Body over Words
Your morning cartoons, your daily advertisements, and even your local fast food restaurants use them. Almost everywhere you look, there is some kind of animation used in commercials, ads, and your favorite binge worthy shows. Animation has become a 21st century medium, and it continues to grow more with new feature films and schools creating programs just for animation and visual effects.
So let’s take a look inside the cartoons and funny characters as what it really means to be animated. First thing animation is about turning your imagination into a creative mean. It’s about gathering all of the details and complex ideas and turning them into expressive, enjoyable characters and shows. As Walt Disney said “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
Animation has been around for a long time, but it started in ways that most people didn’t’ think much of. The drawings in caves that told stories of the natives history was a form of animation, and slowly they became more detailed and complex to what we see now as feature length films. The first feature film was released in 1937 by Disney, and it was called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It used hand drawn animation and over 1.5 million cells.
There are many different methods of animation including drawing, clay models, stop motion, and computer animated models. Along with these methods comes programs designed to build these detailed walls inside our televisions. 
The definition of animation is a creation of a sequence of images drawn, painted, or produced by artistic methods that change over time to portray the illusion of motion. Basically that means expressing actions without words.
One of the main parts you learn for animation is being able to convey a message, feeling, or action without the use of words to describe what is happening at that given time. Although facial expressions are very helpful in that matter, animating character’s body and motions to exaggerate the feeling or action is what sells animation. It’s about over stretching a stride, slumping down further, and expanding the body to extremes to really sell what emotion or action a character is performing. You may remember the famous character Mickey Mouse. He was the first cartoon character with sound printed on film by Walt Disney. In 1928, Mickey Mouse came to television starting the revolution of the future of animation.
Mickey Mouse lives on and so does many other characters from many different shows like Bob’s Burgers, Archer, and many more. They all have different styles, characters, and programs that they use. With each program is designed different to give a different feel. In hand drawing, typically the characters were drawn very simple in ways that could easily be repeating over and over again. In programs such as Maya or Flash where the programs can duplicate scenes or characters easily. In the past, animation is was more simplified because they didn’t have the technology to produce those same images as efficiently as now. You can see by comparing animated films to each other the technology has grown allowing for more advanced drawings and characters.
As time goes on, we will see a change in animation as it continues to grow, and we get more advanced technology. We have already seen so much change in the last couple of years, it can only go up from here.
For more history on animation check it out here.