Rotoscoping is a way of making an animated film. First someone films a real person, animal, or object moving. Then an artist draws over those pictures, one picture at a time, copying the shapes and the movement but turning them into drawings — or, later, into lines on a computer. The motion looks strangely real, because it comes from a living body, not from someone inventing every step. People have used it to make cartoons, to put a drawn character into a live-action scene, and to cut a person neatly out of a film so they can be placed somewhere else. It is slow, careful work. The name comes from the rotoscope, an old machine that shone the film onto glass so the artist could trace it. Today much of this happens on a computer, but we still call it rotoscoping.