Traditional animation, sometimes also called cel animation or hand-drawn animation, is the oldest and historically the most popular form of animation. In a traditionally-animated cartoon, each frame is drawn by hand. For a detailed explanation of the first steps of making an animation (storyboard, design, layout etc.), please see Wikipedia, where the rest of this section also is extracted from. There are two main types of cel animation; Traditional ink-and-paint and camera, and Digital ink and paint.

Traditional ink-and-paint and camera:
Once the clean-ups and in between drawings for a sequence are completed, they are prepared for photography. Each drawing is transferred from paper to a thin, clear sheet of plastic called a cel (once made out of celluloid, they are now made of acetate). The outline of the drawing is inked or photocopied onto the cel, and gouache or a similar type of paint is used on the reverse sides of the cels to add colors in the appropriate shades. The transparent quality of the cel allows for each character or object in a frame to be animated on different cels, as the cel of one character can be seen underneath the cel of another; and the opaque background will be seen beneath all of the cels. Each cel involved in a frame of a sequence is laid on top of each other, with the background at the bottom of the stack. A piece of glass is lowered onto the artwork in order to flatten any irregularities, and the composite image is then photographed by a special animation camera (rostrum camera). The cels are removed, and the process repeats for the next frame until each frame in the sequence has been photographed. Each cel has registration holes, small holes along the top or bottom edge of the cel, which allow the cel to be placed on corresponding peg bars before the camera to ensure that each cel aligns with the one before it. Sometimes, frames may need to be photographed more than once, in order to implement superimpositions and other camera effects. Pans are created by either moving the camera, cels, or backgrounds one step at a time over a succession of frames.

Digital ink and paint:
The "traditional" ink-and-paint process is no longer in use by any major animated productions at present. The current process, termed "digital ink and paint," is the same as traditional ink and paint until after the animation drawings are completed; instead of being transferred to cels, the animators' drawings are scanned into a computer, where they are colored and processed using one or more of a variety of software packages. The resulting drawings are composited in the computer over their respective backgrounds, which have also been scanned into the computer (if not digitally painted), and the computer outputs the final film by either exporting a digital video file, using a video cassette recorder, or printing to film using a high-resolution output device.

The last major feature film to use traditional ink and paint was The Swan Princess (1995); the last animated series to do so was Ed, Edd'n'Eddy. Digital ink and paint has been in use at Walt Disney Feature Animation since 1989, where it was used for the final rainbow shot in The Little Mermaid.

Stop motion is an animation technique which makes static objects appear to move. It is central to the clay animation technique and to puppet-based animation - examples are The Nightmare Before Christmas, Chicken Run, Corpse Bride and all of the Wallace And Gromit films.

Stop motion requires a camera, either motion picture or digital, that can expose single frames. It works by shooting a single frame, stopping the camera to move the object a little bit, and then shooting another frame. When the film runs continuously at 24 frames per second, the illusion of fluid motion is created and the objects appear to move by themselves. This is similar to the animation of cartoons, but with real objects instead of drawings.

Computer animation is the art of creating moving images via the use of computers. It is a subfield of computer graphics and animation. 3D computer graphics are more and more common, but 2D computer graphics are still widely used. Sometimes the target of the animation is the computer itself, sometimes the target is another medium, such as film. It is also referred to as CGI, Computer Generated Imagery, especially when used in movies. Please visit Wikipedia for a thorough explanation of the technique, along with examples of the computer codes used to create the animation. At the DreamWorks Animation website there is also a neat explanation with examples.

3D Computer animation is essentially a digital successor to the art of stop motion animation; the animated figure is built on the computer monitor and rigged with a virtual skeleton. Then the limbs, eyes, mouth, clothes, etc. of the 3D figure are moved by the animator. Finally, the animation is rendered.

One open challenge in computer animation is a photorealistic animation of humans. Due to the enormous complexity of the human body, human motion, and human biomechanics, realistic simulation of humans remains largely an open problem. Eventually, the goal is to create software where the animator can generate a movie sequence showing a photorealistic human character in a way that the viewer is no longer able to tell if a particular movie sequence is computer-generated, or created using real actors in front of movie cameras. Achieving such a goal would mean that conventional flesh-and-bone human actors are no longer necessary for this kind of movie creation, and computer animation would become the standard way of making every kind of a movie, not just animated movies. This is not likely to happen very soon, however such concepts obviously bear certain philosophical implications for the future of the film industry.