100 Years of Animation

100 Years of Animation
Animation started simply; a blackboard, a stick of chalk and the wrist of an artist.

A whirring camera stood nearby while James Stuart Blackton sketched out a dubious-looking gent in a bowtie.

Blackton's wrist soon disappears, but, onscreen the drawing keeps growing.

A woman in a frilly dress with a bun atop her head appears.

The man glances over at her, lifts his eyebrows and breaks out into a grin.

The woman reciprocates, then Bad Man lights up a stogie and obscures Grimacing Ladyfriend in smoke.

Released 100 years ago today, the three-minute clip, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces would forever change American culture.

"At the time, people were amazed with film," says Stephen Worth, director of The International Animated Film Society's Hollywood chapter, "(even seeing) a carriage moving down the street, but to see a moving drawing on the screen was even more amazing."

Blackton's short, which included a handful of other characters, is regarded as the world's first known animation.

It would go on to inspire Windsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, the Mutt and Jeff series and a long string of Krazy Kat shorts, which in turn got the wheels of the great Walt Disney machine turning.

With the birth of sound cartoons in 1928, the medium stepped into its Golden Age.