Skip to content
What's After the Movie?

Jump to
What's After the Movie?
Filmmaking Camera, lighting, sound, editing and the crew roles behind every shot.

Animation: Meaning & Definition in Film

The technique of creating the illusion of motion through sequential images.

  • 4 sections
  • 1 min read
  • Updated
On this page 4 sections

Animation: Historical Background

From early hand-drawn shorts like Gertie the Dinosaur to Disney’s first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), animation evolved through cel animation, stop motion and digital techniques.

Animation: Major Techniques

Traditional hand-drawn, stop motion, computer animation and hybrid approaches each offer distinct aesthetics. Technical advances in CGI revolutionized industry giants like Pixar and DreamWorks.

Industry and Markets

Animation spans feature films, television, advertising and gaming. Studios often invest heavily in franchises (e.g., Toy Story, Shrek) while smaller studios explore artistic or experimental projects.

Animation: Notable Examples

Key films include Spirited Away, The Lion King, Wall-E and Persepolis. Their diversity highlights animation’s capacity to tell universal stories across ages and cultures.

See the vocabulary at work in real films

Look up any movie for its ratings, cast and crew, box office run and where to watch, or read the full plot with the ending explained.

Browse movies
Filmmaking

More Filmmaking Terms

Entries filed on the same shelf as Animation, each with the one-line answer first. They are the words that usually come up in the same conversation.

All 913 terms

  • Hot Head

    A hot head is a remote-controlled camera head that allows an operator to pan, tilt, and sometimes roll the camera from a distance.

  • Grip

    A technician who builds and maintains camera rigs and lighting support structures.

  • BRAW

    BRAW (Blackmagic RAW) is an efficient, partially de-mosaiced raw codec from Blackmagic Design that combines raw quality with smaller file sizes.

  • Atmos Objects

    Discrete, metadata‑driven audio elements in a Dolby Atmos soundscape.

  • Optical Soundtrack

    An optical soundtrack is the audio information for a motion picture that has been photographically printed as a visual waveform directly onto the side of the film strip.