History of Animation - Animation Before Film - Flip Book (1868)

Flip Book (1868)

The first flip book was patented in 1868 by John Barnes Linnett as the kineograph. A flip book is just a book with particularly springy pages that have an animated series of images printed near the unbound edge. A viewer bends the pages back and then rapidly releases them one at a time so that each image viewed springs out of view to momentarily reveal the next image just before it does the same. They operate on the same principle as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope what with the rapid replacement of images with others, but they create the illusion without any thing serving as a flickering shutter as the slits had in the previous devices. They accomplish this because of the simple physiological fact that the eye can focus more easily on stationary objects than on moving ones. Flip books were more often cited as inspiration by early animated filmmakers than the previously discussed devices which didn’t reach quite as wide of an audience. In previous animation devices the images were drawn in circles which meant diameter of the circles physically limited just how many images could reasonably be displayed. While the book format still brings about something of a physical limit to the length of the animation, this limit is significantly longer than the round devices. Even this limit was able to be broken with the invention of the mutoscope in 1894. It consisted of a long circularly bound flip book in a box with a crank handle to flip through the pages.