I Can’t Sleep - Animation | Gentle Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

Unwind with this calm bedtime reading as Benjamin explores the history and art of animation, helping you relax and find relief from insomnia. You’ll discover how animation began with early experiments, its evolution through hand-drawn classics, and the rise of modern digital techniques. Benjamin’s soothing cadence turns the lively world of animation into peaceful storytelling that reduces stress and quiets the mind. This is not whispering or hypnosis—just gentle, fact-filled narration designed to guide you into rest. Press play, settle in, and drift into sleep with this exploration of animation’s magic. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Animation, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – Animation. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch.

I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause. With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, and become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast, where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Animation.

Animation is the method that encompasses myriad filmmaking techniques, by which still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets, cells. to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animation has been recognized as an artistic medium, specifically within the entertainment industry. Many animations are computer animations made with computer-generated imagery, CGI. Stop-motion animation, in particular, claymation,

has continued to exist alongside these other forms. animation is contrasted with live-action film, although the two do not exist in isolation. Many moviemakers have produced films that are a hybrid of the two. As CGI increasingly approximates photographic imagery, filmmakers can easily composite 3D animations into their film, rather than using practical effects for showy visual effects, VFX. Computer animation can be very detailed 3D animation,

while 2D computer animation, which may have the look of traditional animation, can be used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop-motion technique to two- and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts, puppets, or clay figures. A cartoon is an animated film, usually a short film, featuring an exaggerated visual style.

The style takes inspiration from comic strips, often featuring anthropomorphic animals, superheroes, or the adventures of human protagonists. Especially with animals that form a natural predatory or prey relationship, e.g. cats and mice, coyotes and birds. The action often centers on violent pratfalls, such as falls, collisions, and explosions that would be lethal in real life. The illusion of animation, as in motion pictures in general, has traditionally been attributed to the persistence of vision and later to the five phenomenon and beta movement. But the exact neurological causes

are still uncertain. The illusion of motion caused by a rapid succession of images that minimally differ from each other with unnoticeable interruptions is a stroboscopic effect. While animators traditionally used to draw each part of the movements and changes of figures on transparent cells that can be moved over a separate background,

computer animation is usually based on programming paths between keyframes to maneuver digitally created figures throughout a digitally created environment analog mechanical animation media that rely on the rapid display of sequential images include the phenochistocope, zoatrope, flipbook, preksynoscope, and film television and video are popular electronic animation media that originally were analog and now operate digitally. For display on computers, technologies such as the animated gif and flash animation were developed.

In addition to short films, feature films, television series, animated gifts and other media dedicated to the display of moving images, animation is also prevalent in video games, motion graphics, user interfaces, and visual effects. The physical movement of image parts through simple mechanics, for instance, moving images in magic lantern shows, can also be considered animation. The mechanical manipulation of three-dimensional puppets and objects to emulate living beings has a very long history in automata. Electronic automata were popularized by Disney as animatronics. The word animation stems from the Latin animation, stem of animatio, meaning a bestowing of life.

The earlier meaning of the English word is liveliness. and has been in use much longer than the meaning of moving image medium. Hundreds of years before the introduction of true animation, people all over the world enjoyed shows with moving figures that were physically manipulated, manually or sometimes mechanically in puppetry, automata, shadow play, and the magic lantern, especially in phantasmagoria shows. In 1833, the stroboscopic disc, better known as the phenochistocope, introduced the principle of modern animation,

which would also be applied in the zoetrope, introduced in 1866, the flipbook, 1868, the Praxenoscope, 1877, and film. When cinematography eventually broke through in the 1890, 90s, the wonder of the realistic details in the new medium was seen as its biggest accomplishment. It took years before animation found its way to the cinemas. The successful short, The Haunted Hotel, 1907, by J. Stewart Blackton, popularized stop motion and reportedly inspired Emil Cole to create Fantasma Gori, 1908. regarded as the oldest known example of a complete traditional hand-drawn animation

on standard cinematographic film. Other great artists and very influential short films were created by Ladis Las Starovich with his puppet animations since 1910, and by Windsor McKay was detailed hand-drawn animation of films such as Little Nemo, 1911, and Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914. During the 1910s, the production of animated cartoons became an industry in the U.S. Successful producer John Randolph Bray and animator Earl Hurd patented the sale animation process that dominated the animation industry for the rest of the century. Felix the Cat, who debuted in 1919, became the first,

wholly realized animal character in the history of American animation. In 1928, Steamboat Willie featuring Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, popularized film with synchronized sound, and put Walt Disney's studio at the forefront of the animation industry. Although Disney animation's actual output relative to total global animation output has always been very small, the studio has overwhelmingly dominated the aesthetic norms of animation ever since. The enormous success of Mickey Mouse is seen as the start of the golden age of American animation

that would last until the 1960s. The United States dominated the world market of animation, with a plethora of cell-animated theatrical shorts. Several studios would introduce characters, that would become very popular and would have long-lasting careers, including Walt Disney Productions Goofy, 1932, and Donald Duck, 1934. Fleischer Studios, Paramount Cartoon Studios,

Out of the Inkwell, Coco the Clown, 1918, Bimbo and Betty Boop, 1930, Popeye, 1933, and Casper, 1945 Warner Brother cartoons, Looney Tunes, Porky Pig, 1935, Daffy Duck, 37, 17, Helmer Fudd, 1937 to 40, Bugs Bunny, 1938 to 1940, Tweedy, 1942, Wyle E. Coyote and Roadrunner, 1949, MGM Cartoon Studios, Tom and Jericho, Henry, 1940, and Drew P. Walter Lanz Productions Universal Studios, Woody Woodpecker, 1940, Terry Toons, 20th Century Fox's Mighty Mouse, 1942, and United Artists, Pink Panther,

1963. In 1917, Italian Argentine director, Kirino Cristiani, made the first feature-length film, El Apostle, lost, which became a critical and commercial success. It was followed by Christianis' scene de Charastros in 1918, but one day after its premiere, the film was confiscated by the government. After working on it for three years, Lott Reineger released the German feature-length silhouette animation, The Abintra des Prinzen Ahmed in 1926, the oldest extant animated feature. In 1937, Walt Disney Studios premiered their first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, still one of the highest grossing traditional animation features as of May 2020.

The Fleischer Studios followed this example in 1939, with Gulliver's travels, with some success. partly due to foreign markets being cut off by Second World War, Disney's next features Pinocchio, Fantasia, post-1940, Fleischer Studios' second animated feature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town, 1941 to 1942, and Disney's feature films Cinderella, 1950, Alice in Wonderland, 1951, and Lady and the Tramp, 1955 failed at the box office. For decades afterward, Disney would be the only American studio to regularly produce animated features until Ralph Bakshi became the first to also release more than a handful features. Sullivan Bluth Studios began to regularly produce animated features, starting with an American tale in 1986.

Although relatively few titles became as successful as Disney's features, other countries developed their own animation industries that produced both short and feature theatrical animations in a wide variety of styles, relatively often including stop motion and cut-out animation techniques. Russia's Soyev's Multifilm Animation Studio founded in 1936, produced 20 films including shorts per year on average and reached 1,582 titles in 2018.

China, Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic, Italy, France, and Belgium were other countries that more than occasionally released feature films, while Japan became a true powerhouse of animation production with its own recognizable and influential anime style of effective limits, animation. Animation became very popular on television since the 1950s, when television sets started to become common in most developed countries. Cartoons were mainly programmed for children on convenient time slots, and especially U.S. youth spent many hours watching Saturday morning cartoons. Many classic cartoons found a new life on the small screen and

By the end of the 1950s, the production of new animated cartoons started to shift from theatrical releases to TV series. Hannah-Barbera Productions was especially prolific and had a huge hit series such as the Flintstones, 1960 to 1966, the first primetime animated series, Scooby-Doo since 1969, and Belgian co-productive. the Smurfs, 1981 to 1989. The constraints of American television programming and the demand for an enormous quantity resulted in cheaper and quicker limited animation methods and much more formulaic scripts. Quality dwindled until more Darien animation surfaced in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s, with hit series, the first cartoon of the Simpsons, 1987.

The animated television series such as The Simpsons and SpongeBob SquarePants as part of a renaissance of American animation. While U.S. animated series also spawned successes internationally, many other countries produce their own child-oriented programming, relatively often preferring stop-motion, and puppetry over cell animation. Japanese anime TV series became very successful internationally since the 1960s, and European producers, looking for affordable cell animators, relatively often started co-productions with Japanese studios,

resulting in hit series such as Barba Papa, Wiki Unti Stark and Minner, Maya the Bee, and the Jungle Book. Computer animation was gradually developed since the 1940s. 3D wireframe animations started popping up in the mainstream in the 1970s, with an early short appearance in the sci-fi thriller Future World, 1976. The Rescuers Down Under was the first feature film to be completely created digitally without a camera. It was produced in a style that's very similar to traditional cell. animation on the computer animation production system, Caps, developed by the Walt Disney company

in collaboration with Pixar in the late 1980s. The so-called 3D style, more often associated with computer animation, became the dominant technique following the success of Pixar's Toy Story, the first computer animated feature in this style. Most of the cell animation studios studios switched to producing mostly computer animated films around the 1990s, has it proved cheaper and more profitable. Not only the very popular 3D animation style was generated with computers, but also most of the films and series was a more traditional handcrafted appearance, in which the charming characteristics of cell animation can be emulated with software, while new digital tools helped developing new styles and effects.

In 2010, the animation market was estimated to be worth around US $80 billion. By 2020, the value had increased to an estimated $270 billion. Animated feature-length films returned the highest gross margins, around 52% of all film genres, between 2004 and 2013. Animation as an art and industry continues to thrive as of the early 2020s. The clarity of animation makes it a powerful tool for instruction, while its total malleability also allows exaggeration that can be employed to convey strong emotions

and to thwart reality. It has therefore been widely used for other purposes than mere entertainment. During World War II, animation was widely exploited for propaganda. Many American studios, including Warner Brothers and Disney, lent their talents and their cartoon characters to convey to the public certain war values. Some countries, including China, Japan, and the United Kingdom, produced their first feature-length animation for their war efforts. Animation has been very popular in television commercial.

both due to its graphic appeal and the humor it can provide. Some animated characters in commercials have survived for decades, such as Snap, Crackle, and Pop in advertisements for Kellogg's Serial. Tex Avery was a producer of the first Raid Kills Bugs Dead commercial in 1966, which were very successful for the company. Apart from their success in movie theaters, and television series, many cartoon characters would also prove lucrative when licensed for all kinds of merchandise and for other media. Animation has traditionally been very closely related to comic books.

While many comic book characters found their way to the screen, which is often the case in Japan, where many manga are adapted into anime, original animated characters. characters also commonly appear in comic books and magazines. Somewhat similarly, characters and plots for video games, an interactive form of animation that became its own medium, have been derived from films and vice versa. Some of the original content produced for the screen can be used and marketed in other media. Stories and images can easily be adapted into children,

books and other printed media. Songs and music have appeared on records and as streaming media. While very many animation companies commercially exploit their creations outside moving image media, the Walt Disney Company is the best known and most extreme example. Since first being licensed for a children's writing tablet in 1929, their Mickey Mouse mascot has been depicted on an enormous amount of products, as have many other Disney characters. This may have influenced some pejorative use of Mickey's name,

but licensed Disney products so well, and the so-called Disneyana has many avid collectors, and even a dedicated Disney out of fan club since 1984. Disneyland opened in 1955 and features many attractions that were based on Disney's cartoon characters. Its enormous success spawned several other Disney theme parks and resorts. Disney's earnings from the theme parks have relatively often been higher than those from their movies. Criticism of animation has been common in media and cinema since its inception. With its popularity, a large amount of criticism has arisen,

especially animated feature-length films. Criticism regarding cultural representation and psychological effects on children have been raised around the animation industry, which some claim has remained politically unchanged and stagnant since its inception into mainstream culture. As with any other form of media, Animation has instituted awards for excellence in the field. Many are part of general or regional film award programs,

like the China's Golden Rooster Award for Best Animation. Awards programs dedicated to animation with many categories include Acefa Hollywood's Annie Awards, the Emile Awards in Europe, and the Animamundi Awards in Brazil. Apart from Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film and Best Animated Feature, animated movies have been nominated and rewarded in other categories, relatively often for Best Original Song and Best Original Score.

Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film nominated for Best Picture in 1991. Up and Toy Story 3 also reached. received Best Picture Nominations, after the Academy expanded the number of nominees from 5 to 10. The creation of non-trivial animation works, i.e. longer than a few seconds, has developed as a form of filmmaking, with certain unique aspects. Traits common to both live-action and animated feature length films are labor intensity and high production costs. The most important difference is that once a film is in the production phase, the marginal cost of one more shot is higher for animated films than live-action films.

It is relatively easy for a director to ask for one more take during principal photography of a live-action film, but every take on an animated film must be manually rendered by animators, although the task of rendering slightly different takes has been made less tedious by modern computer animation. It is pointless for a studio to pay the salaries of dozens of animators to spend weeks creating a visually dazzling five-minute scene if that scene fails to effectively advance the plot of the film. Thus, animation studios, starting with Disney, began the practice in the 1930s of maintaining story departments where storyboard artists develop every single scene through storyboards, then handing the film over to the animators only after the production team is satisfied that all

the scenes make sense as a whole. While live-action films are now also storyboarded, they enjoy more latitude to depart from storyboards, i.e. real-time improvisation. Another problem unique to animation is the requirement to maintain a film's consistency from start to finish, even as films have grown longer and teams have grown larger. Animators like all artists necessarily have individual styles, but must subordinate their individuality in a consistent way to whatever style is employed on a particular film. Since the early 1980s, teams of about 500 to 600 people, of whom 50 to 70 are animators typically have created feature-length animated films.

It is relatively easy for two or three artists to match their styles. Synchronizing those of dozens of artists is more difficult. This problem is usually solved by having a separate group of visual development artists develop an overall look and palette for each film before the animation. begins. Character designers on the visual development team draw model sheets to show how each character should look like with different facial expressions, posed in different positions, and viewed from different angles. On traditionally animated projects, maquettes were often sculpted to further help the animators see how characters would look from different angles. Unlike live-action

films, animated films were traditionally developed beyond the synopsis stage through the storyboard format. A storyboard artist would then receive credit for writing the film. In the early 1960s, animation studios began hiring professional screenwriters to write screenplays, while also continuing to use story departments and screenplays had become commonplace for animated films by the late 1980s. Traditional animation, also called cell animation or hand-drawn animation, was the process used for most animated films of the 20th century. The individual frames of a traditionally animated film are photographs of drawings, first drawn on paper. To create the illusion of movement, each drawing differs slightly from the one before it.

The animator's drawings are traced or photocopied onto transparent acetate sheets called cells, which are filled in with paints and assigned colors or tones on the side opposite the line drawings. The completed character cells are photographed one by one against a painted background by a rostrum camera onto motion picture film. The traditional cell animation process became obsolete by the beginning of the 21st century. Today, animators' drawings and the backgrounds are either scanned into or drawn directly into a computer system. Various software programs are used to color the drawings and simulate camera movement and effects. The final animated piece is output to one of several delivery media.

including traditional 35-millimeter film and newer media with digital video. The look of traditional cell animation is still preserved, and the character animator's work has remained essentially the same over the past 90 years. Some animation producers have used the term tradigital, a play on the words traditional and digital, to describe cell animation that uses significant computer technology. Examples of traditional animated feature films include Pinocchio, Animal Farm, Lucky and Zorba, and The Illusionist.

Traditionally animated films produced with the aid of computer technology include The Lion King, the Prince of Egypt, Akira, Spirited Away, the triplets of Belleville, and The Secret of Kells. Full animation is the process of producing high-quality, traditionally animated films that regularly use detailed drawings and plausible movement, having a smooth animation. Fully animated films can be made in a variety of styles, from more realistically animated works like those produced by the Walt Disney Studio, the Little Mermaid, Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, the Lion King, to the more cartoon styles of the Warner Brothers Animation Studio. Many of the Disney animated features are examples of full animation,

as are non-Disney Works, The Secret of Nim, The Iron Giant, and Nocturna. Fully animated films are often animated on twos, sometimes on ones, which means that 12 to 24 drawings are required for a single second of film. Limited animation involves the use of less detailed or more stylized drawings and methods of movement, usually a choppy or skippy movement animation. Limited animation uses fewer drawings per second, thereby limiting the fluidity of the animation. This is a more economic technique pioneered by the artists of the American Studio United Productions of America

Limited animation can be used as a method of a stylized artistic expression as in Gerald McBoeing, Boeing, Yellow Submarine, and certain anime produced in Japan. Its primary use, however, has been in producing cost-effective animated content for media for television, the work of Hannah-Barbera, filmation, and other TV animation studios, and later the internet, web cartoons. Roto scoping is a technique patented by Max Fleischer in 1917, where animators trace live-action movement frame by frame.

The source film can be directly copied from actors' outlines into animated drawings. as in the Lord of the Rings, or used in a stylized and expressive manner as in waking life, and a scanner darkly. Some other examples are fire and ice, heavy metal, and Akunohana. Live action animation is a technique combining hand-drawn characters into live-action shots, or live-action actors into animated shots. One of the earlier uses was in Coco the Clown when Coco was drawn over live-action footage

while Disney and Ube Iworks created a series of Alice comedies in which a live-action girl entered an animated world. Other examples include Allegro Nontropo, who framed Roger Rabbit, Volere Volare, Space Jam, and Osmosis Jones. Stop-motion animation is used to describe animation created by physically manipulated real-world objects, and photographing them one frame of film at a time to create the illusion of movement. There are many different types of stop-motion animation,

usually named after the materials used to create the animation. Computer software is widely available to create this type of animation. Traditional stop-motion animation is usually less expensive, but more time-consuming to produce than current computer animation. Puppet animation typically involves stop-motion puppet figures interacting in a constructed environment, in contrast to real-world interaction in model animation. The puppets generally have an armature inside of them to keep them still and steady, to constrain their motion to particular joints. Examples include The Tale of the Fox,

The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Coraline, the films of Jiri Trunkah, and the adult animated sketch comedy's television series Robot Chicken. Puppetoon, created using techniques developed by George Powell, are puppet animated films that typically use a different version of a puppet for different frames, rather than manipulating one existing puppet. Clay animation or plasticine animation, often called claymation, which, however, is a trademark

name. It uses figures made of clay or a similar, malleable material to create stop-motion animation. The figures may have an armature or wireframe inside, similar to the related puppet animation. that can be manipulated to pose the figures. Alternatively, the figures may be made entirely of clay in the films of Bruce Bickford, where clay features morph into a variety of different shapes. Examples of clay animated works include The Gumby Show, Miomau,

Morph Shorts, Wallace and Grommet Shorts, Yan Zank Mayer's Dimensions of Dialogue, The Trap Door. Films include Wallace and Gromit, the curse of the Weir Rabbit, Chicken Run, and the Adventures of Mark Twain. Stratocut animation, most commonly a form of clay animation in which a long bread-like loaf of clay internally packed tied and loaded with varying imagery is sliced into thin sheets, with the animation camera taking a frame of the end of the loaf for each cut, eventually revealing the movement of the internal images within.

Cut-out animation, a type of stop-motion animation produced by moving two-dimensional pieces of material paper or cloth. Examples include Terry Gilliam's animated sequences from Monty Python's Flying Circus, Fantastic Planet, Tale of Tales, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the first cutout animation, South Park. The pilot episode of the adult television sitcom series and sometimes in episodes of South Park, and the music video Live for the Moment from Verona Riot's band, Silhouette Animation. A variety of cutout animation in which the characters are backlit and only visible as silhouettes.

Examples include the adventures of Prince Ahmed, and Princes at Princesses. Model animation, stop-motion animation created to interact with and exist as a part of a live-action world. Intercutting, mad effects, and split screens are often employed to blend stop-motion characters or objects with live actors and settings. Examples include the work of Ray Harryhausen, as seen in films Jason and the Orson, Jason and the Argonauts, and the work of Willis H. O'Brien on films King Kong. Go-motion, a variant of model animation that uses various techniques to create motion blur

between frames of film, which is not present in traditional stop motion. The technique was invented by industrial light and magic and Phil Tippett to create special effects scenes for the film Star Wars, Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back. Another example is the dragon named Vermetrex from the 1981 film Dragon Slayer. Object animation, the use of regular inanimate objects and stop-motion animation, as opposed to specifically created items. Graphic animation uses non-drawn flat visual graphic material, photographs, newspaper clippings, magazines, etc.,

which are sometimes manipulated frame by frame to create movement. At other times, the graphics remain stationary, while the stop-motion camera is moved to create on-screen action. Brick film, a sub-genre of object animation, involving using Lego or other similar brick toys to make in animation. These have had a recent boost in popularity with the advent of video sharing, insights, YouTube, and the availability of cheap cameras and animation software. Pixelation involves a use of live humans as stop-motion characters.

This allows for a number of surreal effects, including disappearances and reappearances, allowing people to appear to slide across the ground and other effects. Examples of pixelation include The Secret Adventures of Tompensors of Tompies. thumb and Angry Kid shorts and the Academy award-winning neighbors by Norman McLaren.