Types of animation: the main techniques with examples

The main types of animation are hand-drawn (traditional) animation, computer animation (usually 3D), stop motion, cutout or silhouette animation, and pixel art. They differ in what the artist moves between frames: a drawing, a digital model, a real puppet, a paper figure or a grid of pixels. In every case the trick is the same. A row of still images, shown at around 12 to 24 per second, looks like movement.

What are the main types of animation?

Five families cover nearly everything you will see in cinemas, on television and in games. Each has its own look, its own famous titles and its own starting date. The table puts them side by side.

Two more words turn up in most lists, rotoscoping and motion capture. They are methods that feed into the families above rather than separate looks. We cover them below.

What is hand-drawn (traditional) animation?

Hand-drawn animation is a series of drawings, each slightly different from the one before, photographed in order. It was the process behind most animated films of the 20th century. Today the drawings are usually scanned or drawn straight into a computer, but the look of a line drawn by a person stays.

The early films were drawn whole, background and all, on single sheets of paper. Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) was made that way, and you can see it in the slightly trembling background. The cel, a clear sheet of celluloid, changed the work. Earl Hurd and John Bray brought the cel process in 1914. A still background could now be painted once and characters drawn on cels laid over it.

Walt Disney Studios released its first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937. StudioBinder's guide names Bambi beside it, and Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro as later hand-drawn classics.

Two habits help you read hand-drawn work. Animators often shoot "on twos": one drawing is held for two frames of 24-frames-per-second film, so there are 12 drawings each second. And cheaper TV production uses limited animation, where only a mouth or a head moves while the body stays still. The American studio UPA pioneered it, and Hanna-Barbera made it a television staple.

What is computer (3D) animation?

Computer animation builds characters and sets as digital models, gives them a skeleton of controls, and moves them on a computer. The software fills in the frames between the poses the animator sets. Toy Story (1995), made by Disney and Pixar, was the first feature-length computer-animated film.

Television got there a year earlier. ReBoot, which debuted in September 1994, was the first full-length computer-animated series. After Toy Story, the 3D style took over: most cel studios switched to computers during the 1990s because it proved cheaper and more profitable.

The models carry a lot of hidden machinery. Woody from Toy Story has 700 animation controls. Some films record real actors instead. In motion capture, a performer wears a suit with markers, and the computer copies the movement onto a digital character. The Polar Express (2004) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011) were made that way.

Computer work also imitates other types. Many films that look drawn are now drawn and colored digitally, and The Rescuers Down Under was the first feature made completely in a computer without a camera, in a style close to cel animation.

What is stop-motion animation?

Stop motion photographs real objects, moves them a tiny bit, and photographs them again. Played back, the objects seem to move by themselves. Puppets with movable joints and clay figures are the most common, but anything can be animated: toys, sand, food or even people.

Its history runs parallel to drawn cartoons. J. Stuart Blackton's The Haunted Hotel (1907) made the trick popular. Willis O'Brien's ape in King Kong (1933) is still seen as a milestone. Since then, stop motion has given us The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton, and the Aardman films with Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep.

The family has several branches. Clay animation, or claymation, uses figures made of plasticine; our guide to what claymation is covers Gumby, Aardman and the word's history. Pixilation animates live actors frame by frame. The full story of the technique, from 1908 to Laika's films, is in our article on what stop motion is.

What are cutout, silhouette and rotoscope animation?

Cutout animation is stop motion made with flat pieces of paper or cloth, moved by hand under a camera. Silhouette animation is the same, lit from behind so the figures show only as black shapes. Rotoscoping is different: animators trace filmed live action frame by frame.

The oldest surviving animated feature is a silhouette film. Lotte Reiniger released The Adventures of Prince Achmed in Germany in 1926, after three years of work. Terry Gilliam's sequences for Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969 to 1974) are the best-known cutout work on British television. The pilot of South Park also began as paper cutouts by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Max Fleischer patented rotoscoping in 1917. It can copy actors closely, as in The Lord of the Rings (1978), or loosely, as in Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). Rotoscoped motion is easy to spot: people move with the weight and small hesitations of real bodies, while the image stays drawn.

Where does pixel art fit among animation types?

Pixel art is digital art built from pixels as the only building block, usually on a small grid with a short list of colors. It grew out of arcade games such as Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980). Animated pixel art moves sprites frame by frame, much like a flip book.

It is the youngest family here, and the most tied to games. The term itself was first published in 1982, in a letter by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal of Xerox PARC. Artists still choose it on purpose, long after screens stopped forcing them to: Stardew Valley (2016) and Celeste (2018) are recent examples. What makes it pixel art, and how to tell it from a blurry photo, is explained in what pixel art is.

How can you tell which type of animation you are watching?

Look at surfaces, edges and light. Hand-drawn work has outlines and flat or painted color. Computer animation has smooth, perfect surfaces and soft shading. Stop motion shows real texture, fingerprints in clay and slight flicker. Pixel art shows square steps on every curve.

A quick checklist helps:

1. Pause on a still frame. Visible pencil or ink lines mean drawing, by hand or on a tablet.
2. Look at the materials. Fabric weave, clay smudges or wood grain that you could touch mean stop motion.
3. Watch a fast move. Real puppets don't get motion blur unless it is added, so fast action in stop motion can look a little jumpy.
4. Check the light. In 3D, light wraps around rounded forms with soft, even shadows. In stop motion, shadows come from real lamps.
5. Zoom in on a diagonal edge. A staircase of square blocks means pixel art.
6. Notice how people move. Very lifelike body motion inside a drawn or digital image often means rotoscoping or motion capture.

Many modern films mix types. Laika, the Oregon studio behind Coraline, combines hand-made puppets with 3D-printed faces and visual effects, so a single shot can hold two or three techniques.

A short history of animation techniques

The techniques appeared in this order, each new one adding to the old rather than replacing it completely.

1. 1907: J. Stuart Blackton's The Haunted Hotel makes stop motion popular.
2. 1908: Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie, the oldest known complete hand-drawn animation on film.
3. 1914: Earl Hurd and John Bray bring in the cel; Winsor McCay releases Gertie the Dinosaur.
4. 1917: Max Fleischer patents rotoscoping.
5. 1926: Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving animated feature.
6. 1937: Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
7. 1978 to 1980: Space Invaders and Pac-Man bring pixel art to arcades.
8. 1994 and 1995: ReBoot on television, then Toy Story in cinemas, start the 3D era.

For more on each family, the cartoons section collects our articles on drawn and digital animation, and the stop motion and 3D section holds the ones about puppets and clay.