Before Walt Disney: 5 Pioneers of Early Animation

McCay is considered the father of "true" animation.

His 1911 film, Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, or Little Nemo contains two minutes of pure animation using sequential hand illustration in a novel way.

British filmmaker J. Stuart Blackton is credited with creating the first animation in America. He was the first to use stop-motion as a storytelling technique.

In The Enchanted Drawing, Blackton sketches a face, cigars, and a bottle of wine, then "removes" these last drawings as real objects so that the face appears to react.

The animal locomotion studies of Eadweard J. Muybridge are among the earliest visual experiments in creating an illusion of motion. The "persistence of vision" principle laid the foundation for later forms of videography.