This animation trivia quiz has 80 free questions with answers and covers the whole art form, from optical toys to this year's Oscar winner. One half is animation history: the first projected cartoons in Paris and Winsor McCay's Gertie, Fleischer's rotoscope, Termite Terrace, Hanna-Barbera's limited animation, stop-motion from Starevich and Harryhausen to Aardman and Laika, cels, frame rates and the twelve principles. The other half is animated movie trivia questions and answers on the films themselves: Snow White, Fantasia, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Iron Giant, The Prince of Egypt, Spirited Away, Your Name, Up, WALL-E, Inside Out, Zootopia, How to Train Your Dragon, Coraline and Spider-Verse. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who loves cartoons and animated films, a third are medium, and the rest are for people who know what 'on twos' means and where the Rankin/Bass puppets were really built. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
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Q 01Which French artist made Fantasmagorie (1908), considered the first animated cartoon?
Émile Cohl
The whole film is a stick figure meeting morphing objects, and it was drawn in white on black to look like a chalkboard.
Q 02Which American game company introduced the definitive zoetrope, with replaceable picture strips, as a toy in 1866?
Milton Bradley
Its inventor, William Ensign Lincoln, was a Brown University sophomore of about 18 when he came up with it.
Q 03Reynaud's 1877 praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with what?
An inner ring of mirrors
The reflections stayed almost stationary as the drum turned, giving a brighter, less distorted picture.
Q 04Which Belgian physicist invented the phenakistiscope around December 1832, simultaneously with Simon Stampfer?
Joseph Plateau
The inventor never settled on one name for it, using both phénakisticope and his preferred fantascope.
Q 05Émile Reynaud's Pantomimes Lumineuses, the first projected animated films, opened in 1892 at which Paris venue?
Musée Grévin
The shows beat the Lumière brothers' first paid film screening by more than three years.
Q 06Blackton's 1906 Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, an early hand-drawn animation, was drawn on what surface?
A blackboard
Blackton had co-founded Vitagraph Studios and did 'lightning sketch' acts on film before this.
Q 07Winsor McCay first showed Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) not in cinemas but as an interactive part of what?
His vaudeville act
Gertie obeyed McCay's spoken commands on stage; a live-action prologue was added when his boss William Randolph Hearst curtailed his stage career.
Q 08Winsor McCay's most ambitious film (1918) recreated which 1915 event?
The sinking of the Lusitania
It was a commercial disappointment and McCay's later films attracted little attention.
Q 09El Apóstol (1917), considered the first feature-length animated film, was made in which country?
Argentina
The only copy burned in a 1926 studio fire, and its director Quirino Cristiani was paid a meagre 1,000 pesos.
Q 10The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surviving animated feature, used what technique?
Silhouette cutouts
Reiniger's cardboard-and-lead figures were inspired by Wayang shadow puppets, and the original prints were colour-tinted.
Q 11Which pre-digital animation device is Lotte Reiniger, maker of Prince Achmed, credited with first devising in 1923-26?
The multiplane camera
Layering flat planes at different depths gave her shadow films a sense of parallax that Disney would later industrialise.
Q 12What did industry insiders derisively call Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs during production?
Disney's Folly
Walt mortgaged his house to finish it; the film then became the highest-grossing film of 1938.
Q 13Which technique, tracing over live-action footage frame by frame, did Max Fleischer invent in 1915?
Rotoscoping
Q 21Ray Harryhausen's celebrated fight between three actors and seven living skeletons is in which 1963 film?
Jason and the Argonauts
It expanded on the single-skeleton duel he had animated for Sinbad five years earlier.
Q 22What did stop-motion pioneer Ladislas Starevich use as protagonists around 1910?
Dead insects
His live stag beetles kept dying under the studio lights, so he wired their legs and animated them instead.
Q 23Which 2000 film, Aardman's first feature, is the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time?
Chicken Run
Its escape plot is set on a Yorkshire egg farm and it grossed about $228 million.
He used it in the Out of the Inkwell series, and other studios could only use it freely once his patent expired by 1934.
Q 14Betty Boop began life in Fleischer cartoons as an anthropomorphised what?
Dog
She had evolved into a fully human 'Jazz Baby' flapper by 1932.
Q 15'Termite Terrace' was the affectionate nickname for the classic animation department of which studio?
Warner Bros.
The name came from a small building on the Sunset lot that Tex Avery's unit was moved into for about a year.
Q 16At which studio did Tex Avery create Droopy, Screwy Squirrel and Red Hot Riding Hood after 1941?
MGM
Avery's humour was aimed squarely at adults, the opposite of Disney's approach.
Q 17Which Chuck Jones short topped Jerry Beck's 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons?
What's Opera, Doc?
Ten of the fifty entries were directed by Jones, who only got an Oscar in his own name in 1966 for The Dot and the Line.
Q 18Hanna-Barbera's five-minute Ruff and Reddy episodes had to cost no more than how much apiece?
$3,000
Their seven-minute Tom and Jerry shorts had cost around $35,000 each.
Q 19Which 1960 series was the first animated show to air in prime time?
The Flintstones
It ran six seasons on ABC and held the prime-time record for animation until 1997.
Q 20Before becoming a half-hour series in 1989, The Simpsons began as shorts on which variety programme?
The Tracey Ullman Show
It is now the longest-running American animated series, sitcom and scripted prime-time show.
Q 24Nick Park's Creature Comforts (1989) matched animated zoo animals with recordings of real people discussing what?
Their homes
It was his contribution to a Channel 4 series of shorts called Lip Synch and won his first Academy Award.
Q 25Wallace, the cheese-loving inventor of Wallace & Gromit, is especially fond of which cheese?
Wensleydale
His accent comes from the Holme Valley of West Yorkshire, though his letters end with a Wigan address.
Q 26Stop-motion studio Laika (Coraline, Kubo) is owned by the co-founder of which company?
Nike
Phil Knight first invested in 1998, and his son Travis Knight now runs the studio near Portland, Oregon.
Q 27In which city were Rankin/Bass 'Animagic' specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer actually produced?
Tokyo
Japanese animator Tadahito Mochinaga's MOM Production headed the puppet work throughout the 1960s.
Q 28Toy Story (1995), the first entirely computer-animated feature film, was directed by whom?
John Lasseter
It premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles and set a record for the biggest opening weekend.
Q 29The inaugural Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, presented in 2002, went to which film?
Shrek
It was also the first animated film named to the American Film Institute's top ten of the year.
Q 30Which film was the first hand-drawn, non-English winner of the Best Animated Feature Oscar?
Spirited Away
It also shared the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2002 and became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history.