A look at Flipbook animation
By Mikaela Arnold
In the 21st century there
Is a great demand for big budget CGI animated movies. Recently there has been a
boom to remake past line based animated Disney movies into live action movies.
We already got he remake of Tarzan and the Jungle Book. There are talks about
Lion King being remade like the others. These movies assets are probably being
made in Autodesk Maya or blender. This costs the production more than a cartoon
based animation to make and brings the budget of the film up. What if these
movies were made with the flipbook style of animation? Would it be different?
A flipbook is an interesting type of
animation. This is because a flipbook is made and controlled by the artist not
by a computer. The artists take either sheets of paper or a drawing book as the
medium. Page by page the artist creates a single frame until he/she has reached
the animation’s end. The viewer of the piece flips through the pages and the
animation runs with the speed of the viewer’s flipping. Unlike computer
animation, there are no play or pause button. There is no undo button. Knowing
this, it brings a sense of awe and respect towards the artist. The artist cannot
easily correct the animation like he/she could on a computer.
Look
at your comics and Manga books. When you think about it, when they are made
into video form, the process looks like a flipbook. The artist or group of
artists draw out the frames before sending it to the computer to be colored and
compiled into video frames. The video frames are plopped into video editing
software.
Let’s look at Disney’s early animated video.
One of the main reasons it took a while for animation was because the group of
artists had to draw each frame then manually color them. The drawings then went
through a video scanner thing to make sure that the frames flowed smoothly.
That is probably why no one had done animation before 1937. Interestingly,
1,000,000 drawings were made for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” (Disney: The
Making Of Snow White ( 1937 )) “Snow White and the Seven dwarfs” had an
income of $2,000,000 with a box office
amount of $184,925,485 (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937))
while the newest Jungle Book live-action movie had a budget of $175,000,000
with a gross income of $364,001,123. As you can see, it took more money
to make the live-action movie than it was to make the handrawned animation of
the early days of Disney’s animation studio.
There are many types of flipbooks but I am going to discussed
two of these types---the Kinora and the Filoscope.
The Kinara was brought to us by the Lumiere brothers in the late 1800’s It was made
of concave lens. It sat on a wooden stand. There was a handle that rotated a
wheel. The concave lenses were the viewing part of the device. It was a very
popular machine during the early 1900’s. Unfortionaly the brothers’ business
was burnt down in 1914 in London. World War I diminished the popularity of the
machine. There was a similar machine called the mutoscope patented by Herman
Casier in 1894. (/fancy-names-and-fun-toys/kinora/mhs)
The Filoscope looks more like a tape holder than a motion
picture machine. It was invented by Henry William in 1897. It was patented in
1898 . It was fixed in a tin plate holder. The holder had an iron lever that
was used to cycle through the images to make a animation. It was like a mini
Kinora. One of the filmmakers who worked with the Filoscope was Robert Paul who
was born in 1869. He was a well-known in the British film industry. In fact, he
was the pioneer for it. Paul was Short’s friend. Short was in many of his films
included May and Flora Hengler who were dancers. (short) Some of his films
can be found on YouTube.
Flipbooks were very popular for kids
during the late 19th to early 20th century. Not only were
they found in toys but they were found in Children’s books. (Fouché) These books did not
seem to have a story but they entertained them with the small animations.
Interestingly, like the vinyl, flipbooks are coming back into style. People order
their own flipbooks. From what I can defer, businesses use flipbooks to
advertise their business. I found a site named flippies that allows you to
create your own flipbook and order them. The site has a sample gallery, idea
page, and a little snippet in the history of flip books. (Home) . The only down part
of this website is that the consumer must call in to make one and it does not
give you a price for the flipbook until you order. Still, it is interesting
that the practice is still around and still popular in some niches in the world
today. Probably those that adore antiques like I do.
The concepts of a flipbook are very
interesting to me. Inside a small book a small animation can be played as one
turns the pages. Each drawing is a small frame of the animation. It is
interesting to know that a small flipbook jumpstarted the ideas of motion
picture and motion in a single frame. The fact that small children could
experiment with the flipbooks as toys was amazing to read when looking at the
size of the machine. As I watched the animations in flipbooks I can’t help but
notice similarities in modern programs especially when watching the documentary
of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.
Just like animators and children in
the past, we can make our own flipbook like animation. There is a Adobe program
called Animate that allows you to create your own animation. There is a tool in
the program that acts like see-through paper---this is called onion skin. The
onion skin allows you to see what you drew on the previous frame to match the
movement of the present frame. This is what I thought of at the part where the
documentary showed the drawing process of the animation It is strange to see the
progression of the technology of animation from the past progression. It seems like
the animation of today takes less steps and much more less complex than in the past.
Unfortunately, we cannot buy our own Filoscope or Kinetoscope as they are beyond
vintage. Not even Ebay has any. I would highly suggest trying to make your own flipbooks
to get a taste for what they were like in the early days of animation.
Works Cited
/fancy-names-and-fun-toys/kinora/mhs. n.d. 08 10 2017.
<http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/exhibits/fancy-names-and-fun-toys/kinora/>.
Disney: The Making Of Snow White ( 1937 ). Ed. Robert Keller. 06 12 2016. Youtube. 07 10 2017.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8SDB7EHx-k>.
Fouché, Pascal. history. 2017. 10 10 2017.
<http://www.flipbook.info/history.php>.
Home.
2003-2017. Flippies Inc. <http://www.flippies.com/>.
short. n.d.
09 10 2017. <http://www.victorian-cinema.net/short>.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). n.d. 8 10 2017.
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029583/?ref_=nv_sr_4>.
viewers.
n.d. 09 10 2017. <http://www.flipbook.info/viewers.php>.
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