[0:00]When you're watching any animated piece of media, I think it's easy to forget that you're watching drawings move. Excuse me? What kind of Harry Potter dark magic is this? Since when did drawings move? I drew a picture of a dog once, but it hasn't moved at all, not even to play fetch. Well, what you're really watching isn't actually moving. What you're really watching is a series of individual frames played at a rapid speed on a liquid crystal display screen that emit photons into your eyeball receptors that get processed by your brain into what it perceives as movement. It was all a trickery, you see, a ruse that you fell for hook, line, and sinker. Now, a lot of you probably already know about the concept of a frame rate. But what I want you to understand is that in cartoons, every head turn, every blink, every, everything that happens had to be meticulously drawn by a person who studied anatomy and knows about physics and movement, knowing full well that their drawing was only going to be seen for a fraction of a fraction of a second. And you weren't even watching, you were on your phone. Today, I would like to turn back the sands of time and talk about some of the ways animators were able to achieve the illusion of life without the help of modern technology. I hope by watching you can better understand and appreciate the medium of animation as much as I do, because the amount of dedication and hard work that goes into just making drawings move is unreal. And if you're like me and already know a bit about animation history and find this kind of stuff fascinating, don't worry, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up either. Now, we know that animation is just copious amounts of drawings being shown in rapid succession. But how the f*** are we going to get people to look at copious amounts of drawings in rapid succession without a computer? Well, believe it or not, there's actually quite a few things we can do without even having to use a camera. One method we can try is by drawing out all of our frames on a stack of paper. I know, that's the time consuming part, but after we're done doing that, we'll hang up all our drawings side by side on a very long wall. Then we'll ride a bike next to the wall and continuously have our head turned facing the wall, and if we pedal fast enough, we'll zip by the drawings so fast that it'll look like they're moving. Hey, look, it's a horse. Okay, you're probably thinking, that's not how animation is made. And you're right. This method of animation is totally impractical. But not impossible. This type of human transportation animation has been done before in subway tunnels, with the results looking pretty legit. I mean, this minion looks like he's totally moving. I might as well be in the cinema. And for those of the gamer variety, YouTuber Pale of Pears was able to achieve this method of animation flawlessly in Minecraft. But if you wanted to do something more practical, you could instead take your drawings off the really long wall, and then stack them up like a book, and then just flip through the paper quickly, making a flip book. If you have some sticky notes lying around that you forgot about in a junk drawer somewhere, you can make a pretty simple ball bouncing animation really quickly. With the results being, you know, kind of cool. A fun fact, this type of animation was featured in every single copy of the Animorphs books, which I never read. I would just flip through the pages and watch the children in the corner transform into elephants and starfish and this weird blue alien Centaur thing. What the heck was going on in these books, man? Okay, this next method of showing people drawings in rapid succession, it's going to be a little bit crazy. I don't want to freak you out, but it's basically on the same level as rocket science, okay? We're going to have to jump up a whole dimension for this one. What you're going to do is sculpt out a three-dimensional figure of whatever you want to animate. Let's animate, I don't know, this guy jumping. So first, I'm going to sculpt my guy just standing there, just being a dude. This will be frame one. Now, okay, I know some of you are probably thinking, oh, I see where this is going. You're going to take a picture of the sculpture, then change its pose slightly, take a picture of that, and then slightly change the pose over and over, while continuously starting and stopping the camera, making it seem like our subject has some sort of motion. No, actually, we're not going to be doing any of that. Cameras haven't been invented yet in this hypothetical. What we're doing instead is making a whole new sculpture that will be the next frame of our animation. So it'll be our guy again, bending his legs a little bit, getting ready for the jump. All right, neat, that's frame two. Now let's do this a total of, I don't know, 16 times. That sounds good. Let's also make the 16th sculpture look like it came before the first sculpture. So, do you understand? It's going to go from the 16th sculpture back to the first one. It's it's a loop, like a TikTok. We're doing a TikTok loop. Now, we're going to take all 16 of our sculptures and space them out evenly on a round table. Sorry, Arthur. I'm going to need this. Now, make the table spin. That's that's on you to figure out how to do. I don't know. Maybe get the bike guy from the first example to pedal or something. I doubt any of you are actually following along, but if you are, put all your sculptures on a spinning table right now. And make it quick, all right? I'm not going to wait for you. And now, for the final step, turn your lights on and off really quickly. And if we did everything right, the effect we get is mesmerizing.
[5:57]What's happening is that the light shines at the first sculpture, and then we turn the lights off. Cool. Then, as the table spins, the light will turn back on when the second sculpture is in the same position as the first. So we turn the lights on when the sculptures are in the same spot, and we turn them off when they're not. And what we end up seeing is all of our figures standing in a circle performing the animation, and we don't even register that the whole thing is spinning. And congratulations, you all know what a zoetrope is now. Which, I know, is a pretty fun word that you can whip out at parties like, yeah, I know a unique word that starts with the letter Z that isn't xylophone. Another fun thing about the Zoetrope was that a 3D rendering of one was featured in the season 2 opening of Mob Psycho 100. So that's what that spinning thing in the intro was, was a zoetrope. Zoetrope. Okay, let's talk about one more way we can show people drawings in quick succession without a camera, and it's the easiest method by far, so. All we need is this glitchy, abstract drawing like this. Pretty cool and random, right? Except it's not. It's not random at all. I lied. Every line here is placed very deliberately. Let me show you something. If we take this floppy transparent sheet full of vertical bars and cover up most of the drawing, hey, look at that. The outline we end up seeing looks like one of them kitty cats. Now, if we slide the transparent sheet over and reveal different parts of the drawing, hey, it looks like a kitty cat, but in a different position. And if we keep sliding this sheet over, revealing different parts of the drawing, look at him go. This is called a barrier grid animation, and with the right base drawing, you can make all sorts of animations that don't hurt to look at at all. And also I just want to point out that a barrier grid animation was also featured in the season 2 opening of Mob Psycho 100. Hey, do you guys want to watch anime later? So all these different methods of showing people drawings in quick succession. I don't know if there's a word for it, but I'm calling it physical animation. Like animation you can hold and touch with your fingers, you know? All those warrior cat animation memes, those that's digital animation, right? This is physical, it's the real deal. But there's one form of physical animation that we haven't talked about yet that's unarguably the most popular and the most important form of physical animation to have ever existed on Earth. Excuse me. Okay, now we're going to use cameras, okay? They they finally figured it out. With the invention of film, showing people multiple images in quick succession had never been easier. Now we can take something from real life, burn an image of that into a film strip, process it, and then shine a light through it again to get a recreation of the image. And if we roll this whole strip of film over this strobe light, we get moving pictures. That's why they're called movies, because they move. What the f***? A lot of times film was used to capture the movements of real people, but it was also used in the same way to capture the movements of people of the animated variety. Let's take a look at an old, old cartoon, the 1968 animated Batman series, the first time Batman has ever appeared in the animation form. You know, the really, really old Batman cartoon that had appeared on the screen during fight scenes. Boom. Pow. Ka-chow. Except they didn't. They didn't do that in the cartoon. Visually showing the verbage of impacts was exclusively an Adam West thing. In the cartoon, you got to see those impacts. Hey, can I ask you a thought-provoking question? What the f*** am I looking at? I know it's Batman high-kicking a goon, but how is it moving? This frame was captured on film, so there had to be a physical camera to capture it, right? So, where is this drawing? It's not on a computer. Computers in the '60s looked like this. So, where is this? So, every animated movie and animated TV show and animated anime before the year 2000-ish, used what's called cel animation. This frame of Batman was hand-painted, that's right, painted with special paint onto a transparent celluloid sheet, or cel. And then this transparent sheet was laid on top of a hand-painted background, and then this goon that got kicked, well, he had to be painted on his own cel sheet, too. And then this image of sandwiched art was captured onto a film thing, a film strip, a film sheet. Then the Batman cell would come off and be replaced by a whole new hand-painted cell of Batman, and then that frame would be captured. And then the whole process would repeat again and again until the shot was done. This one shot that lasted a little over a second used 14 different hand-painted drawings of Batman, and the goon had six, just for a second. Now, because having to hand-paint 20 different images for one second is insane. There are some things we can do to cut corners without having to sacrifice too much quality. Like in this shot, Robin takes five frames to turn his head, but his body doesn't move. So we can paint his body once on its own cell, and now we only need to paint five different heads. And since we already have all the frames painted, we can just use the same frames in reverse to make his head turn the other way. And you don't need to pay a background artist to paint a background if you just use blue. A big part of cel animation was being able to animate pieces of a character independently of each other. That's actually why so many old cartoon characters had accessories around their necks, so the animators could separate the characters' heads from their bodies, making it easier to animate. Fred wasn't rocking that ascot just because it was trendy. One of the nice things about using a computer to animate is that you can play back what you've animated and clearly see if your timing is correct and if there's any quick adjustments you can make. Being able to see what your previous frames are is so important, there's actually a term for it called onion skinning. But animators pre-2K didn't have computers to re-watch their work. So here's what they did instead. Before they even put paint onto a cell, they first had to draw all their frames out onto a piece of paper. And they didn't work on the frames in chronological order. Like they didn't go, okay, I just drew the first frame of Batman. Okay, here's the second frame of Batman. Okay, I'm going to go do the third frame of Batman. Okay, okay, you do the fourth frame though. That way of animating is called straight ahead animation, and some people use it, but the results look pretty chaotic. But it's still used pretty effectively for effects and concert visuals. But most of the time, animators will animate a character from pose to pose. They'll draw out all the important key poses a character will make on paper, and then they'll hold the pieces of paper between each of their fingers, and then quickly flip between their drawings, just to get an idea of what a drawing that goes in between those key poses would look like. That's called in-betweening, just so you know. And they still wouldn't be able to get a full playback of their animation until every pencil drawing was captured on film and processed. They just had to trust their page flipping technique and their highly trained eyeballs and go, yeah, that looks about right. Let's bring out the paint. And because there are hundreds of shots, all having to be animated without a computer, can you really blame the animators that some shots of Batman look like this? Or this? It was old, remember? Old things are bad. Okay, I kind of have a secret. Remember when I said, let's look at an old, old cartoon? Well, I might have overemphasized how old the Batman cartoon is. By the time the Batman cartoon came out, the movie Bambi had been out for 25 years. And are you aware of how f***ing fluid the animation in Bambi is? Dude, Bambi goes so f***ing hard. Walt literally brought in deer from the f***ing woods into their studio, just so the animators could be like, oh, that's neat, that's how deers move. I, okay, I understand this more now. What the f***? I honestly thought the Batman show came out way earlier in the animation timeline because of how it looked. Obviously, these two things are created by different studios with different animators and different budgets. And TV animation always has to create more animation per budget, but all the same techniques and equipment used to make an episode of Batman were the exact same techniques and equipment used to make an episode of Bambi. I don't mean that as a dunk on Batman. I'm more so impressed with how amazing Bambi looks. Especially since, while it came out, World War II was currently happening. So because celluloid sheets were used to animate every TV show, movie, and anime there has ever been before the year 2000-ish. By my calculations, there are millions of cell sheets out there. Like this single frame of Batman kicking, it's on a cell sheet somewhere. And more importantly, who owns it? Many of the cells that still exist have been sold to the general public. But because of how the paint and time works, cell sheets need to be kept very well preserved. So since cells are very hard to preserve, and because they're not making any new ones, some cells are worth a lot of money. This cell and original background from My Neighbor Totoro sold for $84,000. While I'm writing the script, there's currently an auction going on for this cell from the Jungle Book for $10,000. And I own this cell of Squidward laughing that I got at a convention for $300.
[15:57]It's uh, not an original background. The background's a print, and it's actually not even the correct background for the the shot. But I'm just pointing out that not all cells are thousands of dollars. You know, they they made millions of these. So, you can, you can get a cell from a TV show for a couple hundred. And then you get to own a frame of animation. Like you that belongs to you now. Which I think is super cool. This moment of Squidward laughing belongs to me, and you can't have it. So if you ever visit some friends who really like cartoons, there's a good chance that they have an animation cell somewhere on display. And those are just a handful of ways that animators were able to achieve the illusion of life without a computer. And I do just want to say, just because something was animated on a computer, doesn't make it any less artistic. Yes, computers make the process easier and more streamlined, absolutely. It's still a human expressing their creativity and being in control of that. Did you hear me? It's a human expressing themselves and being in control, creatively, creatively. I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about animation history. There's still quite a few things that I didn't get to cover. Like, how did Walt animate this panning, parallaxing shot of Bambi, where the trees move on separate layers? What kind of technology did they create to to make trees move at different speeds? So much hard work and talent is involved in every piece of animation you see, and because of animation, we're able to tell incredible stories that are nothing like anything we ever see in our day-to-day lives. And before I go, can we talk about the intro to the Batman series, please? Oh my god. I just want to go over some quick announcements. I'll be quick, don't worry. The Scribble Showdown tour is coming back in January to a city near you. But this time the kitties aren't invited. That's right. Only the adults this time. Leave the children at home with the babysitter. If you're like me and are behind on your Christmas shopping, there's some new holiday merch in the merch store. So check it out. But if the shipping won't get there in time, then there's also the Oddballs graphic novel available in retail stores, like Target and Barnes & Noble and Walmart. I'll probably see you all in the New Year. So, uh, happy New Year. Thank you.
