Quickly after Roget's paper was presented scientists began experimenting with primitive animation devices, mostly used to prove the scientific theory, although some caught on as amusing parlor tricks. Some of these devices were the thaumatrope, invented by John Ayrton Paris; the zoetrope, invented by William Horner; and the praxinoscope, invented by Emile Reynaud. Although these devices were very simple, they helped pave the way for Reynaud, who would be the first to do animations on celluloid strips. Building on Reynaud's success Thomas Edison invented the modern projector.

Through the years more inventions and innovations helped along the way to the modern animation. Animators began doing black animations on white paper, replacing the common chalk on blackboard method. In 1914 Earl Hurd invented modern cel animation, by drawing the moving part of the animation on a transparent sheet of celluloid and filming it over the background. In New York, Raoul Barre opened the first animation studio, and invented the modern method of keeping the animated cells in order with pegs.

All throughout this time though the animations that were being created were often just animations of comic strips that appeared in newspapers, or animations played beginning of movies. All of them were under 30 minutes long. The first animation to reach feature length actually came from Argentina in 1917 and was called El Apostol. Despite this it wasn't until 1928 when a little animation called Steam Boat Willie came out of Disney Studios that animation really began to blossom. Steam Boat Willie was the first successful animation to appear with synchronized sound and it changed the way animators conceptualized animation forever.

Later Disney Studios would be the first to incorporate color and even multi-plane effects into their animations, but it wasn't until the invention of the computer that animation got it's next big push.