Animation Trivia
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This animation trivia quiz has 129 free questions with answers and covers the whole art form, from optical toys to this year's Oscar winner. One half is animation history: the first projected cartoons in Paris and Winsor McCay's Gertie, Fleischer's rotoscope, Termite Terrace, Hanna-Barbera's limited animation, stop-motion from Starevich and Harryhausen to Aardman and Laika, cels, frame rates and the twelve principles. The other half is animated movie trivia questions and answers on the films themselves: Snow White, Fantasia, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Iron Giant, The Prince of Egypt, Spirited Away, Your Name, Up, WALL-E, Inside Out, Zootopia, How to Train Your Dragon, Coraline and Spider-Verse. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who loves cartoons and animated films, a third are medium, and the rest are for people who know what 'on twos' means and where the Rankin/Bass puppets were really built. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 129 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which French artist made Fantasmagorie (1908), considered the first animated cartoon?
Émile Cohl
Émile Cohl drew Fantasmagorie as black lines on white paper, then printed it in negative so the stick figure appears chalk-white on black.
Q 02Which American game company introduced the definitive zoetrope, with replaceable picture strips, as a toy in 1866?
Milton Bradley
Milton Bradley got the design from William Ensign Lincoln, a Brown University student who set the viewing slits above the pictures so the strips could be swapped.
Q 03Reynaud's 1877 praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with what?
An inner ring of mirrors
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.
Q 04Which Belgian physicist invented the phenakistiscope around December 1832, simultaneously with Austria's Simon Stampfer?
Joseph Plateau
Joseph Plateau preferred to call his spinning disc the fantascope; phénakisticope, the name that stuck, was coined by a Paris firm selling copies he had no part in.
Q 05The 1906 film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, an early hand-drawn animation, was drawn on what surface?
A blackboard
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.
Q 06Winsor McCay first showed Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) not in cinemas but as an interactive part of what?
His vaudeville act
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.
Q 07Winsor McCay's most ambitious film (1918) recreated which 1915 event?
The sinking of the Lusitania
The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) took McCay 22 months and a claimed 25,000 drawings; he made it in his own time, rebelling against his employer William Randolph Hearst, who had him drawing anti-war cartoons.
Q 08El Apóstol (1917), considered the first feature-length animated film, was made in which country?
Argentina
Quirino Cristiani made El Apóstol in Argentina, satirising President Hipólito Yrigoyen; the only known copy burned in a 1926 fire at producer Federico Valle's studio.
Q 09The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surviving animated feature, used what technique?
Silhouette cutouts
Lotte Reiniger's silhouette cutouts were cardboard and thin lead figures moved frame by frame under the lens, much like Wayang shadow puppets; the first prints were colour-tinted.
Q 10Which pre-digital animation device is Lotte Reiniger, maker of Prince Achmed, credited with first devising in 1923-26?
The multiplane camera
The multiplane camera is credited to Reiniger: layering flat planes at different depths gave her films a parallax that Disney later industrialised with its own 1937 rig.
Q 11What mocking nickname did Hollywood insiders give the first cel-animated feature film while it was still in production?
Disney's Folly
'Disney's Folly' was the insiders' nickname; Walt mortgaged his house to finish the film, which then became the highest-grossing release of 1938.
Q 12Which technique, tracing over live-action footage frame by frame, did Max Fleischer invent in 1915?
Rotoscoping
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.
Q 13Which cartoon star debuted in 1930 as a floppy-eared French poodle?
Betty Boop
Q 21What did stop-motion pioneer Ladislas Starevich use as protagonists around 1910?
Dead insects
Dead insects were his cast: live stag beetles stopped moving or died under hot studio lights, so Starevich wired the legs of dried specimens, as in The Cameraman's Revenge (1912).
Q 22Which 2000 film, co-produced with DreamWorks, was Aardman's first feature?
Chicken Run
Chicken Run, Aardman's first feature, borrows from The Great Escape: hens on a Yorkshire egg farm plot a breakout before the owner's new machine turns them into pies.
Q 23Nick Park's Creature Comforts (1989) matched animated zoo animals with recordings of real people discussing what?
Their homes
Betty Boop began as a poodle in Dizzy Dishes; as animators made her human by 1932, her floppy ears were redrawn as hoop earrings.
Q 14'Termite Terrace' was the affectionate nickname for the classic animation department of which studio?
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. put Tex Avery's unit in a small building on its Sunset lot in 1935; the crew left within a year, but their nickname for it stuck to the whole cartoon studio.
Q 15At which studio did Tex Avery create Droopy, Screwy Squirrel and Red Hot Riding Hood after 1941?
MGM
MGM signed Avery in 1941 after he quit the Looney Tunes studio in a row over a cut gag ending The Heckling Hare; his wilder cartoons there won adult fans too.
Q 16Which Chuck Jones short topped Jerry Beck's 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons?
What's Opera, Doc?
What's Opera, Doc? has Elmer Fudd hunt his rabbit foe through a Wagner pastiche, singing 'Kill the wabbit' to the Ride of the Valkyries; it joined the National Film Registry in 1992.
Q 17Which studio made TV's Ruff and Reddy far more cheaply than its founders' Tom and Jerry shorts?
Hanna-Barbera
Hanna-Barbera cut costs with limited animation, reusing drawings and moving as little as possible; Chuck Jones dismissed such TV cartoons as 'illustrated radio'.
Q 18Which 1960 series was the first animated show to air in prime time?
The Flintstones
The Flintstones took its set-up from the sitcom The Honeymooners, whose star Jackie Gleason later said he had considered suing; it ran six seasons in prime time.
Q 19Before becoming a half-hour series in 1989, The Simpsons began as shorts on which variety programme?
The Tracey Ullman Show
The Tracey Ullman Show ran 48 Simpsons shorts from April 1987; the family looked crude because the animators simply traced Matt Groening's rough sketches, which he expected them to tidy.
Q 20Ray Harryhausen's celebrated fight between three actors and seven living skeletons is in which 1963 film?
Jason and the Argonauts
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.
Their homes were the topic: the big cat griping about the cold was voiced by Park's Brazilian friend, and the short beat Park's own A Grand Day Out to the Oscar.
Q 24Wallace, the cheese-loving inventor of Wallace & Gromit, is especially fond of which cheese?
Wensleydale
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.
Q 25Stop-motion studio Laika (Coraline, Kubo) is owned by the co-founder of which company?
Nike
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.
Q 26In which city was the stop-motion for Rankin/Bass 'Animagic' specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer animated?
Tokyo
Tokyo's MOM Production, under animator Tadahito Mochinaga, shot the puppets frame by frame for the New York firm, while the early voice casts recorded in Toronto.
Q 27Toy Story (1995), the first entirely computer-animated feature film, was directed by whom?
John Lasseter
John Lasseter had been fired by Disney in the 1980s for pushing computer animation; a decade later Disney released his Toy Story, made at Pixar.
Q 28Shrek took the first Best Animated Feature Oscar in March 2002 by beating which Pixar film from 2001?
Monsters, Inc.
Monsters, Inc. lost the animated prize but still won that night: Randy Newman's 'If I Didn't Have You' took Best Original Song, his first Oscar after 15 losing nominations.
Q 29Which furry forest spirit from a 1988 Hayao Miyazaki film became his studio's logo?
Totoro
Totoro also became the face of a real conservation trust, the Totoro Hometown Fund, which buys woodland in Saitama with donations to save it from development.
Q 30Which 2023 film, made after Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature?
The Boy and the Heron
The Boy and the Heron opened in Japan with no trailers, stills or synopsis, only a single poster, and still won Miyazaki his second Oscar in the category.