I haven’t thought much about animation since I taught a unit of it in graphic arts class in high school until I heard about our neighbors’ granddaughter, Megan, who was enrolling in an animation college in Florida. This started me thinking for another column. So here goes.

Saturday night movies were always looked forward to when I was a youngster. Our family would always go to Princeton and us kids would get to go to the movies. They had two movie theaters; one was a smaller one where us kids would go, It usually showed shootn’up westerns and always a short cartoon. Mickey, Popeye, Donald Duck and “beep beep” The Roadrunner, were a few which always gave us laughs. The larger theater was more for romantic movies for adults.

It was Christmas of 1937 when Walt Disney premiered his long-awaited movie, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” I would have been seven years old when there was news of a full-length cartoon coming to our big theater. The adults didn’t think it would be a success. Boy were they wrong.

Now keep in mind in those days, movies were only in black and white. Suddenly, the screen burst with brilliant color. Little dwarfs made us giggle, and the old witch trying to hurt the beautiful princess and prince kept us on the edge of our seats. Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was to become the classic animation of all time.

Up to this time most had never given much thought as to how the short cartoons that we had been seeing had been created. Now people were hearing about cels, twenty-four frames per second, and the persistence of vision. We had not considered that it would take hundreds of drawings to produce a few seconds of action. Now we were told about the thousands of drawings needed for this wonderful full-length animated movie. We learned how the drawings were then given to inkers who outlined the images on clear cellophane cels and then on to the coloring department. The method of filming each cel using the multiplane camera which gave the three-dimensional effect was explained. We were amazed that we had been seeing 24 pictures each second. And how the mind moves the images from one to the other is called the persistence of vision.

Animation has come a long way since the invention of the computer, which I’m sure Megan will learn during her next four years of study. Future animators must first stay down to earth to learn the intricate working of animation. It will be hard and demanding, yet when ready, some animators are willing to take us with them on unimaginable thrills and mystical places. Others spice up our weather reports and make commercials interesting enough to watch.

Mouse-ear hats off to Walt and all the animators of the world. We need you.

Don Hill is a resident of Seymour and a longtime volunteer for Southern Indiana Center for the Arts. Send comments to [email protected].