80 Fun Facts About Animation

Which French artist made Fantasmagorie (1908), considered the first animated cartoon?

Émile Cohl drew Fantasmagorie as black lines on white paper, then printed it in negative so the stick figure appears chalk-white on black.

Which American game company introduced the definitive zoetrope, with replaceable picture strips, as a toy in 1866?

Milton Bradley sold the zoetrope from 1866; its inventor, William Ensign Lincoln, devised it as a Brown University sophomore of about 18.

Reynaud's 1877 praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with what?

An inner ring of mirrors reflected the picture strip; the reflections stayed nearly stationary as the drum turned, giving a brighter, less distorted image than the zoetrope's slits.

Which physicist invented the phenakistiscope around December 1832, simultaneously with Simon Stampfer?

Joseph Plateau never settled on one name for his spinning disc, using both phénakisticope and his preferred fantascope.

Émile Reynaud's Pantomimes Lumineuses, the first projected animated films, opened in 1892 at which Paris venue?

Reynaud's Théâtre Optique ran at the Musée Grévin wax museum from October 1892, more than three years before the Lumière brothers' first paid film screening.

Blackton's 1906 Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, an early hand-drawn animation, was drawn on what surface?

Blackton drew the faces in chalk on a blackboard, filming each change frame by frame; he had co-founded Vitagraph Studios and performed 'lightning sketch' acts on film.

Winsor McCay first showed Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) not in cinemas but as an interactive part of what?

McCay performed Gertie in his vaudeville act, giving her spoken commands on stage; a live-action prologue was added after William Randolph Hearst curtailed his touring.

Winsor McCay's most ambitious film (1918) recreated which 1915 event?

The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) took McCay about 25,000 drawings over 22 months, yet it was a commercial disappointment and his later films drew little attention.

El Apóstol (1917), considered the first feature-length animated film, was made in which country?

Quirino Cristiani made El Apóstol in Argentina, satirising President Hipólito Yrigoyen; the only copies burned in a 1926 fire at Federico Valle's studio.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surviving animated feature, used what technique?

Lotte Reiniger's silhouette cutouts, cardboard figures weighted with lead, drew on Wayang shadow puppets; the original prints were colour-tinted.

Which pre-digital animation device is Lotte Reiniger, maker of Prince Achmed, credited with first devising in 1923-26?

The multiplane camera is credited to Reiniger: layering flat planes at different depths gave her shadow films a parallax that Disney later industrialised with its own 1937 rig.

What did industry insiders derisively call Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs during production?

'Disney's Folly' was the insiders' nickname; Walt mortgaged his house to finish the film, which then became the highest-grossing release of 1938.

Which technique, tracing over live-action footage frame by frame, did Max Fleischer invent in 1915?

Rotoscoping let Fleischer trace filmed movement for the Out of the Inkwell series; rival studios could use it freely only after his 1917 patent expired in 1934.

Betty Boop began life in Fleischer cartoons as an anthropomorphised what?

Dog was her first species: Betty debuted in Dizzy Dishes (1930) as a French poodle with floppy ears, evolving into a fully human flapper by 1932.

'Termite Terrace' was the affectionate nickname for the classic animation department of which studio?

Warner Bros. released the unit's Looney Tunes; Termite Terrace was a ramshackle building on the Sunset lot where Tex Avery's crew worked for about a year from 1935.

At which studio did Tex Avery create Droopy, Screwy Squirrel and Red Hot Riding Hood after 1941?

MGM hired Avery in 1941 after he left the Looney Tunes unit; his humour there was aimed squarely at adults, the opposite of Disney's approach.

Which Chuck Jones short topped Jerry Beck's 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons?

What's Opera, Doc? (1957), Jones's six-minute Wagner parody, took the top spot; in 1992 it became the first short cartoon added to the National Film Registry.

Hanna-Barbera's five-minute Ruff and Reddy episodes had to cost no more than how much apiece?

Their seven-minute Tom and Jerry shorts had cost around $35,000 each.

Which 1960 series was the first animated show to air in prime time?

The Flintstones premiered on ABC on 30 September 1960 and ran six seasons, a prime-time animation record that stood until The Simpsons passed it in 1997.

Before becoming a half-hour series in 1989, The Simpsons began as shorts on which variety programme?

The Simpsons began as 48 shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show from April 1987 before its half-hour debut in December 1989.

Ray Harryhausen's celebrated fight between three actors and seven living skeletons is in which 1963 film?

Jason and the Argonauts (1963) expanded the single-skeleton duel Harryhausen had animated for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad five years earlier; the sequence took him over four months.

What did stop-motion pioneer Ladislas Starevich use as protagonists around 1910?

Dead insects were his cast: live stag beetles kept dying under the studio lights, so Starevich wired their legs and animated the corpses, as in The Cameraman's Revenge (1912).

Which 2000 film, co-produced with DreamWorks, was Aardman's first feature?

Chicken Run, Aardman's first feature, is set on a Yorkshire egg farm and grossed more than $220 million worldwide, a stop-motion record at the time.

Nick Park's Creature Comforts (1989) matched animated zoo animals with recordings of real people discussing what?

Their homes and living conditions were the subject, voiced by zoo animals; the short was Park's entry in Channel 4's Lip Synch series and won his first Academy Award.

Wallace, the cheese-loving inventor of Wallace & Gromit, is especially fond of which cheese?

Wensleydale is Wallace's favourite, and the films' mentions gave the Yorkshire cheese a sales boost; his accent comes from the Holme Valley of West Yorkshire.

Stop-motion studio Laika (Coraline, Kubo) is owned by the co-founder of which company?

Nike co-founder Phil Knight bought into Will Vinton Studios in 1998, took control and renamed it Laika in 2005; his son Travis Knight became its president and CEO.

In which city were Rankin/Bass 'Animagic' specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer actually produced?

Tokyo's MOM Production, led by Japanese animator Tadahito Mochinaga, built and animated the puppets for Rankin/Bass throughout the 1960s.

Toy Story (1995), the first entirely computer-animated feature film, was directed by whom?

John Lasseter directed it at Pixar; the film premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles and earned him a Special Achievement Academy Award.

The inaugural Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, presented in 2002, went to which film?

Shrek beat Monsters, Inc. and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius to the first Best Animated Feature Oscar at the March 2002 ceremony.

Which film was the first hand-drawn, non-English winner of the Best Animated Feature Oscar?

Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 film, took the award at the March 2003 ceremony, the year after the category's debut.

Which 2023 film, made after Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature?

The Boy and the Heron won at the 96th Academy Awards, Miyazaki's second win in the category, 21 years after his first.

Flow (2024), the first independent film to win Best Animated Feature, was animated with which open-source software?

Director Gints Zilbalodis used no storyboards, and the film has no dialogue at all.

Flow, the 2024 film about a cat surviving a flood, was the first Oscar winner from which country?

Latvia's first Oscar came at the March 2025 ceremony, where Flow beat Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot; the statuette was later displayed at the Latvian National Museum of Art.

Ghibli, an Italian word for a hot desert wind, was also the nickname of what?

A scouting plane, the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli flown by Italy in North Africa, carried the name; Miyazaki, an aircraft obsessive, wanted to 'blow a new wind through the anime industry'.

Which artist directed Akira (1988), the Neo-Tokyo cyberpunk landmark, adapting his own manga?

Katsuhiro Otomo directed the film while his manga was unfinished; the comic ran in Young Magazine from 1982 to 1990, two years past the film.

In Into the Spider-Verse, why was Miles animated 'on twos' while Peter was on ones?

His inexperience as a new Spider-Man is why Miles was animated on twos while the seasoned Peter moved on ones; the film won at the 91st Academy Awards.

Persepolis (2007) follows a girl growing up during the 1979 revolution in which country?

Iran is Marjane Satrapi's homeland; her black-and-white film shared the 2007 Cannes Jury Prize with Silent Light.

Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir traces his lost memories as a soldier in which conflict?

The 1982 Lebanon War, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, are what Folman tries to recall; the film won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and was banned in Lebanon.

Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist (2010) was based on an unproduced 1956 script by which French filmmaker?

Jacques Tati wrote the script in 1956 and never filmed it; Chomet's version moves the story to Edinburgh, with the magician drawn to resemble Tati himself.

The Annecy International Animation Film Festival, founded in 1960, is in which country?

France hosts it: Annecy lies in the Haute-Savoie department beside Lake Annecy, and the festival's top prize is the Cristal d'Annecy.

Which legendary voice actress first conceived the Annie Awards, presented since 1972?

June Foray, the voice of Rocky the flying squirrel, proposed the awards to ASIFA-Hollywood; the first honourees in 1972 were Max and Dave Fleischer.

Frank Thomas and which fellow animator wrote The Illusion of Life (1981), setting out Disney's twelve principles?

Ollie Johnston, like Thomas one of Disney's Nine Old Men, co-wrote it; Animation World Network readers voted it the best animation book of all time in 1999.

In realistic squash and stretch, what property of the object must not change?

Its volume must stay constant: stretch a ball vertically and it has to get narrower to compensate, the first of Disney's twelve principles.

The 'cel' in cel animation is a contraction of the name of which material?

Celluloid, the flammable cellulose nitrate sheet, was the original material; studios later switched to more stable cellulose acetate.

Between 1927 and 1930, what frame rate became the standard for 35 mm sound film?

24 frames per second was adopted with sound film as a compromise within the 22 to 26 fps range at which theatres had been projecting silents.

Animating 'on twos' holds each drawing for two frames; how many drawings per second is that at sound-film speed?

12 drawings per second is the result of holding each drawing for two frames at sound speed; animators revert to ones for fast movement, which twos are too slow to convey.

Which animator of Steamboat Willie left Disney in 1930 and launched Flip the Frog?

Ub Iwerks drew most of Steamboat Willie himself; he later returned to Disney, doing effects work on Mary Poppins and Hitchcock's The Birds.

What was the first feature film from the studio Don Bluth founded after quitting Disney in 1979?

The Secret of NIMH (1982), adapted from Robert C. O'Brien's novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, was Don Bluth Productions' debut feature.

What was DreamWorks Animation's first feature film, released in October 1998?

Antz opened on 2 October 1998, beating Pixar's A Bug's Life to cinemas by nearly two months; The Prince of Egypt followed in December.

Which Richard Williams feature, begun in 1964, was finally released in 1995 as Arabian Knight?

The Thief and the Cobbler, Williams's decades-long passion project, was taken over by its completion bond company in 1992 and released in a re-edited form as Arabian Knight in 1995.

Which 1937 film was the first cel-animated feature ever made?

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in December 1937; Walt received an honorary Oscar for it as one full-size statuette and seven miniature ones, presented by Shirley Temple.

Which 1991 Disney film was the first animated feature nominated for Best Picture?

Beauty and the Beast lost Best Picture to The Silence of the Lambs, but its title song and Alan Menken's score both won Oscars.

Which Pixar film was the first animated film to open the Cannes Film Festival, in 2009?

Up opened Cannes on 13 May 2009 and was Pixar's first 3D release; Ed Asner voiced 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, and the film went on to a Best Picture nomination.

In Spirited Away, what becomes of Chihiro's parents after gorging on food in the abandoned town?

Turned into pigs for their greed, they can only be freed by Chihiro working in the bathhouse for spirits run by the witch Yubaba.

Who actually directed The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which Tim Burton conceived and produced?

Burton was busy on Batman Returns. Danny Elfman wrote the songs and sang for Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, while Chris Sarandon spoke his lines.

Which comedian voiced the Genie in Aladdin (1992), improvising hours of unused tape?

Robin Williams took scale pay on condition that Disney not use his voice heavily in marketing; when it did, he fell out with the studio and skipped the first sequel.

Coraline (2009) is based on a novella by which author?

Neil Gaiman said he wrote the 2002 book for his daughters, who wanted something scary; the film was the first feature from the Oregon studio Laika.

What is the name of the 11-year-old girl whose mind hosts Inside Out (2015)?

Riley Andersen's mind is run by five emotions, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger, with Amy Poehler voicing Joy; the film won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

In Pixar's WALL-E, what does the first word of the robot's acronym name stand for?

Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-class. Sound designer Ben Burtt, who also voiced him, recorded about 2,500 sounds, and most characters in the film's first act never speak a word.

In How to Train Your Dragon (2010), what does Hiccup name the Night Fury he befriends?

Toothless is so named for his retractable teeth; the film is based on Cressida Cowell's 2003 novel and set on the Viking island of Berk.

Under what title was Disney's 2016 film about rabbit cop Judy Hopps released in the UK and much of Europe?

Zootropolis was the UK and European title; Disney said it wanted a name that resonated with more audiences, and Germany got a third variant, Zoomania.

Brad Bird's The Iron Giant (1999) is loosely based on a 1968 children's novel by which British poet?

Vin Diesel voiced the Giant. Warner Bros. barely marketed the film and it flopped, but Bird went on to direct The Incredibles and Ratatouille at Pixar.

Which two rival studio mascots first shared a scene, as skydivers, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)?

Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny fall together with Eddie Valiant; Warner insisted its star get exactly as much screen time and dialogue as Disney's, and Bob Hoskins acted opposite characters painted in later.

Which conductor, seen in silhouette shaking hands with Mickey Mouse, led the performances in Fantasia (1940)?

Leopold Stokowski conducted, with the Philadelphia Orchestra playing seven of the eight pieces; the film introduced Fantasound, the first stereophonic system used in a commercial film.

Which song from The Prince of Egypt (1998) won the Oscar for Best Original Song?

'When You Believe', written by Stephen Schwartz, took the Oscar; its pop version was the first recording by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey together.

Which 2016 Makoto Shinkai body-swap romance became, for a time, the highest-grossing anime film worldwide?

Your Name, in which country girl Mitsuha and city boy Taki swap bodies without having met, grossed more than $350 million worldwide.

Frozen (2013) was loosely inspired by which 1844 fairy tale?

The Snow Queen, Hans Christian Andersen's 1844 tale, went through several Disney treatments before the studio commissioned Frozen in 2011; Elsa began as a villain.

Which film overtook Frozen as the highest-grossing animated film in August 2019?

The Lion King remake passed Frozen's $1.28 billion worldwide in August 2019 and finished above $1.6 billion, though whether photoreal CGI counts as animation was disputed.

Shrek (2001) was loosely based on a 1990 picture book by which author-illustrator?

William Steig published the picture book in 1990; Steven Spielberg bought the film rights in 1991, and the project moved to DreamWorks after the studio's 1994 founding.

Which comedian originally recorded most of Shrek's dialogue before dying in 1997?

Chris Farley had recorded most of the ogre's lines when he died in December 1997; Mike Myers took over, alongside Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz.

Which Pixar film became the best-selling DVD of all time, with over 40 million copies sold by 2006?

Finding Nemo, directed by Andrew Stanton, won the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2004 and was the highest-grossing G-rated film at the time of its release.

The Lion King's plot draws notably on which Shakespeare play?

Hamlet supplies the template: Simba's uncle Scar murders his father and seizes the throne, and the father's ghost urges the exiled prince to return.

How was the pilot episode of South Park made, before the show moved to computers?

Paper cutouts of construction paper, shot in stop motion, made the pilot; the series debuted on Comedy Central on 13 August 1997 and later mimicked the look in software.

Which 1940 Disney film was the first animated feature to win a competitive Academy Award?

Pinocchio won two Oscars at the 1941 ceremony, Best Original Score and Best Original Song for 'When You Wish Upon a Star'.

Mickey Mouse was created as a replacement for which earlier Disney character owned by Universal?

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was lost in 1928 when distributor Charles Mintz, working for Universal, took the character and hired away most of Disney's animators.

In which year did Steamboat Willie enter the US public domain?

2024 brought the 1928 short into the public domain on 1 January, 95 years after release; Disney had been inspired by The Jazz Singer to make a synchronised-sound cartoon.

Which producer ran the Looney Tunes studio from 1933 until selling it to Warner Bros. in 1944?

Leon Schlesinger took over production in 1933 after Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, makers of the first Bosko shorts, left; he produced the series for eleven years before the 1944 sale.

Which of Matt Groening's comic strips caught James L. Brooks's eye and led to The Simpsons?

Life in Hell was what Brooks asked Groening to adapt; fearing he would lose the strip's rights, Groening sketched the Simpson family in the lobby instead.

Miyazaki's 2001 bathhouse film shared the top prize at which European film festival in 2002?

Berlin's Golden Bear went jointly to Miyazaki's film and Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday in February 2002, a first for an animated feature.

Which 2020 anime film broke Spirited Away's 19-year Japanese box-office record?

Demon Slayer: Mugen Train passed the previous record in December 2020 on its way to more than ¥40 billion in Japan, the first film to reach that figure there.