2. 职称英语
  3. (1) Animation is older than cinema, indeed almost as old as photography. Niep

(1) Animation is older than cinema, indeed almost as old as photography. Niep

游客2024-09-07  27
问题    (1) Animation is older than cinema, indeed almost as old as photography. Niepce made the first still photograph in 1826, just six years before Plateau invented the Phenakistoscope. The Zoetrope appeared just a year later in 1833. These two devices were examples of what today we would call drawn animation, presenting a series of pictures to the viewer in rapid succession to give the illusion of movement. While such toys were highly popular in the nineteenth century, it was not until the birth of cinema at the end of the century that animated films could tell stories.
   (2) Before the advent of CGI in the 1980s, animation techniques could be divided into two broad categories—drawn animation and model (or stop-motion) animation. The former involves photographing a series of two-dimensional images, usually drawings but sometimes cut-out shapes, while the latter uses three-dimensional puppets and models. Both techniques developed rapidly in the early years of cinema, with Cohl ("Fantasmagorie", 1908) and McCay ("Little Nemo", 1911) among the drawn animation pioneers and Starewicz ("The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman", 1912) the pre-eminent puppet animator.
   (3) The invention of eel animation by Hurd in 1914 was a key milestone. Not only did it reduce the work required to produce drawn animation by eliminating the need to redraw the backgrounds, it also made it possible to divide the work up among a team of specialists. One artist could design the characters, one draw the backgrounds, another produce key character frames as outline drawings, while yet others would work on the less inventive tasks of inking in outlines or filling in character movements ( "in-betweeners" ). The development of "rotoscoping" by the Fleischer brothers was another key improvement, leading to much more realistic character movement.
   (4) While the cel technique transformed drawn animation into a streamlined production-line process, model animation remained very much an individual art. As a result it languished, while by the 1930s eel-animated shorts had become part of nearly every film program. As well as Disney, several of the studios, Warner Brothers and MGM in particular, had flourishing animation departments. Disney produced the first full-length animated feature, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in 1937 and from then on released a new one roughly every other year.
   (5) The advent of widespread television in the 1960s had a profound effect on film programs. First newsreels were abandoned, as television news proved more efficient and immediate. Cartoon shorts were edged out more slowly, but became rare by the end of the 1960s. The animation studios, instead of making five-minute shorts for cinema exhibition, started making thirty-minute TV cartoons for children ("Top Cat", "Deputy Dawg" and "The Flintstones" for example). While stories of necessity became more complex, the cartoon drawings themselves became highly simplified to meet the budgets that TV imposed.
   (6) Within the domain of animated shorts almost every conceivable technique has continued to be used, but until recently cartoon features have been produced exclusively using cel animation. Indeed, for more than forty years, from "Snow White" (1937) until "The Secret of NIMH" (Bluth/Goldman, 1982) almost all the feature-length cartoons came from a single studio, Disney. Model animation, while often used for special effects in fantasy and science fiction films, was not used for a feature-length animated film until "Nightmare" (1993). Despite the success of "Nightmare" we have not seen many more stop-motion 3D cartoons. Indeed there has been just one, "Chicken Run" (Lord/Park, 2000), although the long middle section of "James and the Giant Peach" (Selick, 1996) is entirely stop-motion. Instead there has been a series of very successful 3D cartoons generated completely by computers, starting with "Toy Story" in 1995. [br] The word "languished" in Paragraph 4 means______.
选项 A、abandoned
B、declined
C、disappeared
D、retreated
答案 B
解析 本题考查根据上下文理解单词的含义。languish在这里表示“衰落”。选项A的abandoned主要表示“遗弃”。选项C的disappeare主要表示“消失”。选项D的retreat主要表示“撤退”。
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