Let's start learning a little bit about the history of the principles of animation, where they originated from because they didn't always exist, but they're not as old as you might expect. Principles Of animation, It's always important to learn the history of an art form, not just for appreciation of its own merit, but to use the knowledge of all the people that went before you towards your own efforts creating in that art medium. And in our case, it's animation. So the animation principles as we know them today, were actually created in the 1930s and onwards by a group of nine animators at Disney Animation Studios. And they were affectionately referred to as the Nine Old Men. Two of them published a book in the 1980s called The Illusion of Life.
And it would be a really good extracurricular reading for you if you're interested in diving deeper into the history of animation, especially Disney animation, where these principles originated from, they originated from these guys who were testing animation and short films, and they were called The Silly Symphonies. And it's a similar tactic that Pixar has used recently when they actually had a studio in Vancouver, Canada dedicated to creating short films to help push the medium of animation. And that's kind of an example of history repeating itself in learning from history. And where Pixar took a page outta the book of Disney animation to focus on short films so they could do shorter project cycles and learn and apply all the things they learned from a short film into their future films. And so that's what Disney was doing, and where they started to realize that there were certain principles that could be applied to all their animation, and that's where they started to codify these principles and what we're gonna learn in this course. But let's go back and stay in the 1930s and forties for a moment.
That is considered the golden age of animation. Back then, animation was kind of considered like a carnival or a magic trick. And one really good historic example is Gerie the dinosaur. In 1914, Windsor McKay had this kind of vaudevillian acts where he would stand on stage in front of a big screen and kind of command this animated dinosaur around on screen. And no one had seen anything like it before. Felix the Cat is another good example from this time period that the public saw regularly, but that character kind of lost steam over time and the general public and, you know, production never thought that animation could make the leap from kind of this magic trick, uh, carnival show into feature films and making the leap into some, from something very short into something long like a feature film, and compete with what at the time were called talkies, which are movies that had sound.
Um, so it was never really considered at that time that things that they saw as basically like a little trick could compete with the big, you know, productions of something like a live action movie in this golden age of animation. There were other studios in the game too. It wasn't just Disney working on animation. You had Warner Brothers, UPA Fleischer Studios, and 20th Century Fox Terry Tunes. But one of my favorite interpretations of Superman came from Fleischer Studios. So your assignment for this lesson is going to be to watch a few cartoons to see the progression of animation over time.
Start with one of the silly symphonies called the Skeleton Dance from 1929, and then look up the Fleischer Studio's Superman interpretation in 1941 called The Mad Scientist. I'll put links to those two animated short films in the PDF that comes along with the course, but links change. And so you might have to search for them by name as well on YouTube, but I want you to notice the difference in quality just over a decade from 1929 to 1941, how far the medium of animation came. And that is in part due to these principles that you're gonna learn about, because over that time period, that's when the nine old men from Disney were starting to codify these 12 principles and apply them into their animation. But keep in mind, there's so much more to learn about animation than just these 12 principles we're gonna learn in this course. But it's where you kind of have to necessarily start to begin your journey as an animator.
But one important other thing to notice is as we go through the course and learn these principles, we're also gonna learn different mediums so that you can really take to heart that these principles don't rely on any one medium of animation. So for example, you could animate squash and stretch with a post-it note like we did with the line. You could animate it with a stop motion, clay, you could do it in 3D animation. It doesn't really matter. What we're gonna learn is gonna be able to apply to every medium of animation. That's why it's so important to learn this early in your animation journey so that you can take this toolkit and begin to apply it to all these different kind of interests and, and avenues that animation can take you down.
But keep in mind, there's so much more to learn than just these 12, but it's the perfect place to start. And the other thing that's really fun to do is to see these animation principles applied out in the wild. You know, you'll be watching an animation or uh, a movie or something, and you can start to see these things applied in the real world as, uh, now that you'll know how to identify them, you can begin to call 'em out and see how they're applied in different situations, which is really cool. And it, it will help further your education, which is why the assignment is to do a little homework. And it's some of the best homework is why I like animation, is because you get to watch fun stuff. So in this lesson, we learned the backstory of animation, where it came from, who started codifying these principles.
You have an assignment to follow. So, uh, you know, nothing pen to paper to do, but just to begin to train your eye to see the differences. And even if you can't articulate what they are yet, you'll be able to begin to articulate that as you learn the principles throughout the course. So now that we have an appreciation of the backstory of where animation has come from, let's begin to learn a little bit about the science behind why our eye can be tricked into believing that a bunch of still images back to back actually look like motion.