanding-Animation-Paul-Wells/dp/0415115973/ref=sr_1_1?i
e=UTF8&qid=1289465258&sr=8–1)
Internet links:
 Persistence of Vision 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision
Edward Muybridge
http://www.victorian-cinema.net/muybridge.htm
Optical Toys
http://brightbytes.com/collection/phena.html
PART ONE: GETTING STARTED
1.1 ANIMATION HISTORY

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Getting Started
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Museum of Childhood: Zoetrope 
http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/collections/staff_picks/zoetrope/index.html
Online animated fi lms and clips: see below in 
A Brief History.
Disclaimer:
As web links often expire we suggest the reader to simply Google 
the fi lm title again if the link no longer works.
A Brief History:
Over 35,000 years ago humans were making paintings on cave walls 
and were sometimes drawing four pairs of legs to show motion.
Following this in 1600 BC, an Egyptian Pharaoh built a temple for his 
goddess that had columns. Each column had a painted fi gure of the 
goddess in a progressively changed position. To the horsemen and 
charioteers riding past–the goddess appeared to move!

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The Teachers’ Animation Toolkit
Simultaneously, the Ancient Greeks decorated pots with fi gures 
in successive stages of action–so by spinning the pot it created a 
sense of motion.
Over hundreds of years, people continued to make still images with 
the illusion of movement. Then, in 1824 a very important principle was 
discovered by a man named Peter Mark Roget–‘the persistence of 
vision’ theory. Persistence of Vision explains why our eyes are tricked 
into seeing movement. Our brain holds onto an image for a fraction of 
a second after the image has passed; if the eye sees a series of still 
images very quickly one after another, then the images will appear to 
move. Roget’s theory gave birth to various optical contraptions.
After this there came a few other devices all based on the same 
theory. The one that you all will have seen is a fl ip book.

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Getting Started
11
In fact, a fl ip book is the way that animators test their animation 
to see if the movement is correct, by fl ipping the pages before 
capturing them onto the computer.
The animation toys shown on the handout help to trace the 
historical development of the medium. In the sixteenth century 
there were fl ip books in Europe and during the nineteenth century 
mechanisms were being developed and refi ned to create the illusion 
of movement.
The key moments in the development of animation technology 
include:
1824: the invention of the spinning card (Thaumatrope) by John 
Ayrton Paris or Peter Mark Roget.
1831: the creation of the Spindle Viewer (Phenakistoscope) 
pioneered by Plateau.

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The Teachers’ Animation Toolkit
1834: the creation of the Zoetrope by W. G. Horner.
1861: the creation of the Kinematoscope by Coleman Sellers.
1877: the creation of Reynard’s Praxinoscope 1877.
Despite the rich variety of animation, worldwide audiences will 
equate animation with childhood visits to the cinema where their 
fi rst movie was probably a Disney feature. As such, animation has 
tended to be narrowly regarded as kid’s stuff when the evidence 
clearly indicates this is not true.
Throughout its history, animation has been used to explore 
wide-ranging adult themes, has been used as a medium for political 

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Getting Started
13
allegory or propaganda, and in more recent times, has gained 
acceptance as a serious and important art form.
George Melies is often credited with making the fi rst science fi ction 
fi lm,