A small display at the Grohmann Museum’s current exhibition reminds us that animation is as old as art—dating from 40,000 years ago with the suggestion of motion found on cave paintings. However, animation as we know it today—as motion pictures on screens—is a product of modern technology. The mechanical wonderment of 19th-century magic lanterns and Zoetropes led artists and inventors to the animated films of the 20th century.
“The Art and Mechanics of Animation: The J.J. Sedelmaier Collection” is not a thorough panorama of animated motion pictures but a sketch of that history drawn from the archive of a particular design studio located in White Plains, N.Y. As a result, there’s not much Walt Disney beyond one cel of Donald Duck from the 1959 short “How to Have an Accident at Work.” Buzz Lightyear is nowhere to be seen. But there is Beavis and Butt-Head, their gnarly faces represented on black-and-white model sheets.
Mounted on the walls are video screens showing a few examples of animation alongside storyboards and model sheets, many from long-forgotten advertising campaigns such as the Ajax Cleanser Elves and New Yorker cartoonist George Price’s design for Northern Trust Bank. Examples from living memory include Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite promotional spots.
Justifiably, given the mechanized process of the medium, much of the exhibit is occupied by the machinery of animation. Included are a 1930s Moviola used in editing and other stages of production; a spool of sprocketed film on reels; and the 16- and 35-millimeter cameras that were industry standard until pushed aside by digitalization. The turn toward new technology is represented by an ADM-5 Lear-Siegler computer, resembling an iMac prototype without the cool aesthetic, used in making Disney’s breakthrough in computer animation, Tron.
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The human side of animation is not ignored. An entire wall is occupied by a recreation of an early 20th-century animator’s work station, complete with a scratched and stained drafting table surrounded by India ink pots, paint canisters, pens, metal straight-edges—even a stopwatch and metronome essential for cuing animated images to a musical score. One imagines the artist-engineer seated on the beat-up chair, preparing to propel a set of pictures into motion.
