The History of Animation

Animation begins not with a film, but with a 19th-century scientific toy. In 1832, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau wanted to study how our eyes perceive motion. He invented the phenakistiscope, a simple cardboard disk with a series of drawings around its edge and viewing slits cut into it. When the disk was spun in front of a mirror, the viewer would peer through the slits. The rapid succession of static images tricked the brain into seeing a single, fluid motion—a psychological effect called the phi phenomenon. These early “philosophical toys,” originally designed for scientific experiments, created looping animations and provided the fundamental technical DNA for the cartoons and movies that would follow a century later.