A field with many founders
If you search for the pioneer of computer animation, you will find several different names, and each is defensible. Animation by computer did not begin with one person or one film. It grew in the late 1950s and the 1960s from the work of artists, engineers and university researchers who rarely knew each other, working on machines that were large, slow and mostly meant for other purposes.
This article profiles some of the people most often named in histories of the period. It concentrates on people and their approaches; the broader timeline of techniques and landmark films is covered in the history of computer animation. The list is not complete, and omissions should not be read as judgments.
Artists who used the machine as an instrument
John Whitney is often called a pioneer of motion graphics. Working from the 1940s, he adapted surplus military analog equipment, including a mechanical device for aiming anti-aircraft guns, to control the movement of lights and shapes. His abstract film Catalog (1961) is a frequently cited example, and in the late 1950s he and others contributed to the opening titles for a well-known thriller, with graphic design by Saul Bass. Whitney’s approach treated animation as something like music, with patterns that repeat and develop in time. He later worked with digital computers.
Stan VanDerBeek, an experimental filmmaker, collaborated with researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the mid-1960s on computer-made films, and used the lab’s programs to generate imagery for artistic purposes.
Lillian Schwartz was an artist who worked at Bell Labs for many years starting in the late 1960s. She produced experimental films that combined computer imagery with other media, and her work shows how artists took part as peers rather than as outsiders.
Charles Csuri, an artist at Ohio State University, began making computer-generated works in the 1960s and is often credited as a leading figure in computer art and animation. His short film Hummingbird, from the late 1960s, was made with the assistance of programmers. Several students and staff associated with his lab later worked in the animation industry.
Researchers who built the tools
Many of the contributors were engineers whose main interest was the technology itself.
Edward Zajac at Bell Labs produced one of the earliest known computer-generated films in the early 1960s, a demonstration of how a satellite’s orientation changes under the influence of gravity. It was made as a scientific visualization, not as art, which shows how the field began with practical aims.
Ken Knowlton, also at Bell Labs, wrote programming languages for making films with a computer. One of them, BEFLIX, was designed so that artists could describe simple animated images without having to learn machine code. This is a good example of a pattern in the history of animation: people building tools that others, including artists, could use.
Ivan Sutherland is better known for the Sketchpad system of the early 1960s, in which a person could draw directly on a computer display. It influenced animation indirectly by showing that drawings could be stored as objects that could be changed. The wider story of that work belongs to interactive graphics.
Ed Catmull and Fred Parke, students at the University of Utah in the early 1970s, made short films showing a computer-modeled hand and a human face. These demonstrated that three-dimensional animation could be done with polygon models. Catmull later became one of the founders of a major animation studio, a thread that continues in the story of computer-generated imagery in film.
Animators and filmmakers who reached audiences
In 1974, the Canadian National Film Board released Hunger (La Faim), directed by Peter Foldes. It combined computer-assisted drawing with traditional animation techniques and gained international recognition, including an Academy Award nomination. It is often described as an early example of computers being used for artistic animation that reached a wider public.
Other filmmakers contributed through short films and demonstrations in the 1970s. Larry Cuba, for example, produced animated images that appeared in a wireframe sequence in a major 1977 feature film. As computers became more common in studios, the line between researcher and animator slowly shifted toward a professional discipline with its own staff, schedules and budgets.
What the pioneers had in common
Reading across these profiles, several shared traits stand out:
- Limited access. Almost all of them depended on institutions: a laboratory, a university or a company that owned the computer. Few individuals could afford their own equipment, since most work ran on mainframe computers shared with other users.
- Collaboration. Artists generally worked with programmers, and programmers sometimes took on artistic roles. The idea of a single genius was less accurate than the idea of a small team.
- Overlap between art and science. The first computer-made films were shown at scientific conferences, art exhibitions and film festivals alike.
- Uncertain records. Some early films survive only in part, and dates in sources vary by a year or two, so any list of firsts should be treated with caution.
This collaborative pattern is a theme of the wider site, discussed in the article on collaborative invention. It also explains why disagreements about who was first continue: credit depends on whether you value the scientific demonstration, the artwork, the tool or the film that reached the largest audience.