why handmade animation ?

Bicycles, trains, cars and other things that go have been iconic images in cinema ever since the Lumière brothers filmed an approaching locomotive in 1896. Animation in particular shares a common genealogy with these 19th-century technologies; early animation was the province of eccentric tinkerers and bricoleurs like Muybridge, Otto Messmer, and Ladislas Starevicz. These people were motivated by a fascination with motion itself and what it's made of.

In Triplets, the bicycle becomes a beautiful metaphor for handmade animation: certainly not the fastest or easiest mode of transportation, but one with its own satisfactions, chief among them the sheer joy of motion brought into existence through the agency of one's own body. If traditional animators are cyclists, isn't animating a feature equivalent to riding the Tour de France? Lives there an animator who doesn't connect viscerally with Champion's indomitable urge to just keep pedaling?

by Luke Jaeger for frames per second magazine 2004