Animation is the art of making still pictures appear to move. Animators create this illusion by showing a series of images in rapid succession, each one slightly different from the last. When your brain sees these images flash by quickly enough (often 24 per second), it fills in the gaps and perceives smooth motion, even though you're really just looking at individual drawings or models.

Traditional animation involves drawing each frame by hand. Walt Disney's early films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs required artists to create thousands of individual drawings. Modern computer animation, like that in Toy Story or Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, uses software to generate images, but the principle remains the same: lots of slightly different pictures shown in sequence.

Animation isn't limited to cartoons. Stop-motion animation moves physical objects (like clay figures) tiny amounts between photographs. Even the flip books you might make in the corners of your notebook pages are simple animation.

The word comes from the Latin animare, meaning “to give life to.” That captures what animation does: it brings life and movement to drawings, sculptures, or computer models that would otherwise sit frozen on the page or screen. When you watch an animated character laugh, run, or dance, you're seeing hundreds or thousands of individual images working together to create the animated performance.