Animation Before Hollywood: The Silent Period

Animated films in the United States date back to at least 1906 when Vitagraph released Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Although early animations were rudimentary they rapidly became more sophisticated with such classics as Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914, Felix the Cat, and Koko the Clown.

Originally a novelty, some early animated silents depicted magic acts or were strongly influenced by the comic strip. Later, they were distributed along with newsreels. Early animation films, like their live-action silent cousins, would come with a musical score to be played by an organist or even an orchestra in larger theatres.

The art of animation can be traced back to prehistoric and ancient times when people drew multiple pictures on walls and clay pots to try and capture the illusion of life. This eventually led to the invention of the Zoetrope in 1834. However it was not until the advent of film did animation start to take off. There is no single creator of film animation, since many people were working on several similar projects around the same time.

Georges Méliès; creator of special effect in motion pictures, was one of the first people to use animation with his technique. Méliès discovered a technique when his camera accidentally broke down while shooting a bus driving by. When he had fixed the camera, a hearse happened to be passing by just as Méliès restarted rolling the film, his end result was that he had managed to make a bus transform into a hearse, which is a camera effect called a stop trick. He had discovered that by shooting one frame at a time and changing the image in between frames he could create the illusion of movement, thus stop-motion animation.

...
Wikipedia