Computer Animation is the art (or process) of creating moving images via the use of computers.

Early digital computer animation was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories (now Nokia Bell Labs), situated in New Jersey (United States), in the 1960s by Edward E. Zajac, Frank W. Sinden, Kenneth C. Knowlton and A. Michael Noll.
Another place in which digital computer animation was developed was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which was founded by the University of California in 1952 and was (and still is) situated in Livermore, California (United States).

Nowadays, computer animation usually uses 3D graphics (by using modelling software such as Blender or Maya, which builds objects/models on the computer monitor who are then rigged with virtual skeletons, that is a technique in which a character is represented in a surface representation used to draw the character and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones used to animate the mesh, which is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that defines the shape of an object) but 2D graphics are still used for stylistic and faster real-time renderings.

Technology has been for long an important part of the animator’s toolkit: per example, the animators at Disney revolutionised computer animation with great innovations, like using sounds in animated films and the multi-plane stand camera that created the parallax effect of background depth.

The way it works isn’t really difficult to understand: the image displayed on the computer screen gets replaced quickly by a similar image which is shifted slightly, in order to create the illusion of movement.

To make the audience think that they are seeing a moving object, the pictures should be drawn at around 12 frames (a frame is one complete image) per second or even faster.

Hand-Drawn cartoon animation usually uses 15 frames per second in order to save on the number of drawings who are needed, but it is widely accepted because of the stylized nature of cartoons and to produce more realistic imagery, computer animation asks for higher frame rates.

The fact that movies who are watched in theatres in the United States run at 24 frames per second is sufficient to create the illusion of constant movement.

In case of high resolution, adapters are used.

Computer Generated Imagery short films have been produced as independent animation since 1976 but the popularity of computer animation, especially in the field of special effects, skyrocketed during the modern era of United States animation.

The first full-length cartoon made entirely with computer generated 3D animation was Toy Story, in 1995, and the first completely computer animated television series was ReBoot in 1994.

VeggieTales, an American television series for children, is the first fully 3D computer animated Christian direct to-video series as it has started in 1993.

The increasing realism of 3D animation has to be credited to the exponential growth of computers processing power as today a normal desktop runs 5,000 times faster than the ones used by computer graphics pioneers in the ’60s and, also, the cost of the technology for creating cartoons with computer animation has gone down from $500.000 to less than $2.000.