There are many ways that animation has changed in time in techniques and technology.
I wrote this question mainly because I very much like the method of Rotoscoping in animation, rotoscoping is taking an existing image or video and tracing frames to create an animation, often times its used to change reality or mix animation with reality.
One of the ways in which history can be a huge factor in rotoscoping is the obvious one, the time era in which the original video or photographs came from, since many rotoscoping animators stay faithful to the animation and keep to the mise en scene of the video but a lot of animators like to modernise things or change them try create a surreal world.
I, myself personally see rotoscoping to be a form of surrealism as it's taking something that exists and making something new out of it... A somewhat animated "deconstruction, reconstruction".
The definition of surrealism in the eyes of Wikipedia is to create a semi existing piece that is not possible in the eyes of reality.
Surrealism is a movement that manifested in the 1920's and was made big by people like Andre Breton, Salvador Dali and Man Ray, some artists moved their skill to photography and developed their surrealist skills further.
Man Ray was a huge role in the movements Surrealism and Dada, He was also moved around a lot because of the war and that is probably the key reason he became a good part of the movement Dadaism as it's said that it was born out of a reaction to The first world war. Dadaism would also play a role in the inspirations to other art categories.
The information I supplied above is from reading the website:
http://www.manraytrust.com/ where is includes a short biography of the artist.
The sources I used to know such information about surrealism are mainly online based.
I find that the similarity in surrealism and rotoscoping is the reason I favour the two when it comes to art forms and because I like the concept of editing reality.
In some sense I believe that it could also relate a lot on futurism, futurism is an art movement that focuses a lot on technology and movement, paintings in this style often have depictions of humanity moving forward and I believe this is also a part of how history effects the style of art.
I think that animation is usually determined by the time era that it is set in and the mise en scene is an obvious part to play in that. .. I know in a lot of animations people change the colour scheme of animations intentionally to make it seem old or new.
The film and animation I know of to be inspired heavily on history and surrealism is Alice in wonderland, the story itself is historic and surreal and holds many adaptations of it in different forms.
As well as my theory that physical history will inevitably change the style of rotoscoping due to it just being a tracing of an actual event, but I do also believe that the evolution of technology is also a huge key role on the style of animation, as things like CGI is a newer technology and in time has made traditional frame by frame, drawn animation become obsolete.
Animation styles like flip books, frame by frame, stop motion and rotoscoping have become less known to the newer generation of the animation audience because they are too used to the style of their "time", because they aren't tracing physical events in this form of animation, they are down to the artists doing their research on a certain time period.
I notice for older animations they have been more into the futuristic side of things and imagining things that will happen in the future, but as the things that are already in said animations become real due to humanity advancing in their tech, animations have become more about the past, I believe it's because to appeal to the audience, Animators give them what they cannot have, like an ideal planet with amazing gadgets, or a historic event with pretty colonial dresses.. Either way, it will appeal to some body.
