Oh, you're going to love this, whether you are into the history of animation or just like to watch. A list of the animation sequences that advanced the art or brought something new to it is dangerously close to being a list of the best cartoons ever. The 100 sequences are not ranked, but instead are arranged in chronological order so you can follow the history of animation, beginning in 1892. There follows not one decade that didn't have an entry.
All animation, whether it depicts a whistling mouse, a walking dinosaur, or a leaping superhero, is a kind of magic trick. It’s right there in the name of one of the earliest devices used to project slides: the magic lantern. If you take an image of an open hand and an image of a fist and project the two in sequence, you’ll convey the illusion of a clench. “What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame,” the prominent experimental animator Norman McLaren (who makes the list with his short Neighbours, below) once explained. “Therefore, animation is the art of manipulating the invisible interstices between frames.”
The best part is that the entries have videos, relevant clips if not the entire cartoon. You can read about each and how it contributed to the advancement of animation, or you can just watch them at Vulture. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Giacomo Gambineri)