Animation Codec

The Animation Codec is a lossless QuickTime format developed by Apple Inc. As its name suggests, it is heavily geared toward animated content. It works well with 2D animation compression, where the same color is generally used for large spaces. The Animation Codec is designed to run on systems that do not have expensive modern hardware.

While it works well for animated video, the Animation Codec would perform badly at attempting to compress real-world footage. Bad performance does not mean bad quality, since the Animation Codec is "lossless". So you could compress real-world footage with it without losing any quality whatsoever, but the gains you would make on filesize wouldn't be worth the effort. Older 2D animation movies might perform well with the Animation codec however.

There are other lossless video codecs available, like SheerVideo, that claim superior and lossless performance at compressing even complex video, like real-world footage.