Animation has been around longer than films have. The history of animation goes all the way back to the late 3rd millennium BC when five sequential images depicting a goat leaping up to nip at a tree were discovered on a 5,200-year-old pottery bowl in Shahr-e Sukhteh, Iran. Animation became more significant during the 19th century.

In 1833, the phénakisticope was invented, and it was the first device to visualize the concept of animation using rapid successive substitution of sequential pictures. Many inventions related to the phénakisticope were made years later. These include the zoetrope, originally invented in July 1833, the flipbook, invented in 1868 as the kineograph, the praxinoscope, an improved version of the zoetrope invented in 1877, and the zoopraxiscope, invented in 1879.

One of the earliest known animated films to be made was “Pauvre Pierrot”, which was released on October 28, 1892. The film was directed by Charles-Émile Reynaud, who was responsible for inventing the praxinoscope.

“The Enchanted Drawing” was released in 1900 and is regarded as the first film recorded on standard picture film to contain animated elements, although it only contained simple frame changes. J. Stuart Blackton, the maker of The Enchanted Drawing, would make another film six years later called Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. This film is often regarded as the oldest known drawn animation on standard film.

Traditional hand-drawn animation saw its debut with Fantasmagorie, released in 1908 by Émile Cohl. Computer animation was first demonstrated in the 1960s and started to be commonly used by the 1980s. With new animations made every day, the world of animation is a fine world indeed.