1832 The Phenakistoscope, an early optical toy invented by Joseph Plateau, lets viewers see moving horses or acrobats.
1892 The 500-frame Pauvre Pierrot is presented by Emile Reynaud in the Musée Grevin, Paris.
1899 Britain's Arthur Melbourne uses stop-motion to animate matches for the commercial Matches: An Appeal.
1900 English-born cartoonist James Stuart Blackton uses stop-motion trickery to turn sketches into objects in Enchanted Drawings.
1907 Edwin S. Porter uses stop-motion dolls in The Teddy Bears.
1913 John Randolph Bray, responsible for refining the animation process, makes Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa, featuring the first cartoon series character.
1918 Winsor McCay makes The Sinking of the Lusitania, a furious condemnation of the tragedy.
1922 Disney's first entry into fairytales (albeit in heavily changed versions): Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots and others are created by his Laugh-O-Gram company.
1925 Willis O'Brien's stop-motion dinosaurs star in the feature The Lost World, which climaxes with a brontosaurus rampaging through London.
1929 First Disney Silly Symphony cartoon, The Skeleton Dance, animated entirely by Disney's partner Ub Iwerks.
1934 First appearance of Donald Duck as a supporting character in Disney's The Wise Little Hen. His first words are, “Who? Me? Oh no, I've got a bellyache.”
1937 Disney releases Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. First appearance of Daffy Duck in Porky's Duck Hunt. In Scotland, the pioneer abstract animator Norman McLaren makes Love on the Wing, but the film is banned because of fleeting phallic imagery.
1940 Disney releases Pinocchio and Fantasia; both flop. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera make the first Tom and Jerry cartoon, Puss Gets the Boot (though Tom is called Jasper in the film). Over the next 12 years, seven Tom and Jerry films win Oscars.
1945 Japan's first animated feature, Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors, shows Asia liberated by heroic Japanese animals. It opens weeks before Japan's defeat. Release of Garbancito of La Mancha, the first Spanish cartoon feature.
1950 Disney releases Cinderella, its first major cartoon feature for eight years. At the other end of the production scale, Crusader Rabbit is the first cartoon for US television, though it has extremely limited movement.
1953 The Shepherdess and the Sweep (also known as The Adventures of Mr Wonderbird), a fairytale fantasy, is released in France but disowned as unfinished by its director Paul Grimault. A revised version is released in 1980 as the acclaimed The King and the Bird. Norman McLaren makes the Oscar-winning Neighbours, in which human actors are animated in a form of stop-motion called pixilation. Chuck Jones makes the self-referential Merrie Melodies classic Duck Amuck.
1960 Television debut of The Flintstones, created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, and of the Christian stop-motion series Davey and Goliath.
1968 George Dunning directs the Beatles' animated feature Yellow Submarine. In Japan, Isao Takahata directs the feature The Adventure of Hols, Prince of the Sun, known in the west as The Little Norse Prince. Early production on Richard Williams' feature later known as The Thief and the Cobbler, which will be in and out of production for more than 20 years and never finished except in travesties by other hands.
1973 René Laloux makes the French SF animation Fantastic Planet, winning the Grand Prize at Cannes. The Hungarian studio Pannonia produces the children's feature Hugo the Hippo.
1980 The feature Nezha Conquers the Dragon King is taken as a sign of the revival of Chinese animation, recovering from the Cultural Revolution.
1984 Walt Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney sparks a corporate war with his uncle's company, bringing in a new regime led by ex-Paramount men Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Eisner reportedly wants to close the animation department, but Roy E. Disney elects to become its new head.
1989 Wallace and Gromit debut in Nick Park's A Grand Day Out, losing at the Oscars to Park's Creature Comforts. The Little Mermaid signals a revival in Disney animation. The Simpsons gain its own series, starting with a Christmas special.
1994 Disney's The Lion King becomes the highest-grossing traditionally animated feature, not taking into account inflation. Jeffrey Katzenberg, now closely involved with the studio's animation, quarrels with Michael Eisner and leaves to co-found DreamWorks.
1995 John Lasseter's Toy Story is the world's first feature-length CGI cartoon, heralding the biggest animation revolution since Steamboat Willie. In Japan, Mamoru Oshii's feature Ghost in the Shell and Hideaki Anno's TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion, both SF animations, become international hits. Britain's Dave Borthwick directs the dark, pixilated feature The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, while Nick Park's The Wrong Trousers wins an Oscar.
2000 Aardman releases its first feature film, Chicken Run, in partnership with DreamWorks. Disney's Dinosaur, an expensive attempt to merge CGI and live action, is a commercial disappointment, while Fox's Titan A.E., a space adventure directed by Don Bluth, flops.
2002 The Two Towers, the second part of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, introduces Gollum, a CGI character whose movements and expressions are based on actor Andy Serkis. The Blue Sky studio becomes a successful CGI player with Ice Age. Disney's semi-traditional animation Treasure Planet flops disastrously.
2005 The return of stop-motion, with Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride and Wallace and Gromit The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, by Nick Park and Steve Box. The latter wins an Oscar. Chicken Little, Disney's first in-house CGI film since Dinosaur, has a lukewarm reception.
