For more than 100 years - from flickering black and white images to computer-generated  visual feasts - the cartoon has been an entertainment mainstay of the cinema. Once dominated by Disney with classics such as Snow White and Bambi, it's now a digital free-for-all. Computer trickery is inspiring a whole new generation of animators,  who swap the pencils for a mouse. We take a look back at the pioneers and meet the new kids on the block...

In 1906 Sheffield-born film producer J Stuart Blackton won the accolade of becoming the first animator with Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, a silent movie where where a dog jumps through a hoop, a scene which uses cutout animation made to look like chalk outlines. 

The film moves at 20 frames per second. 

It all seems a long way from Ice Age 3. While only shifting up to 24 frames a second,  Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs employed a bank of computers to manipulate the images.

In just over one hundred years, animation has literally evolved before our eyes from the advent of sound cartoons in 1928, through feature length movies like Snow White to the digital age where Toy Story and The Incredibles entranced yet another generation of cinema-goers.

Twenty years after Blackton’s pioneering effort, the introduction of sound film quickly caught on with animators in the form of Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, the third theatrical appearance of Mickey Mouse. 

Disney would go on to take advantage of the technology offered by Technicolour while rivals such as Max Fleischer fell by the wayside (his massively successful suggestive Betty Boop cartoons suffered under “Production Code” censorship).

In 1936 Disney raised the bar with the feature lengh Snow White, an enormous financial gamble (it took two years to make as opposed to WALL.E’s four) that paid off handsomely. 

However, with Walt's concentration on longer films coupled with increasingly lame shorts, Warners stepped into the breach.

The likes of Looney Tunes and evergreen cartoon classics such as Bugs Bunny – in the Oscar-nominated Wild Hare - and Daffy Duck slipped in to fill the space vacated by Uncle Walt's creations.

Disney followed Snow White with three of the best animated cartoons ever made – Dumbo, Pinnochio and Fantasia. However, these never repeated the success of Snow White at the box office. 

Ironically, it was the low-budget elephant saga Dumbo – another Disney classic – that kept the studio afloat but if suffered in the post-war years as rival studios stole a march on the onetime cartoon giant. 

Over at MGM, Will Hanna and Joe Barbera hit paydirt with Tom & Jerry, whose short Puss Gets The Boot was nominated for an Academy Award. 

Historically, the studios had fought shy of branching out into stop-motion cartoons – the precursor to computer graphics -  although King Kong set in train a movie-making style that reached its peak with Ray Harryhausen and the movies Earth vs The Flying Saucers and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. 

However, with the end of the Golden Age of American Cartoons thanks to the emerging medium of television, it would be years before feature length cartoons regained mass popularity.
 
The means to this resurgence was the computer. 

Computer-generated animation had been used in shorts since 1976…but the first completely CGI’d feature was Pixar’s Toy Story in 1994.
 
The studio followed that box office triumph with the equally impressive Bug’s Life and then other movie-makers twigged there was cash to be made. 

Dreamworks jumped on the CGI bandwagon in 1998 with the accomplished Antz featuring Woody Allen, Sharon Stone and Sylvester Stallone voicing fractious members of an ant colony. 

By 2001, Columbia Pictures had joined the computerised throng with the Japanese made Final Fantasy:  The Spirits Within, which impressed with its CGI recreation of human beings and an eerie post-apocalyptic New York. 

( due to the enormous complexity of human motion, and human biomechanics, realistic simulation of humans remains largely an open problem and is regarded as one of the "holy grails" of computer animation.) 

The same year Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks seriously challenged Pixar’s pre-eminence with the accomplished Shrek, the amiable story of a green ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) and his Donkey sidekick (Eddie Murphy). 

Now everyone was at it from Sony, with its stunning adolescent horror yarn Monster House, to the British Vanguard Studios with the story of wartime derring-do Valiant.

Unfortunately, despite spanking visuals, some of the content could be variable and some splendidly animated offerings such as Barnyard, Over The Hedge and Open Season seemed to be going through the narrative motions.
The interminable sequels to Shrek also proved the law of diminishing returns.

Nevertheless, Pixar - always the maverick in the pack - came back with one of the finest CGI creations to date.  In 2005, The Incredibles - a subtle spoof of superhero movies hooked into a knowing Bond parody - raised the bar for first-class visuals couple to first-rate characterisaion.

Another modern classic was the independently produced Hoodwinked, a deliciously twisted spin on the Little Red Riding Hood story,  while Pixar's Ratatouille - the rat the kitchen romp -continued the studio's noble tradition of off-kilter classics.

Blue Sky Studios' third Ice Age  movie takes the detailed animation another step forward this summer, and, along with Chicken Little, Monsters Vs Aliens and Bolt, will join the growing ranks of 3D movies that battle to beat the piracy revolution.

Tim Evans