Animation,whose English Named Animation comes from Latin sibilant “anima”, Its meaning is the soul, verb animare entrusts with the life, expands for the meaning which causes something to live, therefore animation may explain that  by the way of creator's arrangement, It causes  the thing which have no life to obtain the life moving  likely.

       The animation (motion picture) is produces through recording a series of static images, which may be the handpainted graph,  object or person  in the different position, It is produced by  the illusion that is made from one kind of continual motion ----broadcasting the static picture which are put in the same place continuously. “animation” is widely used, in the movie, the video  or the computer even in the toy which can move . It usually included a series of graphs or the picture, manual turning over a series of images through one kind of mechanism (e.g., dozen of papers may make one “turn over animation book”). “the cartoon” this word usually refers to humorous and short animation work (not to surpass 10 minutes generally).

         What the animation refers to is the activity picture work by broadcasting many static pictures continuously, with (for example each second 16) a certain speed, because the naked eye vision is mistaken then has the illusion . In order to obtain the active picture,  each picture will have the change slightly. But the manufacture way of picture,  the  most common is handpainted in the paper or on celluloid sheet (Celluloid), others have also contained the clay, the model, the paper occasionally, Sha Hua and so on. As a result of the computer science's and technology's progress, computer animation software has been used now, which draws animation up on the computer directly, or is uses the computer in the animation manufacture process to carry on the processing, these already massively utilized in the commercial animation production.

         Animation is the illusion of motion created by consecutive display of images.  Animators have been constantly pushing their medium to bring their animations to life.  For those trying to bring creatures or humans to life this has been a challenge not easily managed.  When animators try to portray an animation as “real life”, the audience is a much tougher critic since they know what “real life” looks like.  The 3D character must not only move and behave correctly, but it must have all the subtle movements and twitches that a real creature or person would have.
 As time has progressed, technology has allowed the animators to bring their characters closer and closer to being real.  Snapping frame to frame, all the way to computing muscle deformations for every muscle on the body, animators have been using technology.  The technology is just a tool that helps animators bring their creations to life.  The improvement of animation technology has caused the animator to have greater control over their animations and allows the character to become more real.

         The process of animation has changed over time, with animators of each period making the best use of their tools. To understand why the improvement in technology is helping animators, the original forms of animation need to be compared to the current ones.  This involves following the evolution of character animation that pertains to simulating real life.  The ultimate goal being that “CGI characters don’t come across as cartoon characters; they have to look like living, breathing, feeling, intelligent (characters) capable of expressing deep emotions so audiences would accept and believe them”(56).  Films such as King Kong, Chronicles of Narnia and Jurassic Park offer a peek into how characters came alive now and in the past.  


       People sometimes talk about the golden age of animation around 80 years ago when cartoons were funny and nice.  These characters were never meant to be taken for real life; they inhabited a surreal world of their own.  To create a photo real world drawing one image at a time would be tedious and next to impossible.  Understanding all these factors, traditional animators kept their distance from realism.

     Another type of animation came along that was heavily utilized in the early part of the century.  The process of stop motion sprang up in films around the 1920’s and continued as the main style of realistic character portrayal until the 90’s.  The practice of stop motion animation began with a man named Georges Mêlées.  This French magician saw a film and was so amazed that he went out and purchased a camera of his own.  He recorded a street, stopping the camera then starting it producing the look as if people were jumping around instantly.  Then a Russian called Wladyslaw Starewicz wanted to film a shot of beetles fighting.  He found that by filming a frame at a time and moving the beetles himself he was able to recreate their movements. 

       It was only a matter of time before stop motion animators were building complex sets were created and the stop motion characters would interact with actual live footage.  This process was used to create the original King Kong film in 1933 which led to a world wide impact of the value of stop motion.  It was an extraordinary example of the most up-to-date camera tricks; a series of process shots, multiple exposures, glass shots, miniatures and virtually everything that can be accomplished with a camera in a motion picture studio.  The dinosaurs and King Kong had metal skeletons which were covered by rubber muscles that could bend and flex to give a more realistic look.  There was even an internal air bladder that would fill up to simulate the characters breathing.  As time passed the stop motion animators kept building more and more elaborate sets and puppets to try to match the real life footage.

      New techniques such as Dynamation allowed for an even higher level of realism.  Through the use of a sheets of glass and a projector animated characters interacted with live action footage, moving in between buildings to give a realistic feel.  This process was still tedious and had problems that caused it to not completely represent live action.  Stop motion was never perfect because of human error and the fact that there was no motion blur.

      Jurassic Park was the first major CG film that was supposed to be done using go motion on dinosaur miniatures.  The animators at Industrial Light and Magic had other ideas on their mind; they did a test of a small herd of dinosaurs running that impressed Steven Spielberg so much that he scraped all the stop and go motion in the film.    Once Steven Spielberg switched to computer animation the animators at ILM realized that the computer technology was still in its infancy and didn’t have the best animation tools.  The solution was ingenious; they incorporated traditional go motion animation with the computer models using a Dinosaur Input Device.  The DID was a model of a dinosaur that the animator physically moved from frame to frame, with all the information being brought into the computer.  This device let old masters at stop and go animation get into the newer wave of special effects.

     Throughout the eighties and into the early nineties, stop and go motion remained the only viable effect technique for bringing all manners of creatures to life, but a competing technology has begun.  Computer animation first began to surface with movies such as Tron.  It grew rapidly as audiences began to see results of what it could do in movies such as Jurassic Park.  At first, it was crude, but as technology grew exponentially, computers began to simulate near photographic realism.  Now at the turn of the century the effects from computers are seen almost everywhere in the entertainment industry.

     The technology today has come so far that the characters seem to come to life even before the animator touches them.  Complex computer programs push and pull muscles according to how the animator moves the body around.  Bone structures help guide the animator to limit their animation to movements possible to the characters body.  The whole time the animator is animating, computer programmers are constantly working on the characters, giving them more controls and abilities.

    New movies such as King Kong and Chronicles of Narnia have really taken character animation to the next level.  In order to create realistic animals and creatures the animators have to rely more heavily on reference and their engineer counterparts.  King Kong had the interesting task of creating a 25 foot monkey realistic enough to fool the audience.  This is hard because a real living creature has skin that jiggles and little subtle movements that are hard to notice, but essential for a realistic movement.

      In order to give a realistic performance they animators needed to be able to control every vertex on the surface of the creature.  This was a challenge because animators would have to keep track of hundred