Animation means giving images the illusion of life
From hand-painted cels to CGI composites, animation is filmmaking that creates or manipulates pictures and plays them in sequence until motion appears. The English word once simply meant liveliness. Devices from the zoetrope to the flip book proved the trick long before cartoons filled theaters and phone screens.
Animation builds moving images by creating or altering frames and showing them in rapid order. Traditional practice draws or paints on transparent celluloid sheets, photographs them, and projects the result. Stop-motion moves puppets or objects between exposures. Computer methods range from detailed three-dimensional scenes to two-dimensional looks chosen for style, bandwidth, or speed. Live action and animation routinely mix; as CGI nears photographic realism, filmmakers composite animated effects into photographed worlds with relative ease.
People once blamed persistence of vision for the illusion; later accounts invoke the phi phenomenon and beta movement, though exact neurological causes remain uncertain. Analog precursors include the phenakistiscope, zoetrope, flip book, praxinoscope, and film itself. Television and video carried the form into electronic—and now digital—media. Beyond features and shorts, animation powers games, motion graphics, interfaces, and visual effects. Even magic-lantern mechanics and centuries of automata sit on the same continuum of forced life.
An animated cartoon usually means a short with an exaggerated style drawn from comics and gag art. In the late 1980s the slang toon took hold, popularized by the 1988 hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The Latin root animatio means bestowing of life; English used animation for liveliness long before it named a moving-image medium. That older sense still fits: every technique, from cel paint to real-time render, is an attempt to make still matter behave as if it breathes.
Source: Animation
