Animated cartoon

An animated cartoon is a short animated film made from drawings rather than live-action photography or, later, computer-generated 3D models — the moving-picture descendant of the newspaper comic strip and the gag cartoon, and historically the dominant form theatrical and television animation took through most of the 20th century. The term is generally reserved for drawn, often broadly comic short films; stop-motion clay animation or fully rendered 3D features are not usually described as "cartoons" in this narrower sense, even though both fall under the wider heading of animation.

Origins

Projected drawn animation predates film itself. Charles-Émile Reynaud's Pauvre Pierrot, shown publicly at the Musée Grévin in Paris on 28 October 1892, is usually credited as the first projected animated sequence, using his hand-painted Théâtre Optique system rather than photographic film. On film specifically, J. Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) is often cited as the first animated cartoon shot on a motion-picture camera, and Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) is generally regarded as the first fully animated film made entirely of drawings rather than a mix of live action and animated elements.

Early development

Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) is widely treated as the point at which animation acquired a genuine sense of character performance rather than simple novelty motion. Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat (from 1919) became the medium's first breakout recurring star, built on the same anthropomorphic-character model that would come to define cartoon animation for decades. Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928) introduced reliably synchronized sound to the format, and the characters that followed from Disney and its rivals — Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and later Warner Bros.' and MGM's own ensembles — established the animated cartoon as a major theatrical short-film category, typically shown ahead of a feature film, through the 1930s–1950s.

Comic-strip roots

Much of the animated cartoon's visual and comic vocabulary — a small recurring cast of exaggerated, often anthropomorphic characters, broad slapstick, a strong connection to newspaper humor — carries over directly from the gag cartoon and the comic strip, the two print forms from which animation borrowed both technique and personnel in its earliest decades. Several studios licensed existing comic-strip characters for animated adaptation, and the reverse also happened regularly, with cartoon characters spinning off into their own newspaper or comic-book strips.

Later history

Theatrical cartoon shorts declined through the 1950s and 1960s as television became animation's primary outlet, shifting most new cartoon production toward made-for-TV series. The word "cartoon" nonetheless stuck as the everyday term for drawn animation generally, theatrical or televised, and remains in use for contemporary 2D and digitally-inked animated short films and series even as 3D computer animation has become dominant in theatrical features.

See also

• Animation
• History of comics
• Rotoscoping
• Comic strip