Animation is a gray area

I brought this up in class today, but the whole idea of what exactly animation is astounds me.

When we watch films in class that are time lapses and photo collage and stop motion, it makes me wonder where animation begins and stops. So I dictionaried it, which produced this definition:

animation

[an-uh-mey-shuhn]
See more synonyms for animation on Thesaurus.com
noun
  1. animated quality; liveliness; vivacity; spirit:to talk with animation.
  2. an act or instance of animating or enlivening.
  3. the state or condition of being animated.

And it bring me to a point that we kind of touched upon this in class. Animation can also be metaphorical in its meaning. To be animated is to act lively, as I suppose while usually one would not be. So to animate something is a way that it normally isn't could be considered animation? Take, for instance, time lapse. Animating vines as they grow up a tree, or showing the cars zipping by and forming patterns with their lights: it gives these objects and things personality and liveliness that they didn't have before. The idea of consolidating tons of pictures to make movement has a lot of room for diversity, much more than I used to believe. 

I thought animation was just drawing something over and over but a little different each time and flipping through the photos like a flipbook. Now I am starting to realize that the definition of animation is much more broad than I had ever suspected. Being able to combine a bunch of real photos together to create movement that wasn't there before is animation. Film originated from animation. So what draws the line? Or is there one? 

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