Kitty – A Russian Computer Animation From 1968

This short animation of a kitten could quite possibly be the world’s first ever computer generated film.

Created by a team of Russian physicists and mathematicians in 1968, a mathematic model of a walking cat was created on a BESM-4 computer. The computer then “rendered” the resulting animation to a printer, using alphabetical characters (similar to the tractor-feed printed ASCII art, so common on the walls of early computer labs).

The resulting frames of animation were then photographed by a motion picture camera, to produce the result shown above. More details about the film are available in this Russian-language article. [Google Translate link]