Film animation applies techniques of cinematography to the graphic and plastic arts in order to give the illusion of life and movement to cartoons, drawings, paintings, puppets, and three-dimensional objects. Beginning with crude and simple methods, animation has become a highly sophisticated form of filmmaking, involving the use of automation, computer, and even laser technology to achieve its effects. Some animation techniques overlap with those used to produce special effects in live-action cinematography. In watching such films as 2001—A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977), a person often finds it difficult to tell whether a certain result has been achieved through animation or through special effects.

Since the early, popular shorts involving such animals as Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse, the international history of animation has been characterized by the almost constant introduction of ever more complex forms. Many advances were made in Europe: Lotte Reiniger employed mobile silhouettes; Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye experimented with abstract designs choreographed to music; and George Pal of Holland created techniques of puppet animation. Since World War II, animation was increasingly used in instructional films and in television and cinema commercials.  Advanced forms of graphic design, both in black and white and in color, and new methods of puppet and object animation have been developed. From the 1940s until the early 1980s, Norman McLaren, one of the versatile of all animators, experimented with three-dimensional animation and with other innovations as drawing images directly on film.

Beginning in the 1960s, films showing abstract color designs in motion were programmed by means of computers that calculate intricate movements with amazing precision. Today, computer animation has achieved the ability to create moving images and backgrounds of great complexity. The basic tool, usually called a paintbox, is an electronic surface on which the artist draws figures and backgrounds and selects colors.  Other devices manipulate the figures and change the backgrounds. The work is reproduced on a TV monitor and stored on a computer disk. Computerized animation is widely used in television commercials, titles, and in making music videos and provides many of the special effects in the films of directors like George Lucas. Old-style cel animation continues to be the sole technique by which high quality animators, such as Disney Productions, create their characters. Backgrounds, and the movement of objects within a scene, however, are often computer-generated.

Television, with its insatiable need for new material, introduced a type of semi-animation in its cartoon programs for children. Compared with traditional animation, on television the movement of characters is primitive in its rendition, colors are limited, and detail is stripped down to bare essentials. Costs of TV animation are a minute fraction of the cost for quality movie animation. For the cartoon-and-live-character film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), the Walt Disney Company spent $250,000 per minute to make one hour of animation.