The early usage of animation was about exploring its potential and was really influenced by the new vision of the century: in a context full of social change and political revolution, the role of all the arts were also questioned and re-defined by their most influential exponents. Among the famous individuals who contributed to the progress of Animation we can find James Stuart Blackton who introduced animation and other important film techniques that helped shape and stimulate the development of cinematic art: one of most famous works was “Humorous Phases of a Funny Face” (1906) which can be considered to be the earliest surviving American animated film where single exposures of drawings were simulating movement where the presence of an artist is only suggested to the audience.

Blackton pioneered stop frame animation. He brought innovation in the process of production in the industrial organisation making it more efficient and effective by employing faster or simpler working methods so that he could manage multiple films at once.

“Enchanted Drawing” (the first animated sequences recorded on standard picture film) is another famous work of his, where Blackton actually interacts with its drawing making it come to life.

One of the earliest pioneers of animation, along with Blackton was Émile Cohl: he is considered to be the creator of the first fully animated cartoon: ‘Fantasmagorie’ (1908). Even if It shared a similar look with Blackton’s chalk animation, there was a notable difference between Blackton’s characters and his: Cohl’s animation was drawn on hundred pieces of paper.

in the 1880’s Cohl and Jules Levy (who was the founder) were members of the artists and journalists movement called the “Incoherent”. The Incoherents presented work which was deliberately irrational and iconoclastic, “found” art objects, nonsense humoristic sketchs, drawings of children, and drawings “made by people who don’t know how to draw.”

“Cartoons, which rebuff so ferociously painterly realism and filmic naturalism are set in a universe of transformation, overturning and provisionally”

This statement was created by modernist movements fro whom animation became an extension of their work and innovative thinking: the role of Art is defined during a time where anarchy was exploding into the cultural scene when Modernists (both a philosophical movement and an art movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and Dadaists (art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war) also questioned the difference between high and popular culture – Art was never available to the people only for educated and wealthy to appreciate and understand it. This necessary debate arouse from the division in terms of accessibility to creativity. Animation in the midst of these polemic arguments softened the edges between his and mass forms of culture and was able to cross social and cultural divisions: from its very early stages animation was destined to be a multi-cultural, multifunctional medium fuelled by technological change. The avant – garde interest in animation is part focused upon the formal aesthetic potentials of film and animation, line and form movement and rhythm colour an d light.

There are several inventions which helped, in the1900, transforming production possibilities and facilitating assembly line production setting a path for animation:

• 1913 Raoul Barré, a French Canadian painter, cartoonist, animator of the silent film era, had invented the peg system which provided a universal registration system by creating common relationship with the background or the viewer’s point of view where the animated images shared foundation with each other.
• 1915 saw the introduction of cel: a transparent sheet used in the process of hand-drawn animation;

Mass production was priority since mass communication was a first concern, and America became land of filmmakers, immigrants coming over from Europe after the Wars in the midst of social reforms in Europe; European culture is abandoned in favour of American technology:

• John Randolph Bray (1879-1978) was a pivotal figure in the development and organisation of the animated cartoon industry in the United States: he introduced the printed background and releasing the first animated colour film “the debut of Thomas cat” in 1920; it was produced by Earl Hurd for Bray Pictures using the Brewster Colour film process.
• American animator, inventor, film director and producer, and studio founder and owner Max Fleischer was very influential in the whole process of animation. Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope, a time and labour saving device in which live-action film frames are traced as a guide for animated action. Brother Dave’s on-camera performance in a clown suit was rotoscoped into the character Ko-Ko the Clown, who starred in the “Out of the Inkwell” 1915

• Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator pioneer (he created the first animated documentary “sinking of the Lusitania” 1918). He is best known for the comic strip “Little Nemo” and the animated film “Gertie the Dinosaur”.