Page "History of film" Paragraph 94

The technique of single frame animation was further developed in 1907 by Edwin S. Porter in The Teddy Bears and by J. Stuart Blackton with Work Made Easy.

In the first of these the toy bears were made to move, apparently on their own, and in the latter film building tools were made to perform construction tasks without human intervention, by using frame-by-frame animation.

The technique got to Europe almost immediately, and Segundo de Chomon and others at Pathé took it further, adding clay animation, in which sculptures were deformed from one thing into another thing frame by frame in Sculpture moderne ( 1908 ), and then Pathé made the next step to the animation of silhouette shapes.

Also in France, Émile Cohl fully developed drawn animation in a series of films starting with Fantasmagorie ( 1908 ), in which humans and objects drawn as outline figures went though a series of remarkable interactions and transformations.

In the United States the response was from the famous strip cartoon artist Winsor McCay, who drew much more realistic animated figures going through smoother, more naturalistic motion in a series of films starting with the film Little Nemo, made for Vitagraph in 1911.

In the next few years various others took part in this development of animated cartoons in the United States and elsewhere.