When was the first cartoon invented and who invented it?

Answer 1

Cartoons have been drawn for thousands of years from Neolithic cave paintings to Egyptian murals to, for example, Leonardo Da Vinci's very famous cartoon of The Madonna and Child, to the proliferation of journals and comics published consisting of cartoons during the past century.

Moving image toys were created in Britain, Belgium, Austria and even France in the time of Queen Victoria for children to amuse themselves, such as the zoetrope, magic lantern, praxinoscope, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and flip book. The zoetrope seems to have been a Chinese invention by an inventor called Ting Huan from about the year 180 AD.

Finally, cinema and television films have been made with animated cartoons for approximately a hundred years. The first ever animated film was created by Charles-Emile Reynaud, inventor of the praxinoscope (which used a loop of 12 pictures). Later, in 1892, he produced animations of 500 frames with a system called Theatre Optique (which was similar to a modern projector). Some 14 years after that, in 1906 in New York City, an English-born man called J. Stuart Blackton produced a silent film, the first using standard picture film, called "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces".