Among the incunabula of animation cinema, perhaps no other work is as revered and well-known to scholars, students, and cartoon aficionados as Winsor McCay’s Gertie. Aside from the technical innovation, the astounding feat of producing thousands of nearly-identical handmade pen-and-ink…
In the final months of 1917, Helena Smith Dayton (1883–1960) released a one-reel production of Romeo and Juliet starring a cast of characters crafted entirely out of clay. Though identifiable now as a pioneering work of stop-motion animation, the film’s…
Animation is the medium that allows for a dramatization of a skirmish with nature. -Esther Leslie, “Animation and History” In Segundo de Chomón’s Création de la Serpentine (1908), a sorcerer transforms a billowing piece of fabric into a woman…
This post explores the use of the camera obscura as an Early Modern astronomical instrument and shows how that apparatus helped make sequential images of extraordinarily controversial cosmological significance centuries before chronophotography. What follows is the story of how, in…
