1786 is ultimately the year that would create 2D animation, as that year William Horner was born, William would later invent the zoetrope and bring 2D animation into existence.
Joseph Plateau was the first man to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image, but the zoetrope was created shortly before Plateau's phenakistoscope.
Edward's contribution was the zoopraxiscope, created in 1879, a device which consisted of a glass disc with silhouettes of frames of an animation drawn onto it, with a beam of light projected over the starting position of a specific frame, then as the disc was rotated the silhouettes would be displayed, enlarged like shadows onto a wall so that multiple groups of people were capable of viewing the image clearly. Later versions of the zoopraxiscope were coloured by hand.
The zoetrope was invented in it's first form around 1833 named the 'daedaleum', which was often mistranslated as wheel of the devil. Unfortunately the daedalum failed to become popular until 23 years later. The zoetrope consisted of a cylinder with equally spaced slits in that had images between, when the zoetrope was spun looking through the slits would appear to play one image after another as if the image was animated, so long as the zoetrope was rotating at the correct speed.
The phenakistoscope was invented in 1841, just shortly after the zoetrope, it consisted of a disc with equally spaced images on one side and radial slits in, the disc would be attached to a handle and the viewer would look through the slits at a mirror, with the images facing the mirror. The equally spaced slits removed blur between the images making it appear to be one animated image.
While his most notable and famous inventions that allowed us to utilise electricity are what most people think of when they here his name, Edison's advances in 2D animation were incredibly valuable and also allowed us to work with real imagery in cinema.
On january the 4th 1857, Emile Cohl was born, Emile would go on to create the first fully animated 2D film.
The daedalum finally became popular in 1860, where multiple English and American inventors patented the device, and in particular the inventor William F Lincoln named his variant the zoetrope, which Is the origin of the name meaning 'wheel of life'. The zoetrope was popular until approximately 1880, where it was replaced by the more practical and newer praxinoscope, invented by Emile raynaud in1877. The praxinoscope improved upon the designs of the zoetrope by having an inner ring of mirrors that reflected the image with less distortion than what the zoetrope viewing slits offered, as well as making more practical for a larger number of people to view the animation at once.
Auguste Lumière, the older of the Lumière brothers was born, with Louis Lumière being born 2 years later. Together the brothers would go on to invent the cinematograph, a device which would become the standard basis for cinema projection devices. The cinematographe was also the first 2D animation device that did not use the word 'scope' at the end.
The kinetoscope was the first device to use film projection technology in the format that would become standard for film recording, both animated and 'real'. The kinetoscope was first conceptualised by Thomas Edison after and encounter with Edward Muybridge and viewing of the zoopraxiscope gave Thomas some inspiration. The kinetoscope used long strips of perforated film, because of the small size of each 'frame' longer and/or smoother animations could be created with a smaller amount of space required. The kinetoscope was technically not a film projector as only one person could view the animation through the device at a time, although the image was still projected inside of the machine. Unlike 2,332 of Thomas Edison's other inventions, the kinetoscope was left unpatented allowing many variants to be created in various parts of the world by different inventors.
The specific year the cinematographe was patented and invented is a big vague, and some sources suggest it may have been another inventor altogether who was the true creator of the device, but it was known to have been invented in the 1890s. The cinematographe used the kinetoscope concept as a base and made many improvements to it, it was switched from an electric battery, which at the time was not portable, to a manual hand crank which greatly decreased running costs and made it much smaller and lighter, the lens had a small flask of water secured to the front to focus the image and prevent it from overheating, also the flask was designed so that if it did break the light would not shine onto the film with the riks of igniting it. The cinematographe produced higher quality imagess by using a set of 'forks' to keep the film in place behind the lens, reducing motion. Finally and generally most significantly, the machine was designed so that it could be projected onto a screen so groups of people could view it at once.
In 1901 Walt Disney was born, there is no need to explain who Walt Disney is, but back then nobody could guess or imagine him or even anyone to become as famous and successful as he became, especially with 2D animation which was a concept relatively few people had an interest in or saw potential in.
In 1908 the 50 year old Emile released 'Fantasmagorie', which is considered the first full 2D animated film. It consisted of over 700 hand drawn images, each running on 'twos', the film lasted for two minutes but rapidly gained fame and made 2D animation's popularity and fame increase dramatically.
Steamboat willie was the first 2D animation to include fully synchronised sound effects. Steamboat Willie used a technique called cell animation/cell shading where rather than shading via smooth gradients shadows were drawn as solid blocks of colour that didn't change in opacity or specific shade as they went down the object.
Hanna-Barbera studios was founded by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. The studio created famous animated series such as the Flintstones, Scooby-doo and Tom and Jerry. Hanna and Barbera have since died and the studio became a part of Warner brothers, ceasing to exist as it's own entity.
In 1978 Albert, Harry, Jack and Sam Warner founder Warner brothers studios, which is now one of the largest animation studios in the world, owning properties such as the Looney toons.
Tradigital animation refers to animation that is created in a traditional way but using modern technology to increase efficiency and reduce the workload. An example could be that originally rotoscoping would involve filming the scene and then drawing over every single image by hand ,now we have techniques and technologies that can be set to match shapes and patterns in an animation and consistently and accurately keep a new image or mask over the top mapped to the original image.
Another piece of software useful for 2D animation that was created realtively recently was after effects, after effects uses a system of multiple layers that allows for easy creation and editing of animation, including motion tweening, scaling, specific control of when certain assets are visible or not and the ability to easily add and tweak graphical effects such as electricity and glass shattering effects without specific hand drawn assets.
Toon boom studios is a company that produces various kinds of animation production software. The software ranges from creating storyboards to the actual animation itself. Toon Boom software is used by many well known animation companies such as Warner brothers and Disney and some examples of what has been produced with it include series such as Futurama or movies such as the Simpsons movie.
Adobe flash is an easy to use software that allows anyone to quickly and cheaply make high quality 2D animations. Flash is compatible with raster and ector graphics, sound implementation and allows settings such as rapid duplication of frames and 'onion skinning' which shows 'ghosts' of the next and previous frames for reference to easily position and draw images quickly. Unlike other software such as after effects which requires you to create most of the assets seperately in other software, flash allows you to instantly draw vector or raster images straight onto a frame which can then be saved as 'symbols' or images. Due to the simplicity, ease of use and time and cost efficiency flash has been used by studios such as cartoon network to create series such as the powerpuff girls.
Overall, 2D animation has taken massive leaps and completely changed in everything but the basic concept of rapidly changing images giving the illusion of motion. What used to be an expensive and time consuming hobby of building the machines, then hand drawing and applying each image has been replaced with software that allows industries to earn millions of pounds in profit each year and change the way we can exchange ideas, information and stories.
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