Animation Trivia
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This animation trivia quiz has 130 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.
30 of 130 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which French artist made Fantasmagorie (1908), considered the first animated cartoon?
Émile Cohl
Émile Cohl drew Fantasmagorie as black lines on white paper, then printed it in negative so the stick figure appears chalk-white on black.
Q 02Which American game company introduced the definitive zoetrope, with replaceable picture strips, as a toy in 1866?
Milton Bradley
Milton Bradley sold the zoetrope from 1866; its inventor, William Ensign Lincoln, devised it as a Brown University sophomore of about 18.
Q 03Reynaud's 1877 praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with what?
An inner ring of mirrors
An inner ring of mirrors reflected the picture strip; the reflections stayed nearly stationary as the drum turned, giving a brighter, less distorted image than the zoetrope's slits.
Q 04Which physicist invented the phenakistiscope around December 1832, simultaneously with Simon Stampfer?
Joseph Plateau
Joseph Plateau never settled on one name for his spinning disc, 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
Reynaud's Théâtre Optique ran at the Musée Grévin wax museum from October 1892, more than three years before the Lumière brothers' first paid film screening.
Q 06Blackton's 1906 Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, an early hand-drawn animation, was drawn on what surface?
A blackboard
Blackton drew the faces in chalk on a blackboard, filming each change frame by frame; he had co-founded Vitagraph Studios and performed 'lightning sketch' acts on film.
Q 07Winsor McCay first showed Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) not in cinemas but as an interactive part of what?
His vaudeville act
McCay performed Gertie in his vaudeville act, giving her spoken commands on stage; a live-action prologue was added after William Randolph Hearst curtailed his touring.
Q 08Winsor McCay's most ambitious film (1918) recreated which 1915 event?
The sinking of the Lusitania
The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) took McCay about 25,000 drawings over 22 months, yet it was a commercial disappointment and his later films drew little attention.
Q 09El Apóstol (1917), considered the first feature-length animated film, was made in which country?
Argentina
Quirino Cristiani made El Apóstol in Argentina, satirising President Hipólito Yrigoyen; the only copies burned in a 1926 fire at Federico Valle's studio.
Q 10The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surviving animated feature, used what technique?
Silhouette cutouts
Lotte Reiniger's silhouette cutouts, cardboard figures weighted with lead, drew on Wayang shadow puppets; 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
The multiplane camera is credited to Reiniger: layering flat planes at different depths gave her shadow films a parallax that Disney later industrialised with its own 1937 rig.
Q 12What did industry insiders derisively call Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs during production?
Disney's Folly
'Disney's Folly' was the insiders' nickname; Walt mortgaged his house to finish the film, which then became the highest-grossing release 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
Jason and the Argonauts (1963) expanded the single-skeleton duel Harryhausen had animated for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad five years earlier; the sequence took him over four months.
Q 22What did stop-motion pioneer Ladislas Starevich use as protagonists around 1910?
Dead insects
Dead insects were his cast: live stag beetles kept dying under the studio lights, so Starevich wired their legs and animated the corpses, as in The Cameraman's Revenge (1912).
Q 23Which 2000 film, co-produced with DreamWorks, was Aardman's first feature?
Chicken Run
Rotoscoping let Fleischer trace filmed movement for the Out of the Inkwell series; rival studios could use it freely only after his 1917 patent expired in 1934.
Q 14Betty Boop began life in Fleischer cartoons as an anthropomorphised what?
Dog
Dog was her first species: Betty debuted in Dizzy Dishes (1930) as a French poodle with floppy ears, evolving into a fully human flapper by 1932.
Q 15'Termite Terrace' was the affectionate nickname for the classic animation department of which studio?
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. released the unit's Looney Tunes; Termite Terrace was a ramshackle building on the Sunset lot where Tex Avery's crew worked for about a year from 1935.
Q 16At which studio did Tex Avery create Droopy, Screwy Squirrel and Red Hot Riding Hood after 1941?
MGM
MGM hired Avery in 1941 after he left the Looney Tunes unit; his humour there 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?
What's Opera, Doc? (1957), Jones's six-minute Wagner parody, took the top spot; in 1992 it became the first short cartoon added to the National Film Registry.
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
The Flintstones premiered on ABC on 30 September 1960 and ran six seasons, a prime-time animation record that stood until The Simpsons passed it in 1997.
Q 20Before becoming a half-hour series in 1989, The Simpsons began as shorts on which variety programme?
The Tracey Ullman Show
The Simpsons began as 48 shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show from April 1987 before its half-hour debut in December 1989.
Chicken Run, Aardman's first feature, is set on a Yorkshire egg farm and grossed more than $220 million worldwide, a stop-motion record at the time.
Q 24Nick Park's Creature Comforts (1989) matched animated zoo animals with recordings of real people discussing what?
Their homes
Their homes and living conditions were the subject, voiced by zoo animals; the short was Park's entry in Channel 4's Lip Synch series and won his first Academy Award.
Q 25Wallace, the cheese-loving inventor of Wallace & Gromit, is especially fond of which cheese?
Wensleydale
Wensleydale is Wallace's favourite, and the films' mentions gave the Yorkshire cheese a sales boost; his accent comes from the Holme Valley of West Yorkshire.
Q 26Stop-motion studio Laika (Coraline, Kubo) is owned by the co-founder of which company?
Nike
Nike co-founder Phil Knight bought into Will Vinton Studios in 1998, took control and renamed it Laika in 2005; his son Travis Knight became its president and CEO.
Q 27In which city were Rankin/Bass 'Animagic' specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer actually produced?
Tokyo
Tokyo's MOM Production, led by Japanese animator Tadahito Mochinaga, built and animated the puppets for Rankin/Bass throughout the 1960s.
Q 28Toy Story (1995), the first entirely computer-animated feature film, was directed by whom?
John Lasseter
John Lasseter directed it at Pixar; the film premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles and earned him a Special Achievement Academy Award.
Q 29The inaugural Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, presented in 2002, went to which film?
Shrek
Shrek beat Monsters, Inc. and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius to the first Best Animated Feature Oscar at the March 2002 ceremony.
Q 30Which film was the first hand-drawn, non-English winner of the Best Animated Feature Oscar?
Spirited Away
Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 film, took the award at the March 2003 ceremony, the year after the category's debut.