English Every Day: Birth of Cinema, Film and Animation

Your Daily English Programme #9 - Birth of Film, Cinema & Animation (Listening B1-B2)

Think Before You Listen

A look at these photos will reveal the topic of today's post: Have you seen them before? What do they represent?

A Projecting Praxinoscope 1882 Wikipedia.org

A Disney Brothers' First Flickr.com

On July 11, 1895, Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, French pioneers of photographic equipment, devised an early motion-picture camera and projector called the Cinématographe that  revolutionized the world of motion picture for the years to come. Today, we will be looking at one of the fastest-growing aspects of the moving picture industry: the animation.

Watch and Listen

Before You Listen: Use the words in the table to complete the passage below (you need to ' modify' some of the words to fit the sentence gaps)¹:

cartoonist	bankrupt	come up with	blockbuster	feature-length
animator	hit	golden age	budget	re-imagine

Move your mouse over the gaps to see a hint:

In the early days of animation, several (1)___________ got together and started an animation company. They tried to (2)_____________ new characters for their (3)______________ animated films. Their first production, The Stars, became a huge (4)_______ although it had been created with a very small (5)_________ . This early success led to the creation and release of many popular (6)____________ . This was the (7)_____________ of their company, which unfortunately did not last long. The newly-hired (8)___________ became more and more reliant on (9)____________ old characters and stories, and eventually the company went (10)___________ and had to close down.

(See the answers in the first comment)

Watch to Find Out: Has the Walt Disney Company always been successful?

Let's Practice

Listen again: Find out what happened to Disney on these important dates²:

(See the answers in the first comment)

Over to You

In the last few years, computer-generated animation has taken the world of cartoons and games over with exciting new themes and bold futuristic depictions.

Watch this highly popular CGI-animated short, "Overwatch - Alive": What differences do you see between this new trend in animation and the works of Disney and Pixar? (let us know in the comments)

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Download a print-friendly pdf copy for classroom use (with links to Youtube videos).

Did You Notice? If you move your mouse over the underlined words, you'll see a short explanation pop up.

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1 Why this activity? Using vocabulary in a sentence or a short passage will help you learn 'how to use' the words, which is an important part of 'knowing a word'. Just recognizing a word is not enough.^↩
2 Remember: it is not always necessary to know all the words or understand all of a text. Sometimes, for example, when we listen to the news, even in our mother tongue, we only try and catch the essential information that we need.^↩