Portal:Animation/Selected picture

An animated cartoon of a galloping horse. This animation was created by rotoscoping Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering 19th century photos. The animation consists of 8 drawings, which are "looped", i.e. repeated over and over.

An animated image of Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering high speed photography, demonstrating that a horse's feet all leave the ground during a gallop. Muybridge used a battery of cameras lined along a track. The first camera had to be triggered manually, but the rest were automatically triggered by an electronic apparatus he designed.

Layout artist Lindsay Dawson working on a key-frame of animation for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. This was a typical working desk for animators, layout artists, and background designers at Filmation in 1983.

A rotating globe in Graphics Interchange Format. Posterization is noticeable in the red gradient areas due to the restricted palette.

Patent drawing for Fleischer's original rotoscope. The artist is drawing on a transparent easel, onto which the movie projector at the right is throwing an image of a single film frame.

The praxinoscope was an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope. It was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud.

An animated simulation of a phenakistoscope disc. The phenakistoscope is one of the first devices to create moving images and a precursor of the zoopraxiscope and, in turn, cinematography. Conceived as a simple disc to be held vertically in front of a mirror and spun around its axis, the subjects appear to be in motion when viewed through the slits of the disc.

American actor Ernest Borgnine, when he was made an honorary chief petty officer of the United States Navy in October 2004. After being discharged from the navy after World War II and having no direction in his life, Borgnine began his acting career on the advice of his mother, who thought his personality was well-suited for the stage. This began a six-decade period mostly as a character actor on stage, film, and television. His most famous roles were as the lead in Marty, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, the title role in McHale's Navy, and as a voice actor in the cartoon series SpongeBob SquarePants.

An advertising poster for Winsor McCay's 1914 film Gertie the Dinosaur.

Though technically digital art may be any art created using other media or processes, and then digitally scanned, the term is usually reserved for art that has been non-trivially modified by a computing process. This particular image was created with POV-Ray 3.6 using radiosity. The glasses, ashtray and pitcher were modeled with Rhino and the dice with Cinema 4D. The entire image took 560 hours to render.

The former Hanna-Barbera building at 3400 Cahuenga Blvd. in Studio City, California, seen in a 2007 photograph.

A thaumatrope is a toy that was popular in Victorian times. A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to persistence of vision.

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is the application of the field of computer graphics or, more specifically, 3D computer graphics to special effects in art, films, television programs, commercials, simulators and simulation generally, and printed media. The visual scenes may be either dynamic or static.

Motion capture, motion tracking, or mocap are terms used to describe the process of recording movement and translating that movement on to a digital model. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, and medical applications, and for validation of computer vision and robotics.

Cel-shaded animation is a type of non-photorealistic rendering designed to make computer graphics appear to be hand-drawn. Cel-shading is often used to mimic the style of a comic book or cartoon. It is a somewhat recent addition to computer graphics, most commonly turning up in video games.

A modern replica of a Victorian zoetrope. A zoetrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.

DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. is an American animation studio which primarily produce a series of commercially successful computer-animated films, including Shrek, Shark Tale, Madagascar, Over the Hedge, Bee Movie, Kung Fu Panda, Monsters vs. Aliens, How to Train Your Dragon, and Megamind.

Empire State Building illuminated yellow to promote the home video release of The Simpsons Movie.

Motion blur is the apparent streaking of rapidly moving objects in a still image or a sequence of images such as a movie or animation.

The cast and crew of Monster House at the 2006 Annie Awards red carpet at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, California. The Annie Awards is an animation award show created and produced by the Los Angeles, California branch of the International Animated Film Association, ASIFA-Hollywood since 1972.

Computer animation is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more general term computer-generated imagery encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to moving images.

Merrie Melodies is the name of a series of animated cartoons distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures between 1931 and 1969. Originally produced by Harman-Ising Pictures, Merrie Melodies were produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions from 1933 to 1944.

A 7-Eleven store in Seattle, July 1, 2007. The store was transformed into a Kwik-E-Mart as part of a promotion for The Simpsons Movie.

Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and is WB's first animated theatrical series. The regular Warner Bros. animation cast also became known as the "Looney Tunes" (often misspelled, intentionally or not, as "Looney Toons").

A can of Buzz Cola, an officially licensed product of Twentieth Century Fox. Buzz Cola is one of the many products in The Simpsons which spoof real-life products. Buzz Cola was sold in 7-Eleven stores as a promotion for The Simpsons Movie.

A 3-D solid model of a jack inside a cube. Solid modeling is a set of principles for creating three-dimensional shapes that, when combined with geometric modeling, form the foundation of computer-aided design and in general support the creation, exchange, visualization, animation, interrogation, and annotation of digital models of physical objects.

The word cartoon has various meanings, based on several very different forms of visual art and illustration. The term has evolved over time. The original meaning was in fine art of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, where it referred to a preparatory drawing for a piece of art, such as a painting or tapestry.

Billion Dollar Limited is the third of the seventeen animated Technicolor short films based upon the DC Comics character Superman. Produced by Fleischer Studios, Billion Dollar Limited centers around a train carrying one billion dollars in gold to the US mint, which is sabotaged by robbers before Superman intervenes. The short was released by Paramount Pictures on January 9, 1942.

The giant artificial doughnut that was erected in Springfield, New Zealand to promote The Simpsons Movie.

Oliver Martin Johnston, Jr. (October 31, 1912 – April 14, 2008) was an American motion picture animator. He was one of Disney's Nine Old Men, and the last surviving at the time of his death. He was recognized by The Walt Disney Company with its Disney Legend Award in 1989. His work was recognized with the National Medal of Arts in 2005.

Randy Cartwright at the Disney Studio in 1991.

Traditional animation, (or classical animation, cel animation, or hand-drawn animation) is an animation technique where each frame is drawn by hand. The technique was the dominant form of animation in cinema until the advent of computer animation.

A cel, short for celluloid, is a transparent sheet on which objects are drawn or painted for traditional, hand-drawn animation. Actual celluloid (consisting of cellulose nitrate and camphor) was used during the first half of the 20th century, but since it was flammable and dimensionally unstable it was largely replaced by cellulose acetate. With the advent of computer assisted animation production, the use of cels has been practically abandoned in major productions.

Whiteboard animation is a process where a creative story and storyboard with pictures is drawn on a whiteboard (or something that resembles a whiteboard) by artists who record themselves in the process of their artwork

An animation camera, a type of rostrum camera, is a movie camera specially adapted for frame-by-frame shooting animation or stop motion.

Skeletal animation is a technique in computer animation in which a character is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called skin or mesh) and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones (called the skeleton or rig) used to animate (pose and keyframe) the mesh.

The National Film Board of Canada (or simply National Film Board or NFB) (French: Office National du Film du Canada, or ONF) is Canada's twelve-time Academy Award-winning public film producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary, animation, alternative drama and digital media productions. In total, the NFB has produced over 13,000 productions which have won over 5,000 awards.

The Walt Disney Company (commonly referred to as Disney) is the largest media conglomerate in the world in terms of revenue. Founded on October 16, 1923, by Walt Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio the company was reincorporated as Walt Disney Productions, Ltd. in 1929, and became publicly-traded as Walt Disney Productions in 1938.

A mad scientist is a stock character, often villainous, who appears in fiction as a scientist who is insane or eccentric. He is usually working with some utterly fictional technology in order to forward his evil schemes. Recent mad scientist depictions are often satirical and humorous, and some are actually protagonists, such as Dexter in the cartoon series Dexter's Laboratory.

A flip book or flick book is a book with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change.

Storyboards are graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence, including website interactivity.

Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. was an American animation studio that dominated North American television animation during the second half of the 20th century.

Sinkin' in the Bathtub was the very first Warner Bros. theatrical cartoon short as well as the very first of the Looney Tunes series.

Elmer Earl "Butch" Hartman IV (born January 10, 1965) is an American animator, executive producer, animation director, storyboard artist, voice actor, occasional singer, producer, and creator of the animated series The Fairly OddParents, Danny Phantom and T.U.F.F. Puppy.

Winsor McCay sketching Gertie the Dinosaur at a dinner party in 1914.

Clay animation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually Plasticine clay.

Stop motion (also known as stop action) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence.

Morph target animation is a method of 3D computer animation used together with techniques such as skeletal animation. In a morph target animation, a "deformed" version of a mesh is stored as a series of vertex positions. In each key frame of an animation, the vertices are then interpolated between these stored positions.

DIC Entertainment was an international film and television production company. In addition to animated (and occasionally live-action) television shows such as Ulysses 31 (1981), Inspector Gadget (1983–1986), The Real Ghostbusters (1986–1991), Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990-1993), and the first two seasons of the English adaptation of Sailor Moon (1995–1998), DIC produced live-action feature films while under Disney, including 1998's Meet the Deedles and 1999's Inspector Gadget.

PowerPoint animation is a form of animation which uses Microsoft PowerPoint and similar programs to create a game or movie.

Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) is an area of computer graphics that focuses on enabling a wide variety of expressive styles for digital art. In contrast to traditional computer graphics, which has focused on photorealism, NPR is inspired by artistic styles such as painting, drawing, technical illustration, and animated cartoons.

How a Mosquito Operates (1912) is a silent animated film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. The six-minute short, about a giant mosquito tormenting a dozing man who tries in vain to shoo it away, is one of the earliest works of animation. It is considered far ahead of its contemporaries in its technical quality. McCay had a reputation for his proficiency as a cartoonist, exemplified in the children's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. He delved into the infant art of animation with the 1911 film Little Nemo, and followed its success by adapting an episode of his comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend into How a Mosquito Operates. McCay gives the animation naturalistic timing, motion, and weight, and displays a more coherent story and developed character than in Little Nemo. The film was enthusiastically received when McCay first unveiled it during a chalk talk (a vaudeville act with drawings) and in a theatrical release that soon followed. In 1914 McCay further developed his character animation style in his best-known animated work, Gertie the Dinosaur.

Warner Bros. Cartoons, Inc. was the in-house division of Warner Bros. Pictures during the Golden Age of American animation. One of the most successful animation studios in American media history, Warner Bros. Cartoons was primarily responsible for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoon short subjects. The Warner animation division was founded in 1933 as Leon Schlesinger Studios, an independent company which produced the popular Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated short subjects for release by Warner Bros. Pictures.

A scene of Felix the Cat "laughing" from "Felix in Hollywood" (1923).

A rostrum camera is a specially designed camera used in television production and filmmaking to animate a still picture or object. It consists of a moving lower platform on which the article to be filmed is placed, while the camera is placed above on a column. Many visual effects can be created from this simple setup although it is most often used to add interest to static objects. The camera can for example traverse across a painting, and using wipes and zooms, change a still picture into a sequence suitable for television or movie productions.

Big Buck Bunny (code-named Peach) is a short computer animated film by the Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation. Like the foundation's previous film Elephants Dream, the film was made using Blender, a free software application for animation made by the same foundation.

Private Snafu is the title character of a series of black-and-white American instructional cartoon shorts produced between 1943 and 1945 during World War II. The character was created by director Frank Capra, chairman of the U.S. Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit, and most were written by Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, Philip D. Eastman, and Munro Leaf.

The Dover Boys at Pimento University; or, The Rivals of Roquefort Hall is a 1942 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Chuck Jones. The short was released on September 19, 1942. The cartoon is a parody of the Rover Boys, a popular juvenile fiction book series of the early 20th century. It is one of the first cartoons to make extensive use of limited animation, as well as other techniques that would only be more broadly popularized in the 1950s.

Flip the Frog is an animated cartoon character created by American cartoonist Ub Iwerks. He starred in a series of cartoons produced by Celebrity Pictures and distributed through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1930 to 1933. The series had many recurring characters besides Flip, including Flip's dog, the mule Orace, and a dizzy neighborhood spinster.

Photoanimation is a technique as old as the motion picture industry, in which still photos, artwork, or other objects are filmed with the use of an animation stand. On the Oxberry Master Series Stand, the compound (platform) of the animation stand moves East-West and North-South or varying degrees of these parameters and tilts at angles up to 45 degrees in any direction with combinations that cover the compass rose. In the meantime the camera, mounted to a steel track, moves up and down relative to the subject being filmed.

Elephants Dream (code-named Orange) is a short computer-generated short film that was produced almost completely using the free software 3D suite Blender (except for the modular sound studio Reaktor and the cluster that rendered the final production, which ran Mac OS X). It premiered on 24 March 2006, after about 8 months of work.

Norman McLaren (11 April 1914 – 27 January 1987) was a Scottish-born Canadian animator and film director known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including drawn on film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound.

Pixar Animation Studios is an American CGI animation film studio based in Emeryville, California, United States. Pixar became a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company in 2006. The studio has earned twenty-four Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and three Grammys, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Its films have made over $6.3 billion worldwide.

The phenakistiscope was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. A series of pictures showing sequential phases of the animation are seen through small slots spaced evenly around the rim of a disc. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the images reflected in a mirror, seeing a rapid succession of images that appear to be a single moving picture. This animation shows one such phenakistiscope disc, entitled Running rats, created by Thomas Mann Baynes in 1833.

A demonstration of the effect of a multiplane camera, a motion-picture camera that was used in the traditional animation process that moves a number of pieces of artwork past the camera at various speeds and at various distances from one another. This creates a sense of parallax or depth. Various parts of the artwork layers are left transparent to allow other layers to be seen behind them. The movements are calculated and photographed frame by frame, with the result being an illusion of depth by having several layers of artwork moving at different speeds: the further away from the camera, the slower the speed. The multiplane effect is sometimes referred to as a parallax process.