Digital Felix The Cat from the 1980s

I only discovered this recently while doing some research for PuppetVision: The Movie (see previous post)...did you know that Felix The Cat: The Movie was one of the first films to use motion capture technology to create a computer generated character?

This digital Felix head was performed by Eren Ozker (the primary female puppeteer during the first season of The Muppet Show) and is a pioneering example of digital puppetry. Felix The Cat: The Movie was made in Europe in 1987, which means that it predates even Waldo C. Graphic. "Digital Felix" might be the very first digital puppet to ever appear in a feature film!

ANIMAC: Digital Puppetry in the 1960s

A dancer performs using ANIMAC - likely the world's first digital puppetry system - in 1962.

ACCAD at Ohio State University offers a course called A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation (link via BlenderNation). As you might expect, the course examines the history of the computer graphics, which stretches back much further than you might expect. The course section that I found to be the most interesting-looking was part twelve which looks at the work of Lee Harrison III, an computer graphics pioneer who in the 1960s developed ANIMAC, which was probably the world's first digital puppetry system.

A .pdf file with additional information about Lee Harrison and ANIMAC is available here.