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Experimental animation
Experimental animation, or expanded animation, are terms used to describe the exploratory form of animation deviate from mainstreams and commercial animation, aligned with non-industrial production contexts. The application of the technique in experimental animation is broad, ranging from hand drawing, painting, scratching, celluloid, collage, stop-motion to computer graphics.

By contrast of traditional animation, experimental animation tends towards abstract figures, music-driven, and non-continuity storytelling, exposure of the utility materials and application of multiple techniques in the same film. It also emphasises more on the role of individual artists.

Early experimental animation focus on qualities such as movement, mood, rhythm, counterpoint, music, harmony, tempo and composition. The contemporary experimental animation are increasingly engaged with innovative cinematic platforms and installation that can offer its audience imaginative and complex experiences.

Early history of experimental animation in Europe
Around the turn of the twentieth century, postwar industrial advances and capitalism has changed the changing social, economic, and cultural conditions in Europe. Dadaist, futurist and other modern artists reject classical representation and sought to subversive traditional constraints by exploring motion picture as the medium of art and graphic designs.

The earliest history of experimental animation starts with the exploration of animation. Examples of the first generation of experimenters before 1910 includes Charles-Émile Reynaud, Émile Cohl, Ségundo de Chomon and Arthur Melbourne-Cooper. Among the best-known pioneers of film animation, Émile Cohl made the first full-length animated film named Fantasmagorie in 1908 in Paris; Georges Méliès explored special effects such as dissolve double exposure and split-screen shots.

Léopold Survage was found to be the first artists conceptualised and designed a work of abstract animation. Inspired by the cubist painting, Survage began the series of nearly 200 abstract watercolours named Rythmes colorés in time between 1912-1914, with each image imagined as one frame in a continuous animation. Leopold described his experiment as a creation of new art. However, the film was never produced ; 59 of the paintings are owned by the Museum of Modern Art, 12 by the Cinémathèque française, while the rest mainly by his family and friends.

In 1921, Walter Ruttmann exhibited the world's first completed experimental animation namely Lichtspiel Opus I in Frankfort. The film consists of sweeping strokes of shapes and colour moving rhythmically with the live performance of an especially composed synchronous music score created by Max Butting.

One of the early theorists in the field of experimental animation is Viking Eggeling. His film Diagonal-Symphonie in 1924, co-produced by Han Richter, is another excellent example of avant-garde animation, which further developed the importance of the time problem.

Hans Richter devoted his experiments in surrealist animation shorts. In years between 1921 and 1925, he created the films Rhythmus 21, Rhythmus 23, and Rhythmus 25. His film Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927) combining animation and live action footage explored and demonstrated the use of special effect.

Len Lye was the pioneer of cameraless film and directed-on-film animation. In Britain, he produced the first cameraless film entitled A Colour Box in 1936, which was also the first animation painted and scratched images directly on film.

Pictorial animation
Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, together with Lotte Reiniger and Berthold Bartsch pioneered distinctive ways of making pictorial animation films outside the bounds of mainstream animation.

Lotte Reiniger's career was one of the longest and most productive in the history of experimental animation. In 1926, assisted by Berthold Bartosch and Walter Ruttmann working on special-effects, Reiniger produced the successful full-length animation The Adventure of Prince Achmed, which combined  abstract animation with silhouette figures. From the 1920s, Reiniger and Bartsch collaborated and produced animation including The Battle of Skagerrak, Doctor Dolittle and The Ornament of the Loving Heart. In 1932, Berthold Bartsch created a film entitled The Idea in Paris, which consists of over 45000 frames.

Alexandre Alexeieff began his career of filming motion picture after seeing Bartosch's technique of animating the entire surface of the screen, with his partner Claire Parker collaborated on all his films and technical experiments. During the early 1930s, they invented the pinscreen, a device that could produce pictorial textural effects that replace traditional etchings, hence reduce the costly and labor-intensive animation process. Later, they used pinboard as an illustration for other animatior's prologue and background, for example, in The Trial (1963) by Orson Welles.

Experimental animation in America and Canada
Winsor McCay was one of the early masters of comic strips, he was also a pioneer experimenter of animated films. In 1911, Winsor McCay created the first animated cartoon, Little Nemo, which consists of over 4000 frames of drawings.

Oskar Fischinger and Mary Ellen Bute were among the pioneers who explored the correspondence of sounds and motion graphics in their animation. Since 1921, Fischinger began experiments with thinly sliced wax and abstract form onto the optical soundtrack of the filmstrip to create sound directly from the material. In late 1920s, he attempted on a new audio-visual language by using purely visual rhythm without an musical support.

By using a series of techniques that was called “Seeing Sound", Mary Ellen Bute pioneered the "visual music" abstract films. She made her first abstract film namely Rhythm in Light in the mid-1930s, which was considered to be some of the first music videos. From 1954, Mary Ellen began creating figures in her films using cathode ray oscilloscope. She claimed to be the first person to use this technique in the making process of animation.

In 1947, inspired by filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Norman McLaren began his series of animation by drawing directly on the film. Two animated works namely Fiddle-De-Dee and Begone Dull Care (1949) are the successful examples of this graphic approach. He also contributes to enlarge the animation production process and produce unique and expressive sound effects. Later, he founded National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and became the first animator employing synthetic sound techniques to create a significant number of artworks.

Many American experimental producers have also made feature films. Notable examples include Douglas Crockwell, Dwinell Grant, Francis Lee, Standish Lawder, Sally Cruikshank, Mary Beams, Frank Mouris, Paul Glabicki, Robert Russett, Adam Beckett, Barry Spinello and Sky David.

Collage animation: post-1950s
Experimenters working in the post-1950s began to create innovative content and meaning by investigating the interior logic of nonnarrative and perceptual concepts of cinema. Filmmakers and experimental animators in this new generation strongly associate with a personal style.

During the 50s, Harry Smith began to produce his series of experiments on animation by converging his early abstract approach with a surrealistic collage technique. Each film is numbered in the order they were made (No.1-No.12, from No.13 Smith turned into live-action cinema), and the most notable one was NO.12 (also known as Heaven and Earth Magic). His works guided by human consciousness employs surrealistic devices to create dream-like effects and implies psychological phenomena.

From the 1950s to 1960s, Robert Breer and his experiments challenged the order of visual relationship by using distinctive images on each frame to construct intermittent animated movement. His films, such as Images I (1954) and Blazes (1962), composed of rapid changing images and visual sensations rather than realistic movements. He further expanded the psychology and physiology of perception in contemporary animation and had a critical impact on later animation during the sixties and seventies.

In 1955-1965, the earliest films of Stan Vanderbeek also consist of animated paintings and collage films, he produced more collage animation than either Beer or Smith. Examples of his representatives include A La Mode (1961), Science Fiction (1960) and Skullduggery (1956).

Other classic examples under this genre include D'Avino's The Room (1958-1959), Jerome Hill's Canaries (1968) and Film Portrait (1965-71), Tony Conrad's The Flicker (1965), Larry Jordan's Duo Concertantes (1962-64), Orb (1973) and Once Upon A Time (1974), Paul Sharits' N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968).

Feminist experimental animation: 1970-1980s
With the increase in the number of classes in colleges and art schools, the female population has their opportunity to learn animation skills and become animators. From the 1970s, liberated feminists animators expressed autobiographic statements about being female in their films. These films focus on revealing feelings, sexual imagery and true experiences of the female animator.

Suzan Pitt completed her first film Asparagus in 1979. The premiere was held in 1979 at the Whitney Museum, then the film was screened on the midnight movie circuit for two years. Along with Joanna Priestley’s All My Relations (1990), it was regarded as one of the solid examples of avant-garde feminist animation.

Other feminist animation during the period includes Mary Beams's Tub Film (1972), Joan Freeman's Toilette (1976), Barbara Bottner's Later That Night (1976), Lisa Crafts's Desire Pie (1976), Marcy Page's Paradisia (1987), Joanna Priestley's Voices (1985).

The rise of experimental computer animation: The 1960–70s and today
Since the 1960s, advances in digital technology have influenced animators and commercial motion graphic designers by changing the way of producing animation films. Among the pioneers contributed in this new form of animation are John Whitney and his brother James Whitney, Ed Emshwiller, Ken Knowlton and Stan VanDerBeek.

John Whitney was regarded one of the most notable technical innovator and experimenter in the field of computer films and animation. In the 1940s and 1950s, John Whitney and his brother James began working with an 8mm camera and created the first example of motion control photography. The animated short film consists of a rectangle and a simple circle moving and interspersed with each other in a certain way. In 1960, John Whitney founded Motion Graphic Inc. and pioneered the concept of "motion control." His examples of experimental film include Catalog (1961), Matrix III (1972), and Arabesque (1975).

Stan Vanderbeek devoted himself in the field of computers animation as an underground filmmaker during the 1960s. During 1964-1967 he created a series of 8 computer-generated animations namely Poem Field with Ken Knowlton to explore the variations of abstract forms and words.

Later in 1970, Ken Knowlton developed a special computer language called BEFLIX to produce raster-based animation. He also investigated the perception of patterns and developed an algorithm that uses dot patterns to reconstruct and fragment pictures. Another prominent artists-technicians in the early 1970s is Lilian Schwartz, who was the only experimental animator maintained a long-term relationship with large institutional research organisations, and produced some of the first artistically conceived computer animated films.

After 1990s, computer animation artists such as Michel Bret, Nicole Stenger, Manfred Mohr, David Larcher, Karl Sims and William Latham produced films that influenced the processes of creation three-dimensional animation and moving image. Their animations explored the computer image, digital landscapes and CGI creatures. In Liquid Selves (1992), Karl Sims generated 3D CGI backgrounds that exist within the computer.

Influences on avant-garde films and animation
Experimental animation during the period of the late 1800s and the early 1900s played an important role in the development of the avant-garde film, by establishing a code that are later used by avant-garde filmmakers. Animation is also considered as the first playground of experimental filmakers. Many experimental animators contributes in avant-garde films in their later years. Notably Walter Ruttmann, Lotte Reiniger, Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Jan Svankmajer, Raoul Servais, Hans Richter, Len Lye, Oskar Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, Norman McLaren, Harry Smith, Robert Breer, Stan Vanderbeek, John Whitney, Lilian Schwartz.

There is increasing recognition for experimental animation in the field of film and animation. In 1985, experimental animation was given its own special category in the Maya Deren avant-garde film awards held by the American Film Institute. The first winner of this award were Robert Breer and Sally Cruikshank.

Experimental animation also influences the modern graphic design, animation, and short films, contributes highly simplified but more expressive characters and creates stories penetrated deep into human subconscious. Some animators contribute their animation to investigate on a philosophy level the shortcoming of the society and offer their own sharp, critical commentary on their observation.