animation history

Terry Gilliam’s paper cut-out animation

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Let’s not forget the hand-made. In the olden days, back then before computers…. people made animation by hand.

Terry Gilliam describes how he achieved the raw dynamism and anarchic humour of his paper cut-out animations for Monty Python. From Bob Godfrey’s brilliant ‘Do It Yourself Animation Show‘, 1974.

Here’s some of Gilliam’s work in action for Monty Python:

Questions to ponder: does our work actually benefit from technical perfection? Or is there something that gets lost – some form of energy or dynamism – when we spend too much time getting it just right?

Seeing Gilliam’s use of real hands in combination with paper cut-outs reminds me of this fantastic car commercial that uses many, many hands. The initial simplicity of ‘What Hands Can Do‘ reminds us of the hand-made and takes us back to what the very first images projected through shadows may have looked like and then it builds to an extraordinary complexity. This commercial is a perfect example of a post-digital aesthetic – seamlessly combining the hand-made with the digital, using the best of both worlds.

The evils of alcohol: early French cut-out animation by Marius O’Galop and Robert Lortac

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Marius O’Galup (1867 – 1946) was an illustrator and animator who created around 20 short films using paper cut-outs. The public information films shown below from You Tube were made around 1918.

Robert Lortac (1884 – 1973) created around 20 films for Pathé, which were either educational or children’s stories. He went on to work in animated commercials until the late 30’s. The quality of these films he made in 1922 is not good, but still interesting to look at in terms of style.

For more information about the early French animators Marius O’Galup, Robert Lortac and Emile Cohl, see Valérie Vignaux’s interesting article in the Animation Interdisciplinary Journal: Entertainment and Instruction as Models in the Early Years of Animated Film.

Charles-Èmile Reynauld’s Théâtre Optique, 1892

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An interdiscplinary background in engineering, photography, sculpture and watercolours proved to be a fertile ground for the innovations in moving image technology developed by Charles-Èmile Reynauld, arguably the first person to create frame-by-frame animation in the classic form that we understand today.

Deriving from a praxinoscope that he had invented in 1876, Reynauld’s patented a Praxinoscope Théâtre in 1879 and then an improved version, the Théâtre Optique, was patented in 1888. This invention was able to project hand-painted, animated, moving images and was adopted commercially by the Museé Grévin in Paris in 1892. The Museé Grévin was a famous museum of waxworks, which also featured a Cabaret Fantastique, a small theatre with shows from magicians. The Théâtre Optique opened there in 1892 – three years before the Lumière Brothers had perfected the first film camera and demonstrated moving, photographic images in 1895. The Théâtre Optique was open until 1900, when it was superseded by cinema and closed down. Before his death in January 1918, in a fit of depression, he smashed the surviving Théâtre Optique mechanism and threw all but two of his picture bands into the Seine.

Here is a reconstruction of Théâtre Optique by the Museum of Cinema in Girona.

Here is a reconstruction of one of the two surviving Pantomimes Lumineuses that were screened at the Théâtre Optique, Pauvre Pierrot from 1892.