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Animation History

From Disney's Steamboat Willie to Pixar's Inside Out — 100 years of moving drawings.

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Animation — creating the illusion of motion from a sequence of images — began with phenakistoscopes and zoetropes (1830s) and developed into a cinema art form through Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928, first synchronized sound cartoon, introducing Mickey Mouse). Disney's feature-length Snow White (1937) proved animated films could be serious artistic and commercial works. Disney dominated the Golden Age (1937-1966) with fairy tale adaptations. Japanese anime developed independently — Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, 1988; Princess Mononoke, 1997; Spirited Away, 2001 — still the highest-grossing anime film ever) created a national aesthetic tradition. Pixar (founded 1986, acquired by Disney 2006) pioneered CGI feature animation (Toy Story, 1995, first CGI feature) and demonstrated that animated films could match or exceed live-action storytelling quality for adult audiences.

# Top 10 animated films

  1. 1Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
  2. 2Bambi (1942)
  3. 3Fantasia (1940)
  4. 4My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
  5. 5Spirited Away (2001)
  6. 6The Lion King (1994)
  7. 7Toy Story (1995)
  8. 8WALL-E (2008)
  9. 9The Iron Giant (1999)
  10. 10Princess Mononoke (1997)

Fascinating Facts

  • ◆Spirited Away (2001, Miyazaki) is the only non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature — and it is the highest-grossing film in Japanese history
  • ◆The production of Toy Story (1995) — the first CGI feature film — required 800,000 machine-processing hours and $30 million in computing costs in 1995; today's desktop computer could render it in days
  • ◆Walt Disney's Snow White (1937) was called 'Disney's Folly' during production — skeptics believed no audience would sit through a 90-minute animated film; it became the highest-grossing film of 1937
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