Nostalgic Showcase Presents is joining in on the 250th birthday celebration of the United States of America with our own yearlong landmark celebrations of our favorite toys, movies, characters, and franchises! Check back every two months for a special themed article, and attend our in-person events throughout the year.
Readers, this is the article that I have been the most excited to write about this year, and with good reason- animation and cartoons have been a essential part of my life in one way or another since I was a kid; I remember fondly presenting on the history of Saturday Morning Cartoons for an assignment in middle school- not much has changed! During my undergraduate program for Animation, I took two different animation history courses, and fell in love with researching and writing about these topics. From the earliest years of the animation industry, spearheaded by early pioneers of the industry with vaudeville performer Windsor McCay, to celluloid and rotoscoped animation popularized Fleischer and Disney, computer generated animation created in the 1980s and developed by PIXAR, stop motion special effects and shorts through the decades, and many other trends and fads, this topic is just boundless! I’ve already written numerous articles for WPPL’s blogsite about the defunct animation studios from the past century, but I wanted to focus specifically on the animated shorts, series, and films for this entry. There’s a lot of ground to cover in this article over the past century of American animated movies and shorts all celebrating landmark anniversaries, so let’s get started!
Vaudeville and performative acts were always intertwined with the new medium of animation and moving film in the early 1900s. The rise and accessibility to film stock and cameras contributed to the experimentation of film, from short experiments to fully realized stories or adaptations of short plays and performances. For the first time in all of human history, pictures could be set in motion and projected, opening up new means of entertainment, accessible to audiences at movie palaces or nickelodeons. A popular vaudeville act was for an artistically inclined performer to speed draw in rapid succession a variety of different subjects and caricatures, entertaining audiences live; J. Stuart Blackton took this concept to film. His film, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces premiered 120 years ago, and is considered the first animated film recorded on standard picture film, combining these quick successive changing subjects with physical items, an early example of stop motion and mixed media animation. I would be amiss not to include one of the pioneers of animation, vaudeville performer, and comic strip artist, Windsor McCay. McCay had made his mark in comic strips with the wildly popular Little Nemo in Slumberland series, published in the New York Herald and New York American from 1905-1927. In 1911, he decided to combine the newly forming craft of animation, film, and his comic strip characters with a nearly four minute long animated segment of his vaudeville act, using four thousand pieces of rice-paper to move the characters, transforming them across the screen. The act was so successful that McCay later added color to the animation, filming the frames again, and this version is the one featured in Little Nemo (1911). It’s important to note that most of these early projects were done independently, or with a small crew of one or two uncredited assistants, and due to the fragile nature of the film stock, many of the animation and films from this era have become lost media.
Our next big anniversaries come in the 1940s. Walt Disney Studios had already become an established household name, producing Mickey Mouse shorts for twenty years, releasing Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Pinocchio (1940), and Fantasia (1940), but full length animated films were a gamble. Snow White was infamously one of the most expensive animated films up to that point to produce and could have bankrupt the studio if it was not a blockbuster success, Pinocchio was initially a commercial failure and only made up costs after a re-release five years later, and Fantasia, despite being a revolutionary exploration of the medium with it’s incorporation of live orchestral pieces with original animation in an anthology, also failed to make up costs with the shuddering of the international market during WWII. During the production of Disney’s next film, tensions began to bubble in the studio, leading to a worker’s strike, the first of many. The resulting film was more “cartoony” than Disney’s previous ventures, on a lower budget, and one of the shortest full-length films of Disney’s filmography, but Dumbo (1941) became an animated classic. Competing for audiences was the Fleischer Studio’s last attempt at a feature film. Founded by brothers Dave and Max Fleischer in 1929, the studio was starting to falter; neither brother were talking with each other, and Paramount Pictures specified that upon completion of the film that they must resign from the studio. Unfortunately, Mr. Bug Goes to Town failed to pull in the audiences and Paramount Pictures took over the reign of the studio, renaming it Famous Studios. (You can read more about the history behind Fleischer Studios in this article.)
In 1951, Disney premiered Alice in Wonderland, based on the Lewis Carroll book of the same name. Ten years later, the studio released One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), which used xerography to copy the animator’s sketch drawings directly to celluloid and allowing for production to run smoothly, despite animating dogs with hundreds of uniquely laid out spots. One Hundred and One Dalmatians became a financial and critical success, and the use of xerox for Disney’s animated films and shorts continued until digital ink and paint took over in the 1990s. Sixty years ago, Chuck Jones would partner with longtime children’s book author, Dr. Seuss, on the now holiday television classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
1986 would also prove to be a fruitful year in the animation industry. Computer generated animation, although rudimentary during this time, was starting to become more mainstream, used primarily for commercial bumpers and short special effects. Lucasfilms started a department dedicated to developing softwares that could process computer generated imagery and other computer assisted tools that are still used (in some capacity) in the animation industry to this day, experimenting with the software’s capacity with short narrative films like The Adventures of André & Wally B. (1984) and Luxo Jr. (1986). This department would detach from Lucasfilms in 1986, renaming themselves as PIXAR, after the digital compositing computer used at the studio. In the same year, Don Bluth Studio’s An American Tail premiered in theaters, produced by Steven Spielberg, and spanning a franchise into the 1990s. (You can read more about the history behind Don Bluth Studios in this article.) Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective also made its theatrical debut this year, generating enough revenue to pull the studio out of the red after the financial failure of The Black Cauldron (1985). Five years later, in 1991, Disney released Beauty and the Beast, the second film in the Disney Renaissance Era; the same weekend, Steven Spielberg’s Amblimation released American Tail: Fievel Goes West, the second and last movie in the American Tail franchise to get a theatrical release. Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame premiered later that year.
We enter the millennial with a mixture of traditional cel and computer generated (CGI) animated films. 2001 would bring DreamWorks’ Shrek, the first movie of a highly successful franchise, based on a children’s book by William Steig. Later that year, Pixar’s Monsters, Inc premiered in theaters, to high acclaim. 2006’s line up of animated movies would include Disney/Pixar’s Cars, DreamWorks’ Over the Hedge, Disney’s The Wild, Nickelodeon’s Barnyard, and Sony’s Monster House; CGI was starting to become the preferred medium for blockbuster films. New technological advances created new waves of styles in the industry, for better or for worse. Motion capture became widely popular for a few years, creating uncannily human-like movement on animated puppets. 2011 was the tail end of this trend, with Disney’s Mars Needs Moms (a critical and financial flop) causing the studio to back out of the mo-cap business. DreamWorks utilized the technology for Rango, and Steven Spielberg’s The Adventure of TinTin also used the technology for the adaptation of Hergé’s comics. Disney released their last 2-D animated full feature film in 2011, Winnie-the-Pooh. Five years later, in 2016, the animation industry started to expand outward. Laika, the stop-motion studio running out of Oregon, released Kubo and the Two Strings. (You can read more about the history behind Laika in this article.) Computer generated animation continued to rule the theaters; Disney’s Moana, Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets and Sing, and Disney’s Zootopia.
Zooming into 202, the pandemic years were rough for the entertainment industry. While audiences were locked in, animated films found their viewership on streaming services. Netflix released Arlo the Alligator Boy, The Mitchell’s vs the Machines, Vivo, and Wish Dragon, and Disney’s new streaming service became the home for Raya and the Last Dragon, Pixar’s Luca, an animated adaptation of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and the wildly popular Encanto.
Now in 2026, the animation industry seems to be on the cusp. On one hand, the technological advances with computer generated animation have pushed the artistic abilities of the medium, creating realism and detail never seen before, amazing audiences with visuals; on the other hand, audiences have shown a preference towards artistically creative films and stories, reflected in the popularity and success with Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse (2018) and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022). Independent films and stories have also rose in popularity over the past twenty years, experimenting with computer generated animation, 2-D animation, and stop motion, a welcomed return to the once exploratory spirit of the early years of the medium.
Enjoy this article? Check out my upcoming event next month on Saturday Morning Cartoons of the 1990s and Nicktoons’ 35th Anniversary!
Come back in August for a showcase of our favorite television shows that celebrate anniversaries this year!
