Animation: Science or Art?

I've been reading in Stuart Mealing's book "Computers and art". I found the first chapter very appealing, especially for a person like me that has a science background.

Mealing states that computer animation is a remarkable combination of Science and Art. He declares that animation represents one of the leading progression areas in computing and is defined to be a sequence of images in continuous movement. Its purpose may be entertainment, education, commercial persuasion or other.

The author asserts that computers have been of great assistance to the animation industry. He makes a sustained analysis of some of the ways that explain how the computer helps create better animations. He clearly explains that hand-drawn animation requires a lot of patience and is time-consuming because each frame is separately created by the illustrator. He then gives an example: “a feature film containing the production of 250,000 individual drawings would take fifty years of labour if all were to be drawn by one person [Halas 1974]”.

Mealing explains that computers  have replaced  people in doing monotonous tasks, especially the  specific repetitive chores involved in traditional animation.

In his first chapter, Mealing argues that computers can aid animation in two ways: as tools to develop the application of traditional methods; and as  means of producing output that could not be produced traditionally. It is possible that, the use of computers requires a smaller budget, less time to do the animation and has better precision than the traditional animation techniques: projects that were previously impossible to do can now be easily completed with the use of computers.

Stuart Mealing concludes that there are many ways that computers can support, complement or modernize traditional animation. For instance, the computer offers animators a new set of tools that would encourage them to push the boundaries of the discipline far forward, and allow work of unimagined complication and complexity to become an everyday reality.