Welcome!
Animation is one of the oldest forms of cinema. The first movies with a clear narrative (meaning not just test footage, but actual plot, albeit a very primitive one that often had to be narrated by a live performer in order to become clear) appeared in the last few years in the 19th century, around 1897. The first animated short, a propaganda piece for the Boer War, came out in 1899. Over the last 116 years, animation has gradually grown more and more sophisticated, to the point where animated shorts (such as those featuring Mickey Mouse) were commonly played before feature films, a spot that used to be occupied by live-action shorts such as “Flash Gordon”. When “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” came out in 1937, for the first time the world saw the true potential of animation as a medium (and not just a genre, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts seems to think), and the genre hasn’t slowed down ever since, continuously improving all the way to the present. While in 2015 we’re enjoying a lot less animated features and series than we did 20 or 30 years ago, the quality of animation has increased dramatically, with two of the top 10 highest grossing films of all time being animated and with more critically-acclaimed cartoons than ever before (such as “Gravity Falls”, “Steven Universe”, “Adventure Time”, “Avatar” and many others). Animation is blooming, and it’s everywhere around us – on TV, in the cinema, on billboards, on our phones… And yes, even in casinos!
My name is Katrin Lehrer, and I’m an animation student from Quarten, Switzerland. I’m in my second year now, but I’ve been interested in animation since I was very little. I also adore casino games – I’ve been playing them since I was about 13 or 14 (legally, of course – among friends and in non-gambling videogames), and really, the best gift I could give myself for my 18th birthday was finally signing up for a Swiss online casino! And it was awesome! Fun story about me – I once actually managed to win the jackpot from some slots, about $750,000. Not exactly a life changing sum, but it did set me up for university! Of course, I always like browsing casino sites, reading reviews, tips and that kind of thing. But there’s one thing I noticed – I’ve never seen anyone talk about animation in slots before. I’ve seen a handful of “Top 3 Cartoon Slots” or what have you, but for the most part animation seems mostly ignored. And I’m not just talking about the license that the slots and, in some online casinos, other games are based on – I’m also talking about the smoothness and colorfulness of the animation itself. Nobody ever really talks about a slot’s visuals in terms of animation. So I decided to change that! I hope that we, through this blog, can get an interesting discussion going!