 Chinese animation has long been under the shadow of Disney and Japanese animations, but it once played a very important role in world animation.In the first century BC, the Han-era Chinese engineer Ding Huan (丁緩) invented a device "on which many strange birds and mysterious animals were attached" that were said to have "moved quite naturally", which was said to have been an attempted to depict the sequential motion of images moving back and forth, yet is unclear if this and the other devices that British historian Joseph Needham calls "a variety of zoetrope" involved any true illusion of animation or simply featured static or mechanized figures actually moving through space.The modern animation industry began in France in 1888, invented by Charles-Émile Reynaud.