Editing Limited animation (section)

==Early history==
The use of budget-cutting and time-saving animation measures in animation dates back to the earliest commercial animation, including cycled animations, mirror-image and symmetrical drawings, still characters, and other labor-saving methods. In general, the progression was from early productions in which every frame was drawn by hand, independent of each other drawing, toward more limited animation that made use of the same drawings in different ways. 

[[Winsor McCay]], a man who put an unprecedented amount of detail into his animations, boasted that in his 1914 film, ''[[Gertie the Dinosaur]]'', everything moved, including the rocks and blades of grass in the background. In contrast, his 1918 film ''[[The Sinking of the Lusitania]]'' progressed to using cels over still backgrounds, while still maintaining a level of detail comparable to that of ''Gertie''.<ref>{{cite book |last = Canemaker |first = John |author-link = John Canemaker |title = Winsor McCay: His Life and Art |url = https://books.google.com/books?id=vs82AQAAIAAJ |edition = Revised |date = 2005 |publisher = Abrams Books |isbn = 978-0-8109-5941-5 }}</ref> 
[[File:The Dover Boys at Pimento University 1080p.webm|thumb|''The Dover Boys'', an early example of limited animation]]
The 1942 ''[[Merrie Melodies]]'' cartoon ''[[The Dover Boys]]'', directed by [[Chuck Jones]], is one of the earliest Warner Bros. cartoons to extensively employ some of the processes of what would become known as "limited animation", particularly its use of characters that either stand still or move so quickly that the actual motion appears to be a blur. This animation technique, an exaggeration of the established practice of [[squash and stretch]], has come to be known as the smear frame.<ref>Chuck Jones: ''Extremes and In-betweens – A Life in Animation'' (PBS 2000)</ref>