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Victorian Era

The document discusses several early animation devices that predated film, including the magic lantern, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and flip book. Many of these devices used spinning disks or cylinders with sequential images that gave the illusion of animation when viewed through slots or in a mirror. Some, like the flip book, did not require additional components to create the animated effect.

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Chandan Kumar
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70 views4 pages

Victorian Era

The document discusses several early animation devices that predated film, including the magic lantern, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and flip book. Many of these devices used spinning disks or cylinders with sequential images that gave the illusion of animation when viewed through slots or in a mirror. Some, like the flip book, did not require additional components to create the animated effect.

Uploaded by

Chandan Kumar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Animation before film

Numerous devices which successfully displayed animated images were introduced well before
the advent of the motion picture. These devices were used to entertain, amaze and sometimes
even frighten people. The majority of these devices didn't project their images and accordingly
could only be viewed by a single person at any one time. For this reason they were considered
toys rather than being a large scale entertainment industry like later animation. Many of these
devices are still built by and for film students being taught the basic principles of animation.

The magic lantern (c. 1650)


The magic lantern is an early predecessor of the modern day projector. It consisted of a
translucent oil painting, a simple lens and a candle or oil lamp. In a darkened room, the image
would appear projected onto an adjacent flat surface. It was often used to project demonic,
frightening images in order to convince people that they were witnessing the supernatural. Some
slides for the lanterns contained moving parts which makes the magic lantern the earliest known
example of projected animation. The origin of the magic lantern is debated, but in the 15th
century the Venetian inventor Giovanni Fontana published an illustration of a device which
projected the image of a demon in his Liber Instrumentorum. The earliest known actual magic
lanterns are usually credited to Christiaan Huygensor Athanasius Kircher.[5][6]

Thaumatrope (1824)
A thaumatrope was a simple toy used in the Victorian era. A thaumatrope is a small circular disk
or card with two different pictures on each side that was attached to a piece of string or a pair of
strings running through the centre. When the string is twirled quickly between the fingers, the
two pictures appear to combine into a single image. The thaumatrope demonstrates the Phi
phenomenon, the brain's ability to persistently perceive an image. Its invention is often credited
to Sir John Herschel. John A. Paris popularized the invention when he used one to illustrate
the Phi phenomenon in 1824 to the Royal College of Physicians.[7]

Phenakistoscope (1831)
A phenakistoscope disc byEadweard Muybridge (1893).

The phenakistoscope was an early animation device.[8] It was invented in 1831 simultaneously by


the Belgian Joseph Plateau and the Austrian Simon von Stampfer. It consists of a disk with a
series of images, drawn on radii evenly spaced around the center of the disk. Slots are cut out of
the disk on the same radii as the drawings, but at a different distance from the center. The device
would be placed in front of a mirror and spun. As the phenakistoscope is spun, a viewer would
look through the slots at the reflection of the drawings which would only become visible when a
slot passes by the viewer's eye.[9] This created the illusion of animation.

Zoetrope (180 AD; 1834)[edit source | editbeta]


The zoetrope concept was suggested in 1834 by William George Horner, and from the 1860s
marketed as the zoetrope. It operates on the same principle as the phenakistoscope. It was a
cylindrical spinning device with several frames of animation printed on a paper strip placed
around the interior circumference. There are vertical slits around the sides through which an
observer can view the moving images on the opposite side when the cylinder spins. As it spins
the material between the viewing slits moves in the opposite direction of the images on the other
side and in doing so serves as a rudimentary shutter. The zoetrope had several advantages over
the basic phenakistoscope. It didn't require the use of a mirror to view the illusion, and because
of its cylindrical shape it could be viewed by several people at once.[10]

In China around 180 AD the prolific inventor [Ting Huan] (丁緩) invented a device similar to
the modern zoetrope. It was made of translucent paper or mica panels and was operated by being
hung over a lamp so that vanes at the top would rotate as they came in contact with the warm air
currents rising from the lamp. It has been stated that this rotation, if it reached the ideal speed
triggered the same illusion of quick animation as the later zoetrope, but since there was no
"shutter" (the slots in a zoetrope), the effect was in fact simply a series of horizontally drifting
figures, with no true animation.[11][12][13][14]

Flip book (1868)[edit source 

A 1886 illustration of the kineograph.

The first flip book was patented in 1868 by John Barnes Linnett as the kineograph. A flip book is
just a book with particularly springy pages that have an animated series of images printed near
the unbound edge. A viewer bends the pages back and then rapidly releases them one at a time so
that each image viewed springs out of view to momentarily reveal the next image just before it
does the same. They operate on the same principle as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope what
with the rapid replacement of images with others, but they create the illusion without any thing
serving as a flickering shutter as the slits had in the previous devices. They accomplish this
because of the simple physiological fact that the eye can focus more easily on stationary objects
than on moving ones. Flip books were more often cited as inspiration by early animated
filmmakers than the previously discussed devices which didn't reach quite as wide of an
audience.[15] In previous animation devices the images were drawn in circles which meant
diameter of the circles physically limited just how many images could reasonably be displayed.
While the book format still brings about something of a physical limit to the length of the
animation, this limit is significantly longer than the round devices. Even this limit was able to be
broken with the invention of themutoscope in 1894. It consisted of a long circularly bound flip
book in a box with a crank handle to flip through the pages.
Praxinoscope (1877)
The praxinoscope, invented by French scientist Charles-Émile Reynaud, combined the
cylindrical design of the zoetrope with the viewing mirror of the phenakistoscope. The mirrors
were mounted still in the center of the spinning ring of slots and drawings so that the image can
be more clearly seen no matter what the device's radius. Reynaud also developed a larger version
of the praxinoscope that could be projected onto a screen, called the Théâtre Optique.

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