Animated cartoons: the toy that grew up

The Toy that Grew Up is a study of the antecedents of cinema, dealing mainly with the developments which took place between 1800 and 1900. The invention of a child’s toy, called a traumatrope, led Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau to study a characteristic of the human eye called persistence of vision. He established that the retina of the eye retains an impression of a luminous object a full third of a second after the actual light source has disappeared. Plateau used this scientific fact as the basis for his invention of a machine which seemed to animate static drawings. Emile Reynaud perfected Plateau’s machine, inventing a machine called the Praxinoscope, which enabled him to show animated cartoons, and later to give theatrical performances, his cartoon shows lasting as long as a quarter of an hour.