Frame-by-frame image-making — the principles, cel and stop motion, 3D and anime, and the experimental work.
9 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Animals in Motion
Eadweard Muybridge · 1899
Uses sequential photography to break animal locomotion into discrete phases invisible to the naked eye, supplying the empirical reference on real…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
My Statements Are in My Work
Oskar Fischinger · 1947
Argues abstract animation is not illustrated music but visual art in its own right, made for its own reasons rather than to serve or explain a…
+6 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation
John Lasseter · 1987
Argues the twelve traditional hand-drawn animation principles — squash and stretch, anticipation, follow-through — transfer directly to 3D computer…
+1 more at this level
11 works
Eadweard Muybridge
Uses sequential photography to break animal locomotion into discrete phases invisible to the naked eye, supplying the empirical reference on real movement that animators would draw on for a century.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026E. G. Lutz
Sets out the first systematic account of how animated drawings are actually produced — timing, registration, cel work — treating cartoon-making as a teachable craft rather than a trade secret.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Oskar Fischinger
Argues abstract animation is not illustrated music but visual art in its own right, made for its own reasons rather than to serve or explain a soundtrack.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston
Codifies twelve principles — squash and stretch, anticipation, follow-through and others — as the technical grammar Disney's animators used to make drawn characters appear to think and feel.
Laura Ivins-Hulley
Compares two stop-motion puppet films to argue that an audience locates 'performance' in an animated puppet's appearance and movement alone, without needing to imagine an actor behind it.
Andrew Buchanan
Argues animators can make a computer-generated character's emotion read as genuine by grounding facial rigs in the Facial Action Coding System developed to study real human expression, using Gollum as a case study.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jane Shadbolt
Argues stop-motion inserted into live-action features works by foregrounding its own imperfect, hand-made randomness against the surrounding photography's smoothness, rather than by hiding the seam.
Rayna Denison
Argues Princess Mononoke's environmentalist ambiguity and refusal of a clear villain reflect Miyazaki's deliberate break from Disney-style moral clarity, aimed at a more adult audience.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Raz Greenberg
Argues Miyazaki's mature themes and visual style were already worked out in his pre-Ghibli television and manga work, against the common view that his artistry began with Nausicaä.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Lasseter
Argues the twelve traditional hand-drawn animation principles — squash and stretch, anticipation, follow-through — transfer directly to 3D computer animation and are what make computer-generated characters believable, not the technology itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Giannalberto Bendazzi
Argues animation's history has to be told as a genuinely global and parallel set of national traditions — American, European, Soviet, Japanese — rather than as a single Hollywood-centred lineage.