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

Yes, there was a common method called paint and trace, where the background was painted on one sheet and then a clear plastic sheet was placed over the background of anything that was moving, for each frame you redraw the moving object on a new sheet and reuse the background, which is why you can tell if any door or similar was going to be opened as it wasn’t on the background sheet but the overlay.

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