What is animation?

This is beginning to become a much harder question for me to answer. It isn't a binary question either. It is related to what to think of as good animation and what to think of as bad animation. These questions concerning value judgment relating to art are always plagued with issues from the start. It isn't so much a question of good and bad art, but really full and rich art versus empty and weak art. So generally I would say that good animation is full and rich, and bad animation is empty and weak.

So what makes good full, rich, wholesome animation. What makes animation something that should become part of the canon of art history.

Here is where I think I am going to really diverge from the normal definition of animation. Animation is the art of presenting content to the part of the brain that interprets visual stimulus. It is not the same as painting, where the content is aimed at the eye. It is aimed at the part of the brain that receives signals from the brain and interprets the changes to understand what is going on.

Animation is not simply trying to show a ball on a screen, that is the job of painting, photography, drawing. Animation is tricking the brain into thinking the ball is moving, bouncing, whatever.

But I need to make a distinction. You could draw a progression of a ball falling in a comic book or story board. I do no consider that animation. In that type of storyboard form, the information from your eyes passes through many layers of the brains process to form the idea of the ball falling. An animated ball falling is impossible for the brain to resist. You simply can't see it not moving, there is no way to distinguish the separate pieces in your mind. Your mind knows that the ball is falling, and that is the art that you have made.

So what does this definition of animation mean to me? Well to being with, it means that I consider film making with a camera to be a type of animation. It is a very specific type of animation, that is really an art form on it's own, but I think it is important to see that film is animation, not that animation is a type of film. It is similar to how painting and drawing came before photography yet all are really just 2d imagery. The big difference was that film and animation came at roughly the same time, and film has had a much stronger backing from society, so it has always been considered the bigger art.

The next really important thing my ideas about animation bring to attention is the question of frame rate. Twenty four frames per second is the speed that normal films are run at. At this speed the brain is generally completely fooled by the illusion that is created by the series of images that make up an animation. However, I feel there is a general trend amongst animators that it is perfectly acceptable due to the large amount of work involved in creating animation to animate at twelve or eight or less frames per second. This is where I think the path towards bad animation begins. When the illusion in the brain begins to fall apart and become apparent to the viewer, I no longer believe that it is good animation.

That is not to say that the product that has been produced is bad, but I don't consider to be near the same thing as animation. TV shows that are really just a series of still images present in sequence should be considered as those. I have seen some really hilarious storyboard like videos on the internet. But they are not really animation.

I think that the question makes a lot of sense to me now.

Kyler