Cartoons are an indispensable companion for children to grow up.
From "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace" to "Black Cat Sheriff", "Dirty King", to "Huluwa", "Haier Brothers", "Journey to the West", "Big Head Son, Little Head Daddy", and now "Pleasant Sheep and Gray Wolf", "Bear Haunting"...
Each work can be called "precious memories of childhood". When looking at these treasures, have you ever wondered: how is the cartoon made?
In the 40th episode of the Russian children's cartoon "Screws", the principle of animation production is explained, and when multiple still pictures are played continuously, the eyes return to the illusion and see continuous movements. Animation is based on this technology, giving art and ideological connotations, and a series of works of art with cultural, historical, social, emotional, natural and other themes. It includes many kinds, probably hand-drawn, puppet, clay cartoons, etc., as well as China's unique ink animation in the world.
Magical ink cartoons
Source :Nezha Noisy Sea
Don't look at the technology now, you can make animations through computers. But decades ago, cartoons were drawn by uncles and aunts by hand. A simple action on the screen, but behind it needs thousands of paintings to compose. Like "Nezha Noisy Sea", one of the pinnacle works of Chinese animation released in 1979, it is hand-drawn animation.
Source :Little Tadpole Finds Mother
The ink animation "Little Tadpole Finds Mother", which appeared on the screen in 1961, is a major achievement in the history of Chinese animation. Not only the traditional Chinese ink painting is presented on the animation screen, but also the image and style borrow from Qi Baishi's freehand flowers and birds. Ink painting master Qi Baishi's painting style is simple, naïve and romantic, full of childlike fun and poetic, with his flower and bird paintings as the blueprint for ink animation, breaking through the traditional way of drawing cartoons, and achieving a major innovation in the history of animation films.
Image source "Mudi"
The production process of ink animation is very cumbersome, and the requirements for the level of painters are also extremely high, and some of the ink backgrounds in "Mudi" in 1963 have borrowed the cattle herding diagram of The Master of Chinese Painting Li Keyan.
Fun and cute puppets and clay cartoons
Puppet animation borrows from traditional puppetry, so the protagonist image in the animation is generally also a puppet. Released in 1979, "Avanti" was filmed using the method of "frame-by-frame photography". "Frame-by-frame photography" means that the camera only takes one frame at a time. This shooting method can make the pictures or scenes on the screen come to life.
Source "Avanti"
Compared with the West, Chinese puppet animation has the advantages of fine production and delicate movements. The transcendence visible to the naked eye is destined to be made of puppets that is not a joke. However, the puppet production in Chinese cartoons is very complicated and the cost is also high, so with the change of the times, it is slowly lonely, and it is difficult to find traces.
Image source "Cao Chong Weighs Elephant"
Clay animation is much the same as puppet animation, and it also adopts the method of "frame-by-frame photography". The crew will make the scenery, objects, etc. in the animated story out of clay, and then let the characters interpret the plot in the scenes built in reality. This method of shooting is common in the West, and most clay animations are made by time-consuming and laborious Western independent artists. For example, the 2009 Australian clay animation "Mary and Marx" was a work that took Adam Elliott five years to complete.
Image source "Mary and Marx"
Chinoiserie paper-cut and silhouette animation
Paper-cut animation, as the name suggests, is derived from folk arts such as Chinese shadow puppetry and window flower paper-cutting. The characters and sets in the film all have the feeling of Chinese opera art, which is different from the Chinese style, but its difficulty is unimaginable, after all, scissors and paintbrushes are still incomparable. Therefore, since the 1980s, the paper-cut animation "Hulu Brothers" came out, it is difficult to see other excellent paper-cut animations.
Source: China's first paper-cut cartoon "Eight Commandments of Pigs Eat Watermelon"
Silhouette animation and paper-cut animation are also derived from Chinese shadow puppetry, but curiously, the French seem to know better than Chinese. The silhouette animation of French animation master Michaux Othello can be described as world-famous. His "The Prince and the Princess", "The Night's Tale" and so on are all world-class masterpieces. However, silhouette animation has the same characteristics as the production method of the above traditional animation films, that is, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive.
Source: The Prince and the Princess
After reading the above content, I believe that everyone roughly understands how animation was made decades ago. In the era without computers, animation required a lot of time, effort and money, but the finished film was also quite delicate and exciting. For the animation practitioners of that year, hand-crafting animation may be a very hard job, but when they see the audience full of satisfied and happy smiling faces, they may also be deeply pleased
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