A short history of animation: from flipbook to screen
How a simple trick of the eye grew into a whole art form.
April 2026 · 1 min read
It all starts with one feature of our eye: if still images follow one another fast enough, the brain reads them as movement. The first animations were exactly this: flipbooks that set a picture moving as you riffled the pages.
At the turn of the twentieth century the trick reached cinema, and thousands of hand paintings made films. Later came celluloid, then the computer. Yet the striking thing is this: the tools changed completely, but the same twelve principles of movement still hold.
