The history of animation is diverse. The evolution of animation is an ongoing process. However, what we regard as animation today came into being in the 1800s with inventions like the magic lanterns and the zoetrope.

Animated cartoons came at least half a century before animated films. These included a lot, from Victorian parlor decoration to touring magic lantern shows.

Animation owes its existence to the principle of persistence of vision. This theory stipulates that if images are shown in succession at a fast pace, they will give an illusion of movement.

In 1834, Joseph Plateau from Belgium created a phenakistoscope, it was one of the first attempts at classical animation. It was a cardboard disc with successive images that gave the illusion of movement once spun and viewed in the mirror.

In 1876, Emilé Reynaud in France applied the same phenomenon and devised a system to project animation into theatrical exhibitions. He was the first to bring color and personality to animated characters through ribbons of celluloid painted by hand.

There are some defining names in the animation industry whose works are known to be pivotal in the evolution of animation as entertainment.

Walt Disney Felix is said to be the manual on which legendary cartoonist Walt Disney modeled most of his early characters starting with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Most people would argue that Mickey Mouse was just a repurposed Oswald. However, Disneys genius did not stop there. Walt Disneys sound-synchronized animations revolutionized cartoons giving them just the element of life that they were missing. Steamboat Willie (1928) took the industry by surprise.

It was not long before other filmmakers realized the market had a lot of opportunity with not many people to take them. The Fleischer Brothers were a New York-based dynamic duo that coined even more sophisticated techniques in animation while Disney was still in Kansas. They launched and perfected the technique of rotoscoping. Its a technique that involves drawing cartoonish images over the footage of a live-action film and playing it in succession. The Fleischer brothers pioneered this technique in their series Out of the Inkwell that went on for a good ten years from 1919 to 1929. This series had the unique element of real-life characters that Disney seemed to struggle with in his productions of Alice. It was much later in 1964 that Disney was able to get a grip of the technique in his musical fantasy Marry Poppins. However, there is a stark difference in how Disney cultivated the animation industry and how Max and Dave Fleischer did.

If Fleischer Studios were known for their edgy animated content, Warner Bros. took it several notches up to an almost chaotic level. The Warner Bros. cartoon studio, Termite Terrace, was founded by some of the seasoned members of the Disney enterprise like Hugh Harmon, Rudolph Ising, and Fritz Freleng. It wasn’t until the young and eccentric Tex Avery joined the studio that they started to get on the map in the industry. Avery was young had an eye for talent which he recognized in his team of artists who went on to become legends on their own. They included Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Bob Cannon.

The animation industry had been predominantly confined to the cinema until it began to adapt to television. The major driving factor was that the average American family started to choose cartoons as their preferred entertainment medium.

Major studios started making animated series for television using the technique of limited animation in the 1960s. By the mid-80s, cartoons were a very common thing on television especially with channels like Disney and Nickelodeon.

From 1980 to 2014, we have seen massive leaps of progress with 2D and 3D CGI animation. It has revolutionized the American animation industry.

In the 90s, Walt Disney Production Company and Animation Studios gave us several phenomenal feature films based on age-old fables and folklore.