Steamboat Willie

How cartoons have progressed since the very early days

Take a look at these videos of cartoons and how they have progressed in quality since the very early days.

Over the years, cartoons have progressed from hand drawn flip frames to CGI graphics. We take a look at how the quality of cartoons has changed since the very first cartoon from 1908 to a Pixar full featured cartoon movie of the 2000´s.

The very first cartoon ever made was a French cartoon called Fantasmagorie.

The cartoon was created by drawing a frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the production a blackboard style look. It was composed of around 700 individual drawings and ran for under 2 minutes.

The very first ever Disney cartoon “Steamboat Willie”

The first ever Disney cartoon was “Steamboat Willie” way back in 1928. The cartoon was also probably the very first time anyone had ever seen or heard of Micky Mouse! It was a very basic black and white cartoon and was the beginning of the soon to come Disney empire of television animation. Steamboat Willy was also one of the first productions to use sound.

The 1930`s and the start of Warner Bros Looney Tunes cartoons

The competition for the cartoon monopoly started to heat up as early as the 1930s when Warner Brothers release the first Looney cartoon called Sinkin’ in the Bathtub starring a cartoon character named Bosko, which was released in 1930.

1937 and the very first full length feature cartoon movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from Walt Disney Productions

Snow White premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937 and was released on February 4, 1938. It was the first ever full length cartoon movie with sound and you can see how far cartoons had progressed within 7 years. It is still regarded as one of the all time favourite cartoon movies ever produced.

The first ever computer animated full length movie was Toy Story in 1995

Skipping passed almost 6 decades of cartoon productions, we come to the very first cartoon to be produced using CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). Toy Story was released in 1995 as the first full feature length cartoon movie to be completely produced using computer generated graphics and real actors used for the characters voices. CGI has been used in movies as far back as 1988 when Who Framed Roger Rabbit blended real actors with cartoon characters, however, Toy Story remains the first movie produced using entirely CGI.

Since Toy Story, cartoons have become more realistic to the point where in some scenes it is hard to distinguish between the cartoon and real life. We are now able to watch cartoon movies in 3D using extremely realistic CGI techniques.

If you were growing up in the 1950s, you can remind your grandkids and great grandkids how lucky or unlucky they are to have such realism in their cartoons compared to the hand drawn cartoons of the earlier years.