Motion before software

Long before anyone owned a computer, people sat in the dark and watched pictures move. They did it with glass, candles, cogs and a great deal of patience. Almost every trick they found is still running inside the animation on your phone.

We went looking through two archives, Europeana and the Internet Archive, and found seven small pieces of the story.

The lantern in the living room

Start with a picture of an audience. A coloured print in the Wellcome Collection, catalogued as “Children watching a magic lantern show” (Europeana record), shows exactly what it says: a room full of children, faces turned to a glowing picture on the wall. The lettering on it reads simply “The magic lantern.”

The lantern itself was often a toy. A ceramic one from 1903, held in Girona and catalogued on Europeana as “Keramik-lanterne” (record), was made “for 5 cm wide plates for domestic use” with its own oil lamp. The museum’s note is lovely and a little rueful: it is “an example of the preponderance of design over the technical quality of the projection.” In other words, it looked better than it worked. Some things never change.

Six drawings and a Maltese cross

Then comes the clever part. A slide made by the English firm Charles Baker (record) is a choreutoscope. According to Girona’s catalogue, it was invented by Lionel Smith Beale “around 1866 to project animated drawings with the magic lantern”. It held “six drawings painted on a black background, representing different phases of a movement”, mounted on “a Maltese cross mechanism, which made it move intermittently.” A shutter hid the picture while it moved and showed it while it was still.

That is the whole secret of film in one wooden slide: show a still, hide the jump, show the next still. The catalogue says as much: “The coreutoscope was the first pre-cinema device to use intermittent motion for image projection,” a system “later used by the first film cameras.”

A hotel that unpacks itself

Forty years later the same idea was running on film. In El Hotel Eléctrico (1908) by Segundo de Chomón (Internet Archive), a couple check into a hotel where the luggage unpacks itself, brushes comb hair and shoes polish their own leather. It is stop-motion: move an object a little, shoot a frame, repeat. The Archive’s record tags it “Stop Motion Animation” and “Science Fiction”, which is fair for a hotel run entirely by invisible electricity.

A year later Chomón made Le Voleur Invisible (1909, Internet Archive), which the record describes in one perfect line: “How do you deal with an invisible thief?” He wrote it, directed it and shot it himself.

A fox, a lion and eighteen months

Stop-motion grew up fast. Ladislas Starevich, described in the Archive’s record as the author of “the first puppet-animated film”, spent “an 18-month period (1929-1930)” in Paris animating Le Roman de Renard, The Tale of the Fox (Internet Archive). Then the film waited years for a soundtrack, finally premiering in Berlin in April 1937. Eighteen months of moving puppets a fraction of an inch at a time, and the hardest part turned out to be the sound.

A cartoon that explains itself

Which brings us to the neatest artefact of all. Finding His Voice (1929), in the Prelinger Archives (Internet Archive), is described as a “cartoon showing how sound motion pictures work”, made for Western Electric and co-directed by Max Fleischer. An animated film, teaching the world how films learned to talk. Animation has been explaining things for almost a century.

What still holds

Put the seven together and a few ideas refuse to die:

• Motion is a trick of stillness. Six drawings on a slide, twenty-four frames a second: the eye does the rest.
• Hide the cut. Beale’s shutter and every modern edit share one job, which is to keep the seam invisible.
• Things feel alive when they have weight. Chomón’s luggage and Starevich’s fox work because they move like objects, not drawings.
• Charm beats polish. The ceramic lantern projected badly and delighted anyway.

From the studio

We’d take a six-frame lantern slide as a style guide for a brand film: drawn loops, paper puppets and in-camera tricks, finished with modern compositing so it holds up on a cinema screen and a phone. Hand-made motion stands out in feeds full of smooth, identical 3D, and it is exactly the kind of work our animation and VFX team makes.

From the institute

These principles are the first weeks of Introduction to Animation and 2D Animation, where students start with timing, spacing and the illusion of motion. Cel Animation covers the hand-drawn tradition, and Storyboarding the planning.

Try this: draw six phases of one simple movement (a ball bouncing, a hand waving) on six small cards. Photograph them in order, play them back at six frames a second, then at twelve. You have just built a choreutoscope, a hundred and sixty years late.