Cartoons

The History of Cartoons: Tracing Cave Paintings to the Simpsons

Trace cartoons from prehistoric cave paintings through The Simpsons. Discover how artists developed animation, from spinning toys to digital films.

By Written Facts StaffJune 2, 2023Updated October 8, 202610 min read

You've probably drawn a stick figure in the corner of a notebook, changed it a little on each page, and flipped the pages to make it move. That little trick connects you to 50,000 years of people drawing things. Cartoons didn't come from one invention. Several separate threads came together: the urge to paint living creatures, a magazine joke that gave us the word "cartoon," a run of spinning parlor toys, and a few stubborn showmen. This is that story, from Ice Age caves to the yellow family in Springfield.

It starts with pictures of living things

The oldest known figurative painting is on a cave ceiling at Leang Karampuang on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. In red pigment, it shows a pig-like animal, probably a Sulawesi warty pig, with at least three human figures around it. Two of the figures hold stick-like objects, which may make it a hunting scene. Researchers published it in Nature in July 2024. A new dating method gave a minimum age of about 53,500 years, give or take 2,300, so the painting is at least 51,200 years old. That is older than Europe's earliest known cave painting, at El Castillo in Spain, which dates to about 40,800 years ago.

Some researchers think a few of these early artists were trying to show motion as well as shape. The Paleolithic researcher and filmmaker Marc Azéma argued in a 2012 paper that painters in caves such as Chauvet and Lascaux suggested movement in two ways. They placed several images of the same animal side by side, or they drew one image on top of another. His best-known example is an eight-legged bison in Chauvet Cave's Alcôve des Lions. Azéma says this shows "split-action movement by superimposition" was already in use around 35,000 years ago. He also argues that the effect works best when a grease lamp or torch is moved along the rock wall. This is a theory, not settled fact. But anyone who has made a flipbook will see why it's tempting.

The idea of showing motion in a sequence of pictures turns up again much later. An Iranian earthenware bowl more than 5,000 years old shows a goat in a series of poses as it jumps toward a tree and eats its leaves. Scholars stress that it is very uncertain whether the artist meant it as an animation.

Where the word "cartoon" comes from

The word itself is much younger, and it started out serious. "Cartoon" comes from the Italian cartone and the Dutch karton, both meaning strong, heavy paper or pasteboard. For centuries a cartoon was a full-size preparatory drawing that artists used to plan a painting, fresco, tapestry or stained-glass window.

The word got its comic meaning through a joke. In 1843 the British magazine Punch published John Leech's drawing "Substance and Shadow" and labeled it "Cartoon, No. 1." It mocked the preparatory designs then being shown for the historical frescoes planned for the new Palace of Westminster. This was the first time "cartoon" was used for a satirical drawing, and the meaning stuck.

Satire in print

Leech gave the form its name, but drawn satire was already about a century old. William Hogarth's pictorial satire in 18th-century England came before it. George Townshend made some of the first openly political cartoons in the 1750s. James Gillray, often called "the father of the political cartoon," mocked George III and Napoleon.

In the United States, Thomas Nast showed how much damage a drawing could do. He published about 160 cartoons attacking New York's corrupt Tweed Ring. When "Boss" Tweed fled the country, he was arrested in Spain after being recognized from Nast's drawings.

Newspapers soon found that recurring characters sold papers. The American comic strip The Yellow Kid first appeared in 1895. In the early 20th century, "cartoon" also came to mean animated films that looked like these printed drawings, which is why the word has two meanings today.

Spinning toys teach the eye a trick

While satirists worked in print, inventors were finding out how to make still pictures appear to move. The phenakistiscope, introduced in 1833, used a spinning disc to create what historians call a "stroboscopic illusion of motion."

A year later, the British mathematician William George Horner published a cylinder version and called it the Dædaleum, after the Daedalus of Greek myth. The pictures sat on a band inside a cylinder with vertical slits. When you spin the cylinder and look through the slits, the images don't blur together. They seem to move. In the 1860s an American student at Brown University, William Ensign Lincoln, made the version that took off. He named it the zoetrope, from Greek words meaning "life" and "turning," and patented it in 1867. The Milton Bradley Company sold it.

In 1877 the French inventor Émile Reynaud improved on the zoetrope with his praxinoscope. It replaced the narrow slits with an inner ring of mirrors that reflected the images one after another.

The first cartoon shows

Reynaud then went further. He patented his Théâtre Optique in December 1888. It projected long strips of hand-painted images onto a screen, which turned a toy into a show for an audience. His Pauvre Pierrot (1892) and his other films each used 300 to 700 frames. He moved the strips back and forth by hand, so each film lasted 10 to 15 minutes. The shows ran at the Musée Grévin in Paris from 28 October 1892 to March 1900: more than 12,800 performances for over 500,000 visitors.

Film cameras moved animation off the hand-cranked strip. In the United States, J. Stuart Blackton made The Enchanted Drawing in 1900 and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906, which is often called the oldest known hand-drawn animation on film. In France, Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) is considered the first animated film made with traditional animation methods.

A dinosaur with a personality

The pioneers had made drawings move. Winsor McCay, already famous for his comic strip Little Nemo, made a drawing seem alive. He first animated Nemo in 1911. Then, on February 8, 1914, at the Palace Theater in Chicago, he introduced Gertie the Dinosaur as part of his vaudeville act.

McCay stood beside the screen with a whip and gave Gertie commands. In one gag he tossed a cardboard apple toward the screen, and it appeared in the film for Gertie to eat. He drew thousands of frames on sheets of mulberry paper measuring 6.5 by 8.5 inches. An art student, John A. Fitzsimmons, did the tedious job of retracing the backgrounds. McCay used registration marks to keep the image from jittering. He also developed what became known as the "McCay Split System": he drew the major poses first and filled in the frames between them later. This made timing easier and the work less tedious, and it influenced Disney, the Fleischers and Walter Lantz. Producer William Fox released a version to movie theaters starting December 28, 1914, with a new live-action opening.

Animation becomes an industry

Gertie showed that audiences would bond with a drawn character. Studios then made the work faster and the results more striking:

Cels. Earl Hurd, working at Bray Productions, patented the cel technique. Animators drew characters on transparent sheets laid over a background, so the background didn't have to be redrawn for every frame.
Rotoscoping. Max Fleischer applied for a patent in 1915 on tracing over live-action film, and received it in 1917.
The first feature. Quirino Cristiani's El Apóstol, a 70-minute satire, premiered in Argentina on 9 November 1917.
Star characters. Felix the Cat arrived in 1919. Mickey Mouse became famous with Steamboat Willie, which premiered November 18, 1928, at Universal's Colony Theater in New York. It is often wrongly called the first cartoon with synchronized sound. Earlier cartoons had sound, but Disney and Ub Iwerks used a click track to keep the picture and the soundtrack tightly in sync. Disney did all the voices, and the film cost about $4,987. It entered the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2024.
Color and depth. Disney's Flowers and Trees (1932) used three-strip Technicolor and won an Academy Award. William Garity's multiplane camera, which created a sense of depth by placing layers of artwork at different distances from the lens, was tested in The Old Mill (1937).
The breakthrough feature. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on 21 December 1937 and became a worldwide hit.

From the movie theater to the living room

The next big move was onto television, in front of the whole family. The Flintstones aired on ABC from September 30, 1960, to April 1, 1966. It was the first animated series with a prime-time slot and the first animated sitcom, and it was aimed at adults as well as children.

Thirty-five years later, computers changed how cartoons were made. Pixar's Toy Story premiered on November 19, 1995, at the El Capitan Theatre and opened across the U.S. three days later. It was the first fully computer-animated feature film.

The Simpsons, and why it matters

That brings us to Springfield. Matt Groening was waiting in the lobby of producer James L. Brooks's office before a pitch meeting. Instead of offering to adapt his comic strip Life in Hell, he quickly came up with a dysfunctional family. The Simpsons first appeared as short segments on The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987. Their half-hour prime-time series premiered on December 17, 1989, with "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire."

The show became the longest-running American animated series, the longest-running American sitcom and the longest-running American scripted prime-time series, with more than 800 episodes over 38 seasons. It has won 37 Primetime Emmy Awards, 34 Annie Awards and two Peabody Awards, and Time named it the best television series of the 20th century. It also proved that animation aimed at adults could succeed in prime time, which led directly to the 1990s wave of shows such as South Park, King of the Hill and Family Guy.

The connections are easy to see. Homer Simpson comes from the Punch satirists and Nast. His family sitcom comes from The Flintstones. He moves because of Reynaud's strips and McCay's split system. All of it goes back to someone painting a pig on a cave wall and wanting it to look alive.

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