What is Animation?

First, the question of all questions: What is animation? Well, per the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), it means the following:

1. To give life to; fill with life.

2. To impart interest or zest to; enliven .

3. To fill with spirit, courage, or resolution; encourage .

4. To inspire to action; prompt.

5. To impart motion or activity to.

6. To make, design, or produce (a cartoon, for example) so as to create the illusion of motion.

While I could get philosophical with the first four definitions, what we are really talking about here are the fifth and sixth definitions. Animation means motion. I like to broaden that a bit and say that animation is change over time, specifically some type of visual change. Motion is basically the change in somethings position over time. One minute it is over here; the next minute it is over there. Theoretically, it was also in the space between those two points, but I wont get metaphysical about it (not just yet anyway). It moved, and some time elapsed between the time it was at the first point and the time it was at the next one.

But an object doesnt necessarily need to change its location in order to be considered animated. It could just be changing its shape. Remember those photo-morphing programs that were all the rage in the late 1990s? You start with one picture of a girl and one picture of a tiger, and the program creates an animation between them. Or the object could be changing its size or orientation, such as a plant growing or a top spinning. Or it could even simply be changing its color . If youve been around long enough, you might remember some of the earliest animations on home PCs consisted of just cycling colors. You make a picture of a waterfall with a bunch of shapes in various shades of blue. You then cycle the colors of those shapes . If done right, the result gives the impression of falling water, even though, technically, nothing is moving at all.

The connection of animation to time is an important one. Without any motion or change, there is no animation, of course, but also there is no sense of time. Sometimes you might see a web cam image of an empty room or a city skyline, where nothing seems to be happening. Its impossible to tell if you are looking at a still image or a live video stream. Finally, you might notice some subtle changea flickering light or a moving shadow. Just that slight flicker has reassured you that time is present, and maybe if you keep watching, something else will change. If you dont see any change after a while, you become convinced that it is a still image. There is no time, and you know nothing else will be happening in the picture.

That brings up another point: Animation keeps us interested in things. While the Mona Lisa is a wonderful piece of work and one of the most famous paintings of all time, I bet the average person gets bored after looking at it for 15 minutes, tops, and then wanders off to see what else he can brag about having seen. But stick him in front of the latest high-budget Hollywood action film, and he wont budge for a good two and a half hours. And if he does need to go to the restroom or to get a snack , he will wait for a slow partone without so much animation. Thats the power of animation.