Animation Timeline.

1833 (180 AD) Zoetrope    

The zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion.

1824 Thaumatrope

A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to persistence of vision.

1833 (180 AD) Zoetrope

The zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion.

1868 flipbook

A flip book or flick book is a book with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change.

1888 Kinetoscope

The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. Though not a movie projector, it was designed for films to be viewed individually through the window of the cabinet housing its components. It creates the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high speed shutter.

1908 Fantasmagorie

French animated film by Emile Cohl.The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film which gave the picture a blackboard look.It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was double-exposed (animated "on twos"), leading to a running time of almost two minutes.

1917 El Apostol

El Apóstol (Spanish: "The Apostle") was a 1917 Argentine animated film utilizing cutout animation, and the world's first animated feature film.

1925 Felix the cat

Felix the Cat is a cartoon character created in the silent film era. His black body, white eyes, and giant grin, coupled with the surrealism of the situations in which his cartoons place him, combine to make Felix one of the most recognized cartoon characters in film history. Felix was the first character from animation to attain a level of popularity sufficient to draw movie audiences

1925 Walt Disney Alice Comedies  

The "Alice Comedies" are a series of animated cartoons created by Walt Disney in the 1920s, in which a live action little girl named Alice (originally played by Virginia Davis) and an animated cat named Julius have adventures in an animated landscape.

1928 Walt Disney Steamboat willie

Steamboat Willie was produced in black-and-white by The Walt Disney Studio and released by Celebrity Productions. The cartoon is considered the debut of Mickey Mouse, and his girlfriend Minnie, but the characters had both appeared several months earlier in test screenings. Steamboat Willie was the third of Mickey's films to be produced, but was the first to be distributed.The film is also notable for being one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound.

1930 Warner Bros Looney Tunes

Sinking in the bathtub, was the very first Warner Bros. theatrical cartoon short as well as the very first of the Looney Tunes series. Made in 1930, this short marked the theatrical debut of Bosko the "Talk-Ink Kid" whom Harman and Ising had created to show to Warner Brothers. Bosko became their first star character, surpassed only much later by Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. Also, this is the first publicly released non-Disney cartoon to have a pre-recorded soundtrack

1937 Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”

It is the first full-length cel animated feature in motion picture history, the first animated feature film produced in the United States, the first produced in full colour, the first to be produced by Walt Disney Productions, and the first in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series.

1945 Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors

The first Japanese feature-length animated film. It was made as a propoganda film for the war by the Japanese Naval Ministry.

1953  Filmed in stereoscopic 3D Melody Short film

 A 3D or 3-D (three-dimensional) film or S3D (stereoscopic 3D) film is a motion picture that enhances the illusion of depth perception. The most common approach to the production of 3D films is derived from stereoscopic photography. In it, a regular motion picture camera system is used to record the images as seen from two perspectives (or computer-generated imagery generates the two perspectives in post-production), and special projection hardware and/or eyewear are used to provide the illusion of depth when viewing the film.

1960 Primetime animated - The Flintstones television series. 

The Flintstones is an animated, prime-time American television sitcom that was broadcast from September 30, 1960, to April 1, 1966, on ABC. The show was produced by Hanna-Barbera. The Flintstones was about a working-class Stone Age man's life with his family and his next-door neighbor and best friend.

1984 Fully CGI - animation film - The adventures of Andre and Wally B 

The Adventures of André and Wally B. is an animated short made in 1984 by The Graphics Group, then a division of Lucasfilm which was later renamed Pixar before being spun off as a separate company on February 3, 1986. The animation in the film was by John Lasseter, who was then working on his first computer animated project with Lucasfilm and as a result of the success of this project and others would become an important executive at Pixar. The animation was groundbreaking by the standards of the time and helped spark the film industry's interest in computer animation. The film was released on July 25, 1984, at SIGGRAPH in Minneapolis.

1993 CGI- animated TV series Insektors 

Insektors is a 1994 French animated TV series about a conflict between two tribes of anthropomorphic insects: the Joyces (an airborne, brightly coloured race) and the Yuks (a dank, dark race fixated on keeping their furnaces burning in order to survive). Made in a small studio, Fantome, in France, it was the 1994 recipient of a "Children and Young People" Emmy Award. It was directed by Georges LaCroix and Renato, and written by Eric Rondeaux, Véronique Herbaut and Marc Perrier.

2003 first flash - animation film - Wizard and giants. 

agos y Gigantes (simply known as Wizards and Giants in English) is a 2003 Mexican animated fantasy-comedy filmproduced by Ánima Estudios and 20th Century Fox and released on November 19, 2003. This is the first feature film from Ánima Estudios and the first theatrically released animated film created with Adobe Flash, a program often used for internet cartoons. It was also the first Mexican animated feature in 30 years.

2012 stop - motion film to use 3D printing technology for models ParaNorman 

Stop-motion is a traditional film-making technique that dates back to the 19th Century. It involves using puppet models that are gently repositioned frame by frame to create the illusion of movement.Traditionally, individual facial expressions would be sculpted by hand out of clay, but the producers of ParaNorman built up a library of 8,800 3D-printed faces for the main character alone, which could be used in various sequences, to give him about 1.5 million different expressions.Production house Laika began experimenting with 3D printers in the production of its 2008 film Coraline, in which the lead character managed a comparatively feeble 200,000 expressions.