Thinking about the earliest forms of animation, what most commonly comes to mind is Disney. Though there's no denying that Disney has played a large role in the development of animation, the truth is that long before Disney came into existence, long before animation schools were ever conceived of, and long before animation as we know it today came into being, animation had very well-established roots.
Computer animation is the element of animation that's taught most often in animation schools. There's good reason for this—that's what most animators use today. But if you have the chance, and your animation school offers it, you might want to also take a course in the history of animation. You may be surprised at what you find.
Animation's true beginnings, or at least its earliest attempts, date as far back as the Paleolithic cave paintings. Examining these early drawings/paintings, it's easy to see that these artists were attempting to capture the elements of motion drawing. One example commonly found in these paintings is the painting of animals with their legs in different superimposed positions—an obvious attempt to show these animals in motion.
A 5000-year-old bowl found in Iran contains another example of one of the earliest forms of animation. On the bowl, a goat is painted around the sides five times; in each of these five instances, the goat appears in a different position—the artist having attempted to show the goat in motion.
In both these cases, it's commonly argued that neither of these instances shows images in motion, which is of course, the ultimate principle of animation. Though that can't be denied, neither can the fact that these early attempts were actually the first impetuses towards animation as we know it today.
The earliest animation device is thought to have been invented in 180 AD, by a Chinese inventor named Ting Huan. Huan's zoetrope device had a mystical name to it—translating from the Chinese, chao hua chich kuan, to "the pipe which makes fantasies appear." Huan's zoetrope used convection as its driving force—it was hung over a lamp, where the rising air would turn the vanes at the top, so that when spun at the right speed, pictures painted on translucent paper (called mica panels) would appear to move.
In the early 19th century, further advancements in animation occurred, with the inventions of the phenakistoscope, the praxinoscope and the flip book. If you don't know what a phenakistoscope or a praxinoscope are, don't feel bad. I didn't know either until I attended animation school.
Basically, the phenakistoscope, which was invented in the early 1830s by a Belgian inventor named Joseph Plateau, incorporated a spinning disc that was vertically attached to a handle. Early animators would draw a series of pictures around the center of the disc, which would spin. The user would then peer through these moving radial slits to view the animations.
The praxinoscope came a little later, in the late 1870s, and was invented by Charles-Emile Renyaud; it built upon the principles of the early zoetropes. The praxinoscope used a spinning cylinder, where a strip of pictures was placed. A circle of mirrors were then used inside to create the illusion of movement, so that the viewer would peer through and see a succession of images, which appeared to be in motion. Reynaud also developed the Theatre Optique in the late 1880s, which allowed him to project animated images on larger screens.
Though much of the animation we learn about today in animation schools actually came about during the 20th century, it was these early animators and their inventions that provided us the earliest concepts of animation. Despite the advancements we've seen over the years in the use of computer animation, which now dominates the field and is mainly what's taught in animation school, it's these early animators that gave us the building blocks for animation as we know it today.
