An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn) film for the cinema, television or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot (even if it is a very short one). This is distinct from the term "animation" or "animated film", as not all follow the definition.
Notable artists and producers of "shorts"
-> Tex Avery
-> Hanna-Barbera
-> Walt Disney
-> Max Fleischer
-> Chuck Jones
-> Walter Lantz
-> Bob Clampett
-> Fred Quimby
-> Ub Iwerks
-> Pat SullivanGenres of animated cartoons:-
Funny animals
The first animated cartoons often depicted funny animals in various adventures. This was the mainstream genre in the United States from the early 1900s until the 1940s, and the backbone of Disney's series of cartoons.
Zany humor
Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck of Warner Brothers, and the various films of Tex Avery at MGM introduced this popular form of animated cartoons. It usually involves surreal acts such as characters being crushed by massive boulders or going over the edge of a cliff but floating in mid air for a few seconds. The Road Runner cartoons are great examples of these actions. The article Cartoon physics describes typical antics of zany cartoon characters. Disney has, to a lesser extent, applied this to some of their cartoons.
Sophistication
As the medium matured, more sophistication was introduced, albeit keeping the humorous touch. Classical music was often spoofed, a notable example is "What's Opera, Doc" by Chuck Jones. European animation sometimes followed a very different path from American animation. In the Soviet Union, the late 1930s saw the enforcement of socialist realism in animation, a style which lasted throughout the Stalinist era. The animations themselves were mostly for kids, and based on traditional fairy tales.
Limited animation
In the 1950s, UPA and other studios refined the art aspects of animation, by using extremely limited animation as a means of expression.
Modernism
Graphic styles continued to change in the late 1950s and 1960s. At this point, the design of the characters became more angular, while the quality of the character animation declined.
Animated music videos and bands
Popular with the advent of MTV and similar music channels, music videos often contain animation, sometimes rotoscoped (see: Take on Me), i.e., based on live action performers. Cartoons animated to music go at least as far back as Disney's 1929 The Skeleton Dance. These are now popular with the animated bands Gorillaz and Dethklok, the latter of which is based around a television show about the band.
Anime
Anime is traditionally hand drawn, but computer-assisted techniques (such as cel-shaded animation) have become quite common in recent years. The subjects of anime represent most major genres of fiction, and anime is available in most motion-picture media ranging from television broadcast to literature.
Computer Animation
Beginning in the 1990s, with the rise of computer animation, some cartoons implemented CGI and a few were done entirely in computer animation. Beast Wars and Reboot were done entirely in CGI whereas Silver Surfer only partially implemented CGI. Donkey Kong Country also used CGI to make it look like the SNES game. CGI is common today, whether obvious such as in Tak and the Power of Juju or made to look two-dimensional such as in Speed Racer X.
