Eli5: how did animation work before computers?

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Did people literally just draw thousands of pictures that looked almost identical and then they stitched them together, like a flip book? How did they do it, and how was it even remotely cost-effective and worth the effort?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Layers. Let’s say there’s a scene of someone standing outside a cottage in the forest. You’d have one drawing of the forest. Then you’d have a drawing of a cottage. Then a drawing of the person’s body/head. Then a drawing of the person’s arms, then one of their facial features.

You put them all on a machine that puts all of those drawings on their own separate layers and has a special camera on the top, and take a picture of all the layers combined, and that’s one frame. If the person is talking and moving his arms around, then you just replace the layers of the arms and facial features, and you don’t have to replace the rest.

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