Something Completely Different

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Originally envisioned by me as the History of Cartoons, it wasn't long before I realised that while of course you can't have cartoons without animation, the reverse does not hold true, and indeed, sometimes I had a hard time, as my research drew me further and further back in time, deciding what was animation, what qualified and what should I include? After all, is a flicker-book (so to speak) of drawings captured by a camera really animation? The answer, according to the experts, would appear to be yes, yes it is, and so I found myself reaching back into the seventeenth century, somewhere I had not ever expected to be looking at as I began this journal.

Rather naively, times two, I was also of the opinion that cartoons, in their most basic sense, at least for this journal, meant cartoons on TV, and had intended leaving out any animated movies, or cartoons shown in movie theatres. Sounds ridiculous now, I know, but that's how I thought. Of course, I quickly realised this was a pointless view, and that if I wished to write a proper history of what could be loosely called cartoons, I had no choice - indeed, it was incumbent upon me: I would have to research the entire history of animation, going back as far as necessary, and sticking my nose into corners and areas I had not originally envisaged exploring. After all, as I found out with my History of Prog journal (eventually to make its appearance here) and indeed my recent Classical Music one, the roots of what you're researching can take you to odd places and back further in time that you could possibly imagine.

It will probably surprise you how long animation, in some form, has been with us - it certainly surprised me - and even then, how absolutely incredible some of the very earliest animations (which were, largely, just drawings on paper, after all) were, and still are. It amazed me how crude sketches made by some French guy in the 1890s could still make me sit up and marvel, and nod my head in appreciation. Of course, animation has come a long, long way since then, but even so, some of these early examples can proudly stand alongside the best Pixar or Disney (yes I know they're one and the same now) can offer, given the extremely limited technology they had to work with back then.

As this art form, by its very nature, relies on not just reading about but seeing, witnessing, watching the animations, I've scoured the internet and done my best to find videos you can watch. I'd recommend doing so, otherwise so much of the artistry and effort, the expertise and, hell, the pure magic these people wove with very basic materials will be lost on you, and you won't get the same sense of wonder I did when I watched them (yes I've watched every clip that will be posted here). But if you can't or don't want to watch everything, I have made a point of trying to, as it were, summarise or narrate each clip, so that you can get a good idea of what's going on. Still, as they say, the old adage holds true: seeing is believing, and some of the stuff you'll see here is frankly hard to believe.

As someone who more or less believed animation began with a certain Mr. Disney I've been roundly disabused of this opinion through my research, and have come to see that there was so much more there before he even came on the scene. There's so much to go into, so Insofar as I can, I'll be following a timeline, and trying to avoid the trap of just featuring American cartoons. I know they led the field for a long time – even started the whole craze properly – but I do recall watching some weird and trippy cartoons as a kid from the likes of Poland and what was then known as Czechoslovakia, as well as other countries, and I'll be doing my best to track those down.

So now I present to you my attempt at the history of animation, covering approximately two hundred years, if you can believe it, from the very first pencil drawings that moved due to photographic trickery right up to the latest Pixar computer-generated marvels. The only caveat I make is that I will not be looking at print media - comics, newspapers, graphic novels, none of that (see my History of Comics for that; oh yes, there's a Trollheart journal for every occasion!)- as animation must, by its very nature, be seen to move (even if it doesn't really, it must create the illusion of movement) and they don't. The only exception here is when something began as a comic or newspaper strip - Popeye, Betty Boop, Peanuts, Felix etc - and then made the leap to the screen, large and/or small. In that case the original will be referenced, but only in passing. Comments and debate are as ever very welcome.

So: who wants to watch some cartoons? How about some badly-drawn and crudely-animated paper figures? Yeah? Can I get a yeah? Pfft, suit yourselves.

Part One: Early Animation: Forefathers, Godfathers and Wizards
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As in most, if not all, histories I research, the question comes up: who did it first? Who created the form, and who have we to thank, who can we point to as being the person who kicked it all off? With animation, given how far back it goes, that's not such an easy question, and I had quite a time answering it for myself. Still not sure I even came up with a satisfactory, answer.

Ask any average person this question and you're going to get more than likely the one answer, but that's way off the mark. Uncle Walt certainly can lay claim to bringing animation to the masses, to some degree (though we may, in fact will dispute and discuss this in later sections) but he was far from the first animator. In fact, America was considerably behind the curve when it came to making drawings move for people's entertainment. So who were the pioneers? Well, let's take a look, shall we? You might be surprised by what we find out.

Seems you can even go all the way back to the ancients, who painted "moving scenes" on jars and things, that are accepted as being animation in their own right. But I'm not concerned with such prehistoric examples, and in the course of my research I've found it hard to come up with a definitive answer as to who is responsible for the birth of animation. Therefore I present these examples of men who can possibly be called

The Godfathers of Animation
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Charles-Émile Reynaud (1844-1918)

With an engineer for a father and an artist for a mother, Reynaud was perfectly placed to become one of the first animators, improving upon the zoetrope, a device that spun and showed painted figures which appeared to move as the watcher viewed them through slits cut in the cylinder, with his praxinoscope, which improved the design by replacing the simple slits with mirrors, making the images as they passed by more fluid and less distorted that those seen through the zoetrope. Originally sold as a very successful toy, Reynaud began to think about using it as a projector, by having a large screen in front of the praxinoscope, onto which he could project his "moving" figures. In essence, it seems this was the first example, almost, of a movie projector. However Reynaud failed to patent it and a few short years later the Lumière  brothers created and patented the first real movie camera, the cinematograph, and that was the end of his invention.

The théâtre optique

Literally, the optical theatre, this was the improved version of Reynaud's praxinoscope, the one with the ability to project the figures onto a screen. Reynaud's first performance was for some select friends, and was called "Un Bon Bock" (a good beer) and they were so impressed by it that he then set up the théâtre optique. However the popularity of his machine turned out to be something of a two-edged sword. Two of its main drawbacks were that it was very fragile, and could easily break if not handled and treated properly, and in addition the only way to operate it was by hand, which meant that when Reynaud secured a contract with the Grévin Museum in 1892 for daily performances of the machine, he had to be there personally to turn the thing. Not quite sure why he couldn't have paid someone else to do it, but that's what it says. Maybe the museum wanted him to be there personally in case anyone had any questions, or maybe they didn't (or he didn't) trust anyone else to work the apparatus. Maybe it was just in the contract that it had to be him.

Whatever the reason, the Grévin also demanded new films every year, while a clause in the contract (did he not read it before signing such a draconian document?) prevented him from selling any of his films outside of France. The grind of being tied into this contract, all his time taken up literally turning the handle of the praxinoscope and coming up with new material for it, allied to the as already alluded to invention of the cinematograph, which was to make his machine obsolete only a few years later, all led to Reynaud testily dumping his films into the Seine, where they were destroyed. Sadly, nothing exists today except this one clip I was able to track down. It does, however, make the jaw drop when you see the techniques used and remember this was at the tail-end of the nineteenth century!
Sure. you can see through the figure and it's obvious he's made of paper, but look how he moves! Or seems to, I should say. Look how the brightly-painted figure of the woman appears to emerge from a door to the right and walk onto the "stage". When Pierrot enters, he comes through a door that just appears in the wall, but it's believable as an entrance. And the figures genuinely seem to interact with each other. Remember, these are just static drawings being projected on a screen. When the door opens there's a square of light on the floor too, as if a real door had opened, and when the first figure we saw goes behind a pillar, he disappears completely, in that sort of animation-doesn't-obey-the-laws-of-physics thing cartoons would later employ. Now the reconstruction shown in the video was admittedly a hundred years later, but you have to assume that all they did was restored it, not upgraded or updated it in any way, in which case it's a stunning achievement for the time.

I think Reynaud has a good claim to being named the actual father of animation, though history precludes him from this as he was not ultimately successful, and was largely forgotten as the cinematograph took over and the Lumière  brothers passed instead into the history books. At the heart of the unhappy inventor's failure was the reliance on temperamental machinery that was very delicate, but more, the one-man-band idea, the artisan who worked alone. While the Lumières made a business out of their new machine, had it easily mass-produced and were able to show people how to use it, Reynaud, a true remnant of the nineteenth century compared to the forward-looking, almost futurist Lumières, laboured on alone and refused to involve big business or investors, and like all the "little guys" in every developing industry, he was crushed by the wheels of advancing technology. He died after a short spell in a hospice in 1917.

Remarkably, and perhaps giving Reynauld the last word from beyond the grave, the Lumière brothers declared "the cinema is an invention without any future", which probably ranks right up there alongside "Can't act, can't sing. Can dance a little" (Astaire) and "too ugly to become famous" (The Rolling Stones) with the most ill-advised reverse predictions ever made. The Lumières instead marketed their invention as a tool for photography, not film, and so are not considered, despite making the first real strides in the field of animation, to be its forebears, despite being credited with having invented the technology.

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Arthur Melbourne-Cooper (1874-1961)

From what I can make out, the next milestone on the road to animation comes from the UK, from a guy called Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, the son of a photographer who created what is generally accepted as "the world's first stop-motion film". It was commissioned by Bryant and May, one of the biggest manufacturers of matches at the time, in response to an appeal to help the soldiers in the Boer War, who were struggling from a shortage of matches. You might imagine, far from home and fighting surely disease and heatstroke as well as an implacable enemy that the last thing on the minds of the soldiers was smoking, but when has that ever stopped a company getting what it wanted?

Using what would become a well-used method of filming one frame, moving the model slightly, filming again, moving it again etc, Melbourne-Cooper was able to make it seem as if the matches were animated, as two sticks figure made of them spelled out the appeal on a black wall. This all took place in 1899.
Now, let's be clear and honest here. The voiceover on this video proudly claims "The oldest existing animated film in the world is British." But no, it isn't. Because as we've seen from our piece on our friend Charles-Emile Reynaud, a version of his Pauvre Pierrot is still around, albeit in a restored form, and that predates Matches Appeal by a good seven years. But I suppose if Melbourne-Cooper's one, being shot, obviously, in black and white, has survived without being restored or altered for over a hundred years, then maybe she has a point. Whatever the case, it's an impressive little bit, both of animation and of advertising, pulling at the heart (and purse) strings of the viewer, both by dint of their patriotic fervour for "the boys abroad" and by the cuteness of the little stick figures. Well, I don't think they're cute but I bet many who watched that film did, and donated their guinea accordingly.

By 1908 Melbourne-Cooper had progressed in leaps and bounds (for the time) and had moved on to be able to shoot a live-action movie with stop-motion (or, as it was called at the time, frame-by-frame) animation in the fantasy short film Dreams of Toyland. In the movie, a woman takes her son to a toyshop, where a distinctly sinister-looking shopkeeper sells her some toys. In quite a clever move, one of the toys she buys, a large omnibus, has an advertisement on it proclaiming the title of the film. That's all very well and good as far as it goes, but nothing terribly innovative. Yet.
It's when the child goes to bed that things start to get interesting. Suddenly the scene zooms in, and we see the toys all arranged as if they're in their own little city. People cross roads while horses and carts move along them and that big omnibus makes its slow way down the thoroughfare. One of the soft toys (think it might be a golliwog - wouldn't be allowed these days!) - even drives the omnibus while other toys, including a white teddy bear, climb on board. However in helping I think a monkey on to the bus the bear overbalances and falls off the bus. Oh dear! But he's not hurt (when ever is anyone in cartoons or animation, or when does it ever matter?) in fact he starts fighting with.. yes I'm sure that's a golliwog. So you have a white bear fighting a toy notoriously recognised as a black person. Whether innocently or no, whether making a political/racial statement or just completely coincidentally, you have perhaps the first filmed occurrence of a race fight on screen!

Now it looks like the golliwog is stealing some drunk's bag and running off, and then being tackled by a monkey. Are they fighting or dancing? If the former, there's a very violent subtext to this film! Now a guy on stilts is joining in and - no, they're all dancing now. Definitely dancing. And now they've been run over by the omnibus! Oh look! Here's that troublesome white bear back, and he's riding a train. And he's, um, ramming a monkey in the arse with it. Now the monkey is on a horse chasing the bear and here comes the omnibus again and - it's crashed into the bear, running him over and blowing up. Man, such violence and such a dark ending!

Amazing stuff, and if you're totally into looking for subtexts like me, there's racial violence, latent homosexual activity, just normal violence and road rage! Crazy. And all before World War I. Arthur Cooper-Melbourne was not just an animator, but made plenty of live-action films (as this one shows) and in fact opened two studios, one of which burned down, but that pesky war interrupted his schedule and though he made some animated advertisments for cinemas after the war, opening an ad agency, he retired in 1940 and died in 1961.
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Walter Robert Booth (1869-1938) and Robert William Paul (1869-1943)

Interesting point above: these two men appear to have been born in the same year and died a mere five years apart, Paul slightly  outlasting Booth. A cartoonist and conjurer, Booth teamed up with Paul, an inventor and showman, and together they produced a number of animated films, beginning with Upside Down, or The Human Flies in which Booth simply turned the camera upside-down to make it appear as if his subjects were on the ceiling. A simple trick, but back then it probably stumped audiences, and being a magician at heart, he probably played up to the idea that this was a form of magic.
It's cleverly done, and let's be honest: it's actually more realistic and believable than Batman and Robin, some sixty years later, apparently walking up a wall! You know how this trick is done, yet in some ways you kind of forget that, and it looks very impressive.  then she's a skeleton, then she's a man - very clever indeed.
Marley's Ghost, shown above, from 1901, was a Paul product, and though it's essentially a movie, it does use clever early animation techniques, such as superimposing Marley's ghostly face on Scrooge's door, and also scenes from the miser's childhood on a black curtain over his bed. Another of his, this time from five years later, shows a car driving up the wall of a building to escape a pursuing policeman, then fly across the sky, up into the clouds (along which it drives as if they were hills) and onto the moon (face and all) then on to Saturn, where it literally drives around the gas giant's rings, falling off and plunging back to earth, where it smashes through the roof of the courthouse, from which it is pursued by the law until, caught, the driver has the car turn into a horse and cart, and the cops let it go. Whereupon, as it drives away, it turns back into a car.
Booth is probably best known, if at all, for his "scaremongering" animation trilogy, The Airship Destroyer (1909), The Aerial Submarine (1910) and The Aerial Anarchists (1911), the last of which predicted what might happen should terrorists gain control of aircraft, perhaps both a prophecy about the coming war and also a look almost a century into the future where the numbers 911 would take on a whole different, horrible and long-lasting meaning, and would in fact prove his "theory".
The middle one is the only one I could track down, and again it's more a film than a proper animation, but it does use clever techniques that would be used again and again in cartoons, such as the fake ocean seen through the portholes of the submarine by the captives as they travel beneath the water, complete with animated fish, the animation of a torpedo and an explosion as the sub torpedoes an ocean liner and a rather clever if crude flight as the sub leaves the sea and flies into the air. Interestingly too, it shows the development of photographic plates in the film, possibly (though I can't confirm) the first time this process was captured on film.

I also remark on the fact here that the leader of the pirates, from what I can see, appears to be a woman. Considering this was 1910 and women's suffrage was still a decade away, this is either a very bold move on Booth's part, making a telling statement, or I guess could also be viewed as the belief that women on board ship are always bad luck. She must be the captain though, because as everyone else, including the hostages, scramble clear and run when the submarine crashes to earth, she folds her arms, remains in the hatchway and waits till the thing explodes, literally going down with her vessel.

Like many early animators and film-makers, Booth gave it all up in 1915 and got into the advertising business, where he invented a method called "Flashing Film Ads: unique colour effects in light and movement." Paul had already moved on to other things by 1910, five years previous, but is remembered fondly by animators, and when you look at the work he put out that's not at all surprising. But he had many irons in the fire, and neither cinematography nor animation were the ones he wanted to handle.

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James Stuart Blackton (1875-1941)

Another Englishman who can be truly said to be one of the godfathers of animation, Blackton produced most of his work in the USA, so may erroneously sometimes be considered an American animator, but he was born in Sheffield in England. He worked with Thomas Edison and set up the American Vitagraph Company, one of the first motion picture companies in America. Eventually the company was bought out by Warner Bros. Blackton produced some animated films that are recognised today as the finest examples of clever stop-motion film, including "The Enchanted Drawing" (1900) in which Blackton draws a picture of a fat man and then beside him a bottle and a glass. He then takes the glass and bottle from the canvas and drinks the beer, later also drawing a top hat on the man which he takes and wears. The expression of the drawing changes too. It's really quite remarkable for the time.
His other major stop-motion films (not strictly animation but using it in some scenes) are "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" (1906) and "The Haunted Hotel" (1907), both of which illustrate the technique well, especially the latter, which allows the creation of ghosts on the screen. "Humorous Phases" shows two faces, one man one woman, reacting to each other, They smile, wink, and when the man blows cigar smoke at the woman and obscures her completely (just before she makes a disapproving frown) Blackton erases them both and creates a new, full-figure sketch of man who bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain rotund director of suspense films! Good evening...
"Haunted Hotel" seems to show ghosts writhing in the smoke from the chimney as the short opens, then the house and a tree outside it both animate, the windows and doors of the former becoming a face. Inside the hotel, objects move, confusing and annoying the weary traveller, and then in an action which surely Disney must have robbed for Fantasia twenty years later, bread cuts itself and coffee pours itself out and then a clown figure bearing more than a passing resemblance to Renaud's Pauvre Pierrot comes out of the milk jug and dances around. The animation is exceptionally smooth and seamless for the era we're talking about here, and it's no wonder all of these early films are now in the Library of Congress, preserved for future generations.

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So, far from Uncle Walt being the father of animation, it seems the only ones to come close to deserving that title were in fact English. Still, everything the abovementioned created was either what were known as "lightning sketches" (where the hand of the artist is shown sketching out a figure which is then animated by various cinematographic effects) or stop-motion films, both of which can certainly be regarded as forms of animation, but don't really tie in with what cartoons and animated films would eventually turn out to be, ie manipulation of frames of drawn characters.

Over the English Channel, the film craze had already been underway of course, with Reynauld and the Lumiere brothers, but nobody had really made the leap into true animation. It was in fact another Frenchman, decoding the ideas and methods of an Englishman, who would perhaps unlock the door that led to one of the world's first true animated films.
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Émile Cohl (1857-1938)
Cohl was intrigued by the process used to animate the dinner things in James Blackton's "The Haunted Hotel", and set about working it out for himself. Once he had, he used that process to produce his own animated feature, which debuted in 1909. "Fantasmagorie" featured a clown who interacts with various other people and objects. The motion is fluid, and when a woman sits in front of him with a large hat with many feathers, blocking his view, he delights in taking the feathers from her hat one by one and disposing of them. But the film is very stream-of-consciousness, as figures become other figures, objects metamorphose and really there's no real sense or logic to the thing, unlike just about every other animated feature prior to its creation. At one point, the animator (Cohl) seems to actually reach into the drawing and pick up the character.

This was totally different to anything that had gone before. Up to now, any animated feature, no matter how weird, had a strange sense of logic running through it. Paul's car flew in "The Motorist", yes, but it still followed some basic rules of logic, driving around the rings of Saturn, using the clouds as if they were hills. Despite the need to suspend disbelief, this and other animations still kept their feet, metaphorically speaking, rooted on the ground. Weird and unexpected things happened, yes, but you understand what was going on. In "Fantasmagorie", as the title implies, everything is a fantasy and nothing is, or needs to be, explained.
This is perhaps the first template for the true cartoon, where things just happened, and no laws of physics applied. A wall could fall on a character, squashing him flat, but he would be up and running about in the next scene. People could fall from heights and leave with nothing more than perhaps concertinaed up legs (which would be staightened out next time) and characters could be shown dying, but still remain alive. In cartoons, everything would go, nothing would be too nonsensical or fantastic or unbelievable. Everything was possible, everything was doable, and there was no such word as can't.

Three years later, Cohl animated "The Newlyweds", a comic strip that had appeared in "New York World" , which I believe makes him the first to bring characters who had appeared in a newspaper strip to life, as it were, through the medium of animation. Only one example of this long-running series has survived time's passage. You can see it below, but be warned: even restored, it's still pretty poor quality.
It's believed that later animator Winsor McCay, at whom we will be looking shortly, took some influences and perhaps even paid homage to Cohl in his films, particularly "Little Nemo", created a year later in 1910. Another ground-breaking film by Cohl introduced colour (I can't confirm if this was the first time or not that colour was used in an animated film - other than coloured paper, which was of course in use long before this - but I haven't read of any other instances of it) to allow him to animate coloured blank canvasses in the four-minute live-action film "The Neo-Impressionistic Painter", where a prospective client is duped into thinking that blank slates are works of art, his imagination filling in the details which Cohl draws and animates.
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George Méliès (1861-1938)

Yes, I know what you're thinking. You are thinking it, aren't you? You're right: he died the very same year as Emile Cohl, mere hours later in fact. Seems the history of animation is full of such crazy little coincidences. But who does not know this name? If you don't actually know his name, you definitely know, or have seen clips of, what was believed to be the world's first ever science-fiction film, "A Trip to the Moon", based on fellow Frenchman Jules Verne's classic novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Having had his interest in cinema fired by witnessing the demonstration of the Lumière brothers' new invention in 1895, he tried to buy one but was turned down. However two years later their camera and others were readily on sale and he was able to buy one that suited his needs.

One of his earliest films used the effect of multiple exposure to allow him play seven characters at once in the 1900 short, "One Man Band", while "The Vanishing Lady", even earlier (1896) shows him making a woman disappear, come back as a skeleton and finally as herself. All of these effects of course are more trick film techniques, and perhaps are not, or should not, be considered true animation, but it's hard to discover where the line between effects and animations lies, and so I've made a sort of arbitrary decision to include examples of anyone who used any sort of effect in their work that either made the film more than it could be with normal camera work, or that mimicked or perhaps even later inspired animation techniques, such as Cohl's "The Haunted Hotel".
Méliès also seems to be the first (probably not the only but certainly the first) film maker I can see who made a satirical religious film, in his "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" (1898) in which a monk worshipping at the foot of the cross is plagued by women who appear out of nowhere and attempt to seduce him, one actually taking the place of Christ on the cross. Surely controversial for the time, and in Catholic France, surely very courageous.
Without question though, his most famous and enduring film is the aforementioned "A Trip to the Moon" (1902) which has been generally accepted as the world's first science-fiction film. I think everyone recognises the famous shot of the moon, a face looking none too pleased as the rocket carrying the space pioneers lands in its eye.

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To my American friends, it may seem like I'm actively trying to kick Disney off his throne (one he never truly occupied, in terms of being the first animator) and put down the efforts of American animation. I'm really not; but like most of you, I guess, I just assumed that was the case: as in a lot of things, America led the way, and Disney was at the forefront. I've discovered, shown and proved now that this was in fact not so, that the earliest animators came from Europe.

But that doesn't mean that American animators were just sitting twiddling their thumbs and waiting for their chance to shine. While Walt may have been not even born yet, and his cartoon revolution a long way off, there were still men working in the land of the free whose names should not be forgotten, who helped contribute to, expand on and develop the whole idea of animation, and who could stand shoulder to shoulder (or perhaps I should say, easel to easel or inkwell to inkwell?) with their European counterparts.

Therefore, rather than anyone get the idea I'm trying to do them out of their place in history, let me present
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Timeline: 1911-1919

There were a few animators working, or starting off, in America around the turn of the century, and while it might be fair to award some, any or even all of them the title of the "Godfathers of American animation", as we've seen, they were already following somewhat in the footsteps of their peers across the water. Nevertheless, at least one of them certainly seems to have advanced the art form ahead of (most) of his fellows. His name was Winsor McCay.
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He worked as a cartoonist for the New York Herald, and in fact worked under William Randolph Hearst, the supposed inspiration and model for the protagonist in Orson Welles's classic movie Citizen Kane. Deciding to "introduce" cartoons to the USA (presumably the ones already discussed remained mostly provincial: I have not seen or read any evidence they crossed the Atlantic or even were known at this time in America) he shot much of the movie in live action, setting up the story whereby he bets a group of laughing colleagues that he can animate drawings. Although the film is over eleven minutes long, the actual animation sequence lasts barely four, and is nothing more than a flip-book like we all used to use and make as children (didn't we?) but it's easy to scoff at this now. When you think though that this was just after really the turn of the twentieth century, and that actual movies were yet in their infancy, it's quite an amazing feat. Deaf to the laughter of his peers, McCay promises to produce four thousand drawings by the next month, and by showing the drawings through a Vitagraph camera he does exactly what he boasted he would, animating the drawings and making them move.

It's truly remarkable. This is 1911, remember, when there were no editing, special or indeed any effects, and yet this film really fools you into thinking, not only that the characters on the paper move, but that they do so seamlessly. Somewhat like Pauvre Pierrot, some twenty years earlier and three thousand miles over that way, they don't just move up and down or left to right: there's a whole story being played out here, even allowing Nemo himself to "draw" a princess for himself, present her with a seat in a dragon's mouth which then bears the two of them away. And because he has drawn all the pictures with coloured ink, this is, in a very real sense, not only the first American animated film, but the first colour American animated film! At least twenty years before movies had colour.
(You can skip to about 8:45 for the animation)
I know you'll look at it and say it's crude by today's standards, and I guess it is, but remember this is one hundred years old! And it's almost completely flawless in its motion. Even the early silent movies jerked and missed frames; this is totally seamless. Even given the, by comparison, huge strides being made in Europe at this time, it has to be accepted that, our little French clown aside, nobody else was working with colour, and the very best France and England could offer were still line drawings or stop-motion movies in black and white. If it wasn't for Pierrot, I would say this changed the game, but certainly, in terms of moving animation forward, between him and Renaud, this is a huge step. My hat would be off to this guy, if I wore a hat.

Not satisfied with that, he went on to produce another "animated movie" the next year, this one being totally silent (no music) and in black and white but just as impressive. How a Mosquito Operates is another classic of early animation by this innovator.
But if there's one award that has to be accorded to him, as far as I've read anyway, it's the idea of, for the first time, the animator appearing in his own animation. This  would come with his piece de resistance,a cartoon he titled Gertie the Dinosaur, produced in 1914, and the last of his animations before Hearst put his foot down and ordered him to concentrate on his day job, drawing cartoons for the newspaper. How a man like Hearst could fail to see the potential in McCay is just staggering. I suppose, like most people - especially those trying to run a business, he considered these "moving drawings" a distraction, worthless, time-consuming and indeed time-wasting. Notwithstanding the opinion of the newspaper magnate, Gertie is even better than the other two films, with McCay, as I say, actually integrating himself somehow into the animation, in such a way as to make it look like he climbs on the dinosaur's back and it takes him for a ride! Unbelievable!
Even more stunning: this man who had done so much to advance the cause of animation refused to hoard his secret or protect his methods. "Any idiot that wants to make a couple thousand drawings for a few hundred feet of film is welcome to join the club", he said, and never patented his idea. His last major work was the first record of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by the German Navy. It's an amazing piece of work, again, this time requiring no less than 25,000 drawings, and really comes to life on the screen. It's of course not a cartoon, but a serious animation, again positioning McCay at the very top of his field, a field with few if any others in it at his time.

McCay declared himself as the "Originator and inventor of animated cartoons", a title I certainly challenge, unless you insert the word "American" or "non-European" in there as a qualifier, but during a meeting with other animators he deplored the way these men were turning his "art" into a "trade". He died in 1934 as a result of a cerebral embolism. It would not be accurate at all to call this man the father of cartoons, but he certainly set the ball rolling on that side of the ocean, a ball others would pick up and run with over the next few years.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Raoul_Barr%C3%A9.jpg)
Raoul Barré (1874-1932)

A French Canadian who moved to New York in 1902 and worked with the great Thomas Edison, Barré was the one who figured out the problem that had been bedevilling animation artists for some time: how to create frames of animation without having to draw the character and the background every frame. He came up with a method called "the slash system", which involved drawing the background only once and leaving a blank space for the character in each. The figure would then be drawn in different poses to suggest movement (foot raised, foot comes down, foot raised again etc) on separate pieces of paper which would then be inserted into the background, and with the standardisation of perforations in the drawing paper, also a process refined by Barré, the previously jerky movements of the cartoons would be a thing of the past.

One of his first animations was The Animated Grouch Chasers (1915) which mixes live action with cartoons as a woman reads a book (the aforementioned Grouch Chasers) and the characters comes to life as she reads. You can see from this the first tropes of animation being laid down, even long before Disney. A lot of firsts here, things even Europeans hadn't dreamed of doing yet, or if they had, had no idea how to achieve the effects needed. Speech balloons are used - in conjunction with the display cards utilised by silent movies - and when the sailor sneezes, dotted lines indicate the action, then when the elephant (bearing more than a passing resemblance to Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur!) cries, the stylised tears drop from its eyes.

In the second cartoon, the illusion of flight is handled pretty well when the small child goes up with the kite (note a very distressingly monkeylike black kid on the ground - well, this was 1915 I guess!) and when a crow annoys him, the motion of its wings is impressive, as is the shower of feathers when the kid kicks out at the bird. Again very racist when the black kid watches the crow falling, licks his lips and says "Here comes ma dinner!" Jim Crow, huh?
In 1916, Barré, with his partner Charles Bowers, successfully animated the comic strip Mutt and Jeff and went on to licence the series, producing over 300 episodes. The animation in this is far superior, only a year on. It's quite remarkable. Whether Barré had only perfected his system after 1915 or not I don't know, but the difference is amazing. Again, before Disney, cartoons are using those alliterative titles, his the first, it would seem, to do so, the video shown below called Domestic Difficulties. Mutt's progress down the drainpipe as he escapes from the house - though clearly the same scene drawn several times, as he's on the fourth floor - is fluid and graceful, without a jerk or a blip to be seen. The motion too of the entire scene, which spins when they're drunk, is effective. More effects, presumably taken from the cartoon strip, where musical notes coming out of their mouths indicate singing, and when Mutt falls down stars jump out from his backside to show the impact. Then there's a bump that rises on Jeff's head when Mutt's wife hits him with the rolling pin.

I'd also like to note for posterity that, again as far as I can see, this is the first real example of a cartoon, as we understand them. It's funny, it follows a specific narrative, and it features characters who will reappear, and indeed become very famous and popular. Certainly, some of this is due to the prior existence of these characters on paper, but even so, I feel this is the first time a, for want of another word, funny cartoon has been made.

Up to now, efforts by British and French animators, while some have contained humour, seem to have been more concerned with showing off the skill of their creators, as in Paul's "The ?Motorist", or how well they can draw, as in "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces." For me, this is, again for want of a better phrase, the first funny story to be animated, and I believe deserves its place in history for that.

However when Bowers unexpectedly quit Barré, always a sensitive artist, and feeling let down and betrayed, had a nervous breakdown and left the business. His only further contribution was to animate Felix the Cat in 1929. He died three years later.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/John_Randolph_Bray%2C_1915.jpg/440px-John_Randolph_Bray%2C_1915.jpg)
John Randolph Bray (1878-1978)

It wouldn't be fair or accurate to say Bray turned animation into a profit-making business, but he certainly was one of the first who, having set up his own studio, retired from the actual process of animation and took on cartoonists to do the job for him. It's also possible (though I could be wrong) that he had the first dedicated animation studio, as others I've looked at seemed either to work for themselves or, like Winsor McCay, for a newspaper.

Focused heavily on making money and making the studio pay for itself, he hooked up with Charles Pathe (who would soon come to be a household name as Pathe News reported all the latest from the front during the wars) to create advertising and later promotional films for World War I. His first animation, 1917's The Artist's Dream, echoes that of other animators in America and elsewhere, such as Roy Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series and Disney's later Alice adventures, where a drawing on a board takes on a life of its own and causes havoc.

This time it's a dog (a dachshund) which hears the derogatory remarks of an editor to his artist and determines to prove him wrong. The dog spies sausages atop a cupboard (using, again, the dotted lines to indicate sight and indeed drops from the mouth to represent salivating) and opening the drawers of the cupboard it uses them as steps to reach the sausages. When the artist comes back the dog quickly jumps into a corner, lying down and pretending to sleep. Bray sees the empty sausage dish, can't understand it, probably concludes he forgot to draw them and does so again, after his departure the dog robs them again. Eventually he bursts, and the whole thing is shown to be a dream the artist was having.
The interesting thing about this cartoon is that Bray experimented with printing the background scenes instead of hand-drawing them each time, which obviously cut the time needed to create the cartoon and led to greater efficiency in the industry and thus made it more cost-effective. His studios, following the tried-and-trusted mantra of American - and to be fair, all - business concerns, make profit, operated on the basis of competition, commission and the need for constant production, keeping them at the forefront of the industry. He registered three important patents: the printing of background scenes, the usage of grey shading in drawings and the use of scenery printed on transparent celluloid to be applied over the drawings to be animated. These patents allowed him to establish a monopoly over other companies, and when Earl Hurd filed for a similar, but better, patent for what became known as cel - a process whereby the actual characters were drawn directly onto transparent celluloid and then applied over painted background scenes - he partnered up with him in the Bray-Hurd Patent Co.

Bray's two main characters were the jingoistic Colonel Heeza Liar (something of a play on the rather exaggerated claims of Baron Munchausen) who sometimes lampooned President Theodore Roosevelt, and Bobby Bumps, one of the first characters in animation to have a sidekick, or at least an animal one, in this case a dog, something many other animators would copy, like Grimault in Les Passengers de la Grand L'Ourse.
The Colonel would get into many scrapes, and in the 1915 version above, Colonel Heeza Liar at the Bat, you can see maybe not the first, but the first instance I've seen of the usage of a question mark above the head to indicate puzzlement or an inquiry. A side-note of interest: using those cards again, this is the first time I've seen the words rhyme, like a little poem, to add perhaps a sense of fun to the cartoon. Again, in the typical trend of ignoring the laws of physics cartoons would embrace, the Colonel jumps over a wall at least three times his height with no visible assistance whatever, simply more or less runs up and over it. It's also the first time, I think, I've seen a cartoon character break the fourth wall, as the Colonel turns and laughs and winks at the camera, as it were, so that he's sharing the joke with us.

I must say, the Colonel bears more than a passing resemblance to later Mr. Magoo. Here, too, the beginnings of those "fight-clouds", where arms and legs and various body parts whirl around while puffs of smoke and stars etc fly out of the middle. In contrast to the Colonel Heeza Liar cartoons, Hurd's Bobby Bumps starts out being drawn by the animator's hand, the artist giving instructions to the boy, such as "hat off" so he can colour in his hair, and the boy talking back to the animator, reminding him that he has forgotten to draw the dog's tail. He's a sort of a Billy Bunter figure, rotund and cheery, with a strangely Asian looking face. Hmm. This could very well be the first usage of this (and I have to keep qualifying these guesses, as I'm not exactly looking through every animation of the period to see if I'm right, but in terms of what I've seen so far I appear to be correct) but I see the thought balloon appear above Bobby's head and in it a winged bag of money takes flight. This would be used more and more, not only in thought bubbles but in reality, to signify the loss of something as cartoons progressed.
The action of the chef is quite impressive, as he tosses eggs up, around, down his back, along his arms. Chef looks a bit devilish though if you ask me. Good humour in the cartoon too, as a customer asks for a piece of raisin pie, pointing, and the server grins that ain't raisin, it's custard, hits the pie and all the flies spiral up into the air from where they were resting on it. The customer appropriately falls over in horror. Hurd, it seems, either learned from Bray or just did the same thing, but the dog here winks at the camera too, letting us in on the joke as he eats the eggs Bobby has been cooking. Clever, too, when the dog meets a cat who calls him a cur, and he says "I'm gonna make her eat those words," and promptly takes the speech balloon, folds it up and forces it down the cat's throat! The artist, though, has had enough and pulls the dog away, another form of fourth wall destruction.

The plates, as Bobby staggers around with a tall stack of them, wobble and weave and wave as he walks, and when he's trying to escape from the vengeful chef after breaking the plates, Bobby is helped by the artist, who draws a ladder he can run up, and then rubs out the bottom half so that the chef can't also use it. He then hands Bobby a bottle of ink which he pours over the chef, blotting him out completely.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Henry_Mayer_-_Mar_1922_EH.jpg/440px-Henry_Mayer_-_Mar_1922_EH.jpg)
Henry "Hy" Mayer (1868-1953)

A German who came to the US and took up animation around 1913, so perhaps technically not an American but hell, we'll let it slide. He specialised in "lightning sketches", of which we have spoken before. He also created the series Such is Life, released between 1920 and 1926, a series which mixed live action in exotic locations with animation - there was Such is Life in Italy, Such is Life at the Zoo etc, but again, no examples available. Ah well, I have to say it, don't I? Such is life! Mayer also found fame in being the man to discover Otto Messner, who would, as we will see shortly, go on to claim to be the creator of a certain somewhat popular black-and-white cartoon cat.

This is the only video I could find of his work, and shows not only what a great and talented artist he was, but how he could make a simple thing like a triangle into so many different objects and people. Stunning.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/91/Willis_H._O%27Brien.jpg)
Willis O'Brien (1886-1962)

A world innovator and inventor in the field of what would become known as claymation, O'Brien discovered how to manipulate clay figures and later used India rubber, which allowed him to insert a metal skeleton for his figures, making them more flexible and posable. His first feature was The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy released in 1916. The movie so impressed Edison that he invited O'Brien to come to New York to work for him. It's not at all surprising that he was blown away. When you look at the movie, for a moment it seems like these are real people they're so lifelike. No Morphs here! The humour in the piece is engaging: "Won't you come into the dining room? I should offer you tea, but tea has not yet been discovered." Nice.
There's quite a matriarchal feel to the story too: the girl tells the Duke and his friends if they want to eat they'll have to go out and hunt. I like the idea of the juxtaposition of a class system that has no place in the Stone Age at all - the Duke, his lady, and the manners of an eighteenth century noble family all contrasts wonderfully with the bleak, sparse setting and the rudimentary clothing. I don't know how long it took to animate this, but it's pretty flawless in terms of movement. There's no jerking, no sudden cuts, everything runs smoothly and it's almost a prehistoric Ray Harryhausen kind of thing. Well, okay: there are a few jumps, like when Wild Willie - the "Missing Link" in the title - attacks and tries to bronco-ride a dinosaur, but they're few and far between.

After 1917, as Edison's financial troubles continued to mount, O'Brien left him to work for a New Jersey sculptor called Herbert Dawley, and together they worked on The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, which saw release in 1919. Unfortunately, O'Brien's name was removed from the credits so Dawley took all the plaudits. In essence, it's a live-action movie with some claymation dinosaurs in it. O'Brien really seems to have had a thing about the dinos: his other works included R.E.D. 10,000 BC, Prehistoric Poultry and The Dinornis. His ability to animate animals though would ensure his fame when he worked on such blockbusters as The Lost World, King Kong and Son of Kong.

While I've given a lot of coverage to early English and French animators, and, I believe quite rightly, afforded them the title of being the first of their kind, and therefore, as I noted, the very godfathers of animation, it also has to be said that, by and large and with very few exceptions, the animation they produced can only be described as crude, limited, perhaps even proto-animation. While it's all very clever and effective, and by its very nature the beginning of something is going to be basic and raw, to some degree there's almost a case for not really calling these true animations.

Not that I wish to denigrate these guys, not by any means, but when most of the animators working before, say, 1910, use either line drawings (the style apparently called "lightning sketches") or manipulate objects in a live-action movie, or even use a very early form of stop-motion animation, as in that advertisement for matches, really, none of these efforts bear much resemblance to what we would later know and recognise as cartoons, even animation itself.

While of course anything that moves onscreen - in cases where it would normally not (to differentiate, at least in my mind, from actors and vehicles etc, which are expected to move anyway) - teapots, sheets, pencils, line characters etc - can be, and has to be called animation, I do see a marked difference betweeen the early efforts of Europeans and those of Americans, which kind of leads me to conclude that, though the latter came later (god what a terrible sentence, huh?) to the party, their efforts seem to me more in line with what animation would become.

Look at "Gertie the Dinoaaur", or "An Artist's Dream", or even the clever "Mutt and Jeff" cartoons, surely the world's first proper animated cartoons. Now compare any of these, even Winsor McCay's "How a Mosquito Operates" to the works of Paul, Renard or Blackton: there's really no comparison between the two. You can't look at, for instance, "A Dream of Toyland" and think there's the progenitor for Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny, but you can look at Gertie and see it. And you can't even say, well, they saw what the English and French were doing, and went one better, because as I mentioned, to my knowledge anyway, there isn't any evidence these American animators ever saw the work of their contemporaries at all. So they would have been working alone, almost in a vacuum as it were.

Add to this the fact that, again as mentioned, or at least theorised by me, the first proper animation studio, a purpose-built unit used only for animation, seems to have been set up by an American, and the first animators employed by one, and I think you have a pretty good case for almost allowing American animation to overtake that in Europe. While of course you can't take the crown, as it were, from the head of people like Renard and Booth, and they will always be the first who did it, in the end we remember more fondly those whose work looks to have had the most recognisable resemblance to what we watch today. In other words, we want to see a kind of "family tree" or some sort of structure that builds up to where we are today, and I'm sorry, but dancing matches really don't cut it. Disobedient dinosaurs, though, most certainly do.

With all of that in mind, then, and given that the biggest advances in animation would, sooner than expected, emanate from the shores of the United States, and always allowing the French and English the respect and honour of having been first, I feel that early - and indeed, later - animation can realistically be broken up into that which was American (who would, after all, have the biggest effect on the genre, with titans like Looney Tunes, Popeye, Hanna-Barbera and of course Disney) and that which was not, basically encompassing the rest of the world.

But while American animators were working hard to all but create the genre, and would soon come up with an iconic character who would become beloved by all and last the test of time (no, not him), there were those who were working outside of the US to try to make their mark. Admittedly, not too many, but we'll take a look at them here in the first section of what I've decided to call

(https://beeimg.com/images/w23155186492.jpg)
UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA

Timeline: 1910-1917
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Argentina is not the sort of place you immediately think of when you think of animation, but believe it or not, that's where the recognised very first animated feature film is supposed to have originated. Lost to the mists of time now, sadly, it was called The Apostle (El Apostolo) and though you might think it from the title (as did I) it is not in fact a religious film chronicling the lives of Jesus's disciples in the Bible. Rather, it is a satirical film lampooning the President of Argentina, who ascends into Heaven (I'm not sure if he dies) and uses the thunderbolts there to cleanse Buenos Aires of its corruption. As a result, the entire city burns. It might be ironic to reflect that the only copy of this important and historic film was lost to a fire in the studios of Quirino Cristiani, who directed it, and who is seen as one of the original fathers of animation. Nothing survives of the film, but there was a documentary called Quirino Cristiani: The Mystery of the First Animated Movies, which attempted to recreate the film. All I can get of that though is this one-minute clip. It's interesting to note that Cristiani is hailed as one of "the men who foreran Disney", which not only acknowledges - perhaps incorrectly, as we'll see - Walt's position as the first true animator, but claims that Cristiani and his people were doing this almost a decade before Mickey Mouse came to the big screen. Amazingly, this feature film was over seventy minutes long, which, if it wasn't already accepted as being the first feature animation, would certainly give it the honour of being the longest.
Oh, I also found this:
Whether any irony was intended or not, Cristiani's next feature, released the following year, was titled Without a Trace (Sin Dejar Rostros). This too was a political film, based around the exploits of Baron von Luxburg, a German commander who tried to blame the Allies (known as the Entente) in World War One for the sinking of an Argentinian ship which he himself had arranged, and thereby draw Argentina into the First World War on the side of the Germans. Unfortunately for von Luxburg, there were survivors and they all clearly identified the attacker as a German ship.

The only other information about this film is that it was confiscated by the War Ministry, on the orders of the President, who presumably did not wish to have it cause an international incident, particularly as the war was by then winding down and would end that year. 

Cristiani's only other major work was Peludópolis, another political satire, but events conspired against him, both with the ousting of the President halfway through, the arrival of the Great Depression and the death of the former President, all resulting in his withdrawing the film from circulation. This, too, vanished in the fire that consumed the film laboratories, though I read now this did not happen until the fifties, which kind of negates the possibility of any irony in the title of his second movie. With the rise of Disney and the eventual domination of Mickey Mouse, Cristiani gave up animation and he died in 1984.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/ba/Flag_of_Germany.svg/1200px-Flag_of_Germany.svg.png)
From the early days, on really into the Second World War, the only avenue open to any German animator was to make shorts for advertising, or experimental ones which would struggle to find both funding and an audience. The very first animated film produced in Germany however appeared before the man who would try to conquer the world had even enlisted in the German Army to fight World War One. Friedrich Konrad Guido Seeber created this clever little stop-motion three-minute film in 1910 with just matches, and though it seems a little simple today, it was probably ground-breaking back then. I mean, we're talking over a hundred years ago now.

Of course, good old Arthur Melbourne Cooper has him beat by a good ten years, his own matchstick animation being released one year before the century turned, but hey, on the one hand, there's only so much you can do animating sticks of wood, as no doubt the producers of Made in Chelsea will tell you! :laughing:
Be that as it may, Seeber came to the notice of Paul Wegener, who in 1915 spoke of the kind of advances in animated film techniques that Walt Disney would pioneer more than twenty years later. In a lecture in Berlin he said "I think that film as art should be based – as in the case of music – on tones, on rhythm. In these changeable planes, events unroll which are partly identified with natural pattern, yet partly beyond real lines and forms." It would be another twenty-five years before a young American would put this into practice with his innovative Fantasia, and Wegener's vision would be seen to be correct. In the audience was a young animator called Lotte Reiniger, and Wegener's speech had a powerful effect upon her, as we shall see.

(https://cdn.britannica.com/82/682-004-F0B47FCB/Flag-France.jpg)
This last one is something of an orphan, being made in 1926, which is outside the timeline of this section, but as my next attempt to catalogue animation outside of America begins in the 1930s, I really have nowhere else to put it, so I'm dropping it in here.

Based on Goethe's tales of the cunning fox, Le Roman de Renard (The Tale of the Fox) was French animator Ladislas Starevich's first full-length animated feature, and though completely unknown outside of France at the time, beat Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to the spot of first full-length animated film by eight months. Unlike Snow White though, Renard made use of puppet animation, and is played for laughs, with the ever-cunning Renard convincing the hangman to loosen his rope, right at the opening of the cartoon, as it is, quote, too tight. I can only get a few small clips, but like almost all European animation at this time, it's in black and white. 

For reasons which will become clear later, I'm restricting this section to western animation, so while Japanese animators in particular were very much active around this time, we'll hold them off for their own section. This, then, is the short (very short) list of animators who were working outside of America during this time.

And speaking of the US, we really should be heading back there...

Timeline: 1919-1923
Fast forward five years after Gertie the Dinosaur had made her mark and established Winsor McCay as the first true animator of cartoons, and you have the debut of a little guy that most of us (certainly people of my age anyway) will be familiar with. Whereas Gertie was a simple creature who responded to commands (though she could disobey, as she does in the cartoon, throwing Jumbo the elephant into the lake and eating trees instead of carrying out her master's commands) Felix the Cat was the first truly anthropomorphic creature to walk across a cinema screen, again, more than a decade before Mickey Mouse.
(https://paradisecandlecompany.com/cdn/shop/products/Felix_413x.png?v=1612141676)
Felix the Cat (1919-1932, 1953 - )
Although some doubt seems to exist as to who actually created him, it's generally accepted that Felix was the work of Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan, (though I will be challenging this in the next article) and his creation became a big hit on the big screen, starring in his own adventures and, even though silent, able to connect to the audience and communicate his feelings through facial expressions. The first film to feature Felix was Feline Follies, released in 1919.
In this first short he is not called Felix, but Master Tom (one would assume, from tomcat) and initially at least walks on all fours, like a domesticated cat, but is soon standing on his hind legs and behaving more like a human than an animal, as he falls in love with Miss Kitty White and does his best to win her heart. It's a clever if simple little cartoon, with attention paid by Sullivan not only to Tom and his lady, but to extraneous factors, such as the mice popping up out of the floorboards as Tom prepares himself for his date, and then doing a little dance when he's gone. The romance of two cats meeting is given a realistic twist when, as Tom proudly declares to his lady love "I have only nine lives to live, and I'll live them all for you" (how romantic and cute!) the neighbours hear only yowling and screaming, and shout at the two cats to get lost. Undeterred, Tom sets up another date, the following night at the trash can, and this time he brings a banjo and plays it while Kitty White dances happily. Back at home, the mice are wrecking his house and eating all the food.

In a very clever demonstration of what could be even then done with cartoons, and as we already saw could be accomplished in McCay's work, Sullivan makes Tom play notes, then take them out of the air and make go-karts out of them for him and his lady. When he gets home he goes asleep, not noticing or caring about the state of the house, but when his owner wakes up and sees the mess she throws him out of the house. He goes to see Kitty, but is less than happy to see he now has a whole brood of kittens to look after! In a perhaps grim ending, he runs to the local gasworks and lies down, taking his own life.

I didn't expect such a dark ending, but the film did well so people obviously didn't catch on to that, or just laughed at it, I guess the same way we would later laugh at Tom being beaten up by Jerry, or the Coyote falling off a mountain into the distance. That's the thing I guess about cartoons: they're not real, and they don't purport to be (later, more sophisticated animation such as The Simpsons and Family Guy etc do, but that's a different matter) and the idea of a character dying, or suffering immense injuries in one scene and then coming back in the next would become a staple of cartoons as the decades wound on. Pure escapism, anything could happen in cartoons and there were no consequences. Pianos, anvils and rocks regularly fell on characters' heads, they suffered all sorts of injuries, even death, but were right as rain the next time we saw them. Still, you'd have to admit that there is a certain darkness in cartoons often, but in general it's not taken seriously. The fact that this one ends with the main character committing suicide rather than face up to his responsibilities as a parent speaks perhaps to the prevalent attitude of the time, and I guess at its heart it's quite brave.

Master Tom was back a week later with a second feature, Musical Mews, though I can find neither information on nor a video for that, and for the third outing for the little black and white cat – now walking upright like a human – the name was changed to Felix, resulting in The Adventures of Felix, which debuted just before Christmas 1919. Again, no video appears to be available, but it was immensely successful, and by 1923 Felix was a star. He even had his own film, Felix in Hollywood, where he  got to meet cinema stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, and was written about by noted author Aldous Huxley. Felix became famous not just for his cuteness and cleverness, but for the sense of surrealism and fantasy that his world occupied. His tail became a tool he could shape to whatever he wished, using it now to make an exclamation mark (remember, this was still the era of silent movies), now a shovel, now turning into a bag to trick his owner into carrying him to Hollywood.
Another thing this movie did (as did the first Master Tom/Felix cartoon) was to use actual speech bubbles in the drawing, though they were more speech rectangles really. Whereas before, any speech had been communicated by a blank screen showing an ornate card – you know the kind of thing – and then cutting back to the character who had said it, here we see the words appear above the heads of Felix and his owner, at the same time as they are spoken. The mouths don't synchronise obviously – I don't think they even move – but it's a much better and more immediate representation of the actions of the characters without having to cut back and forth. The integration into the cartoon of popular themes – sword fights, cowboys etc – was surely another good way to secure the approval of the audience, who would have bought into such a story. The cuteness of Felix himself can't be oversold, and you find yourself rooting for him in every scene, despondent for him when he fails to land a movie role and then delighted when he manages to make his dreams come true.

By now Felix had also become the first cartoon character to metamorphose into a brand, with toys, clocks, all sorts of things sold with his image on them, to say nothing of being sung about and even starring in his own comic strip. In this last, I think (but can't confirm) that Felix was the first, perhaps only cartoon or animated character to as it were reverse the trend of his genesis. In other words, characters like Mutt and Jeff and, later, Popeye, began on the printed page and made the transition to the screen, but the little black-and-white cat, true to his contrary nature and his lack of respect for the rules of the real world, did it the other way around, being created as an animated character and then having his image drawn in newspapers and, presumably, comics.

His popularity inevitably spawned imitators, and of course he was the template for such later cartoon cats as Sylvester and Tom, while he also amassed his own entourage of co-stars, including Skiddoo the mouse, his nephews Inky, Dinky and Winky (surely the inspiration later for Huey, Dewey and Louie, Donald Duck's nephews) and of course his girlfriend from the early Master Tom cartoons, Miss Kitty White. He also had the honour of being one of the first images to be broadcast on the new television medium, when RCA broadcast the image of a papier-mache doll of him. Later his image would be co-opted by everyone from the New York Yankees to an American Naval bomber squadron, and as time and technology moved on, he would make the inevitable transition to the small screen as television grew more popular and more widely available.

(https://bobsegarini.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/felix.jpg)
Cat Burglar? The Curious Question of the Genesis of Felix

I noted in the previous entry that it's generally accepted that Pat Sullivan was the creator of the feisty feline, but that we would be looking into that claim, as we now will, since there appears to be some argument on this issue. Up until the 1960s it was accepted, but after Sullivan's death in 1933 when his estate took the copyright which Sullivan, as head of the studio had claimed, questions began to emerge as it was an animator called Otto Messmer who had originally drawn Felix, though whether he created the character or not, well the jury is still out on that. Messmer was a very quiet and unassuming man, a total contrast to Sullivan's brash, bullying entrepreneurial spirit, Sullivan being known as a man not to cross. So at least while his boss was alive Messmer made nothing of the fact that "his" creation bore Sullivan's name as a credit, and indeed Sullivan told many, sometimes conflicting, stories of the inspiration for the cat. Messmer, on the other hand, seems to have the weight of opinion on his side, at least in terms of fellow animators.

For Sullivan, the Case for the Defence:

Exhibit A: In the first ever Felix cartoon, Feline Follies, where Felix is called Master Tom, there is a point in the video (04:00, just at the end) when one of the kittens has a speech bubble which says "Lo Mum". It has been postulated that Messmer, an American, would not have used that word, but would have said "mom", while Sullivan, being Australian, could. Also, another kitten says "Lo Ma" which is very Irish/Australian - I doubt any American would say that. Not that it constitutes proof of any sort of course; Sullivan could have told Messmer to put the words in, or even added them himself later. However, it must be pointed out that Messmer claimed to have drawn the cartoon himself, single-handed, at home, so it seems unlikely Sullivan would have had any input. Not impossible, but improbable. I think this exhibit strengthens Sullivan's case. What else is there?

Exhibit B: On March 18 1917 Sullivan drew a cartoon called The Tail of Thomas Kat. This is believed to have been a precursor to Felix, which would predate Messner's film by two full years. However this film has not survived, though it is believed that the cat in question was a simple house cat who walked on all fours (as Master Tom did initially, to be fair) and had no "magic bag of tricks" which assisted Felix in his adventures, his tail turning into all sorts of useful tools and so on.

Exhibit C: Writing on the drawings of Feline Follies has been positively identified as that of Sullivan, though admittedly by the Australian Cartoonists Association, which you might be justified in thinking would be more anxious to prove their countryman the proper and rightful creator.

Exhibit D: Messner did not claim ownership of Felix till after Sullivan was dead, making any argument null and void. Dead men don't claim copyright. Well, they do, but they can't prove it.

For Messner, the Case for the Prosecution:

Exhibit A: Messner claims he created Felix at home, solo, and so Sullivan could have had no hand in the process. Of course, there's no way to check this and we only have his word for it.

Exhibit B: Sullivan is cited giving several different answers at different times to the inspiration behind Felix. Ask Disney the same, or Fleischer, and they'd know exactly what drove them to create the character, and this answer would not change. Why then did Sullivan have so many stories about where the idea came from?

Exhibit C: Using Thomas the Cat from The Tail of Thomas the Kat as a prototype for Felix is dubious at best. There are, as mentioned in the case for the defence, many differences between the two, and besides, the film has not survived. Also, if he was going to call his original Thomas the Kat, and the cat in Feline Follies Master Tom, why not call Felix Tom? Or at least spell cat with a "k"? That would fit in with the zany, quirky nature of Felix. But if Messner created him, he would have had no interest in cat with a "k".

Exhibit D: Sullivan was the boss, and could claim copyright over any of the creations of his artists, who often did not even get credited - in general, not just at his studios. So he would have been very capable of "stealing" the copyright as his, even if he had not created Felix. Note: this is not at all uncommon. Writers and artists for 2000 AD complained that they could only get their paycheque if they signed away their copyright on the back, and both (for instance) John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra were denied any sort of claim on their most famous creation, Judge Dredd, all copyright resting with the magazine's publishers.

Exhibit E: A group of cartoonists working in Sullivan's studios backed up Messner's claim, saying Felix had been based on cartoons Messner had made of Charlie Chaplin, and pointing out the similarity in movements.

Exhibit F: Animation historians, too, seem to come down on the side of Messner, with not one of them supporting Sullivan's claim.

One final point, not an exhibit, as it's just my thought. I would be interested to know when Sullivan's mother died. If she was alive in 1919, fine. If not though, why would he put a message to her in the cartoon? I'm not sure if anyone has ever checked this out but it might be worth looking into.

In the end, who wins? Well, both animators have passed away now, so in that sense nobody wins. Who is remembered for creating Felix? The controversy rages on, but so far as I know Sullivan's name is still on the cartoons so I guess he's either protecting or fraudulently proclaiming his creation from beyond the grave. The consensus though seems to be, if you're an Australian, Sullivan created Felix. If you're from anywhere else, especially the USA, credit goes to Messner.

I doubt the crazy little black-and-white cat would care who created him, and he's outlived both of them.
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Timeline: 1924-1927
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Almost single-handedly changing the face of animation forever, Walt Disney originally worked with his brother Roy as an animator for Winkler Pictures and later distributor Universal Studios, who could see the trend in cartoons developing with the popularity of Felix the Cat and other copies. The Disneys had tried selling some of their own animation but it had not been a successful or profitable enough venture, forcing them to work for the abovementioned. When disputes arose over pay, they left and formed The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studios, soon renamed to Walt Disney Studios.

Another of my fallacies exposed. Before I began this journal I firmly believed that the first ever animated cartoon was Steamboat Willie, but even that didn't come for another nine years after Felix and five after Disney's first proper animated feature, The Alice Comedies. Combining live-action and animation in a way that would go on to become something of a theme with Disney, and in a different way to that pioneered by Winsor McCay, the original pilot, as it were, was never released but did signal the beginning of the series in 1924, a series which ran for a staggering fifty-seven episodes, surely unprecedented way back then. Even now, that would be considered a good run, especially for something totally new. Alice (played by three different actresses during the series' run from 1924 to 1927, would have adventures with her cat Julius (who, as you can see, looks suspiciously similar to our Felix, though apparently this was intentional, presumably to "cash in" on the little cat's mass appeal), and no doubt the idea of mixing a live human actress with moving drawings certainly caught the attention.

Though Alice's Wonderland was never officially released, through the magic of YouTube you can sample it here. You can already see McCay's idea of using the medium of cartoons to allow fantastic things like bodies stretching to impossible lengths and contorting to impossible shapes, as the two cats on the table dance, and of course Sullivan continued and improved on this with Felix, allowing him almost limitless possibilities. The idea is stretched further here, as Julius, on the drawing board, tries to poke a real cat with his cartoon sword. The real cat, of course, sees and hears nothing and is unmoved, but it's very clever, especially when Julius scratches his head, wondering why his little sword is having no effect on the newcomer.
Quite long at just over twelve minutes, as I say this gave birth to the long-running series which  did not get going until a year later, and here are some examples of those.

The Alice Comedies ran until 1927, when Walt Disney responded to Universal Studios' eagerness to "get in on the cartoon game" and created the little guy below.

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No, it's not an early sketch of that mouse, though I have to admit the similarities are quite stunning. This was the very first proper animated character created by Disney to have his own series, (as in, without any live-action actor or scenes) and he was called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Doesn't really look like a rabbit, you say? Take it up with Walt. Oh wait, you can't. So suck it. :)

Oswald (created as a rabbit due to a glut of cartoon cats in the wake of the success of Felix, though despite some research I've been unable to turn up any), like his famous descendant, survives to this day. Originally hitting the screens in 1927, just as The Alice Comedies came to an end, he went one step further than Felix or Julius, as Walt Disney wanted to create a character with his own distinct personality. I always felt Felix was a free-spirited individual who danced to his own drum, but people a whole lot more knowledgeable than me contend that Oswald was the first true anthropomorphic character who wasn't there just to "hang gags on", so what do I know? At any rate, Oswald was not a hit right off, and had to be redesigned for his second outing, Trolley Troubles. As an aside, it's interesting how the idea of alliteration had pervaded even the earliest animation, with Felix's first short (as Master Tom) being titled Feline Follies and his next Musical Mews, a tradition that would go on to become a characteristic and mainstay of cartoons for decades to come. I wonder if it makes something more attractive, hearing two words that begin with the same letter? Or funnier? Or was there even a reason? At any rate, it became the standard for a long time.
Immediately the piece begins you can see that Disney is looking to Sullivan for inspiration, as it reads almost like a Felix cartoon, with elements of the fantastic and the absurd in abundance. Polishing the trolley with a cloth, Oswald then throws it behind him and it becomes his bobtail, the wheels of the trolley do that sort of running-in-place motion that would become the standard for characters as they prepared to run (attended by a round of bongo drums or some sort of percussion), almost as if they're winding up to let go, and a literally impossible number of passengers are taken on, given the trolley's tiny dimensions. But this is, or would be, cartoons, and you didn't have to explain anything. Everything was possible if you could think of it or imagine it, and no logic was required. Making people laugh, being clever and innovative was all that was needed to make a cartoon successful. As the trolley runs over wider and narrower tracks it becomes correspondingly wider or narrower to accommodate them, stretching and then scrunching inwards; a cow on the line which refuses to move is gone under by the trolley, which uses it as a kind of tunnel . For once in the film, logic and science are used; as the track climbs steeply upwards, Oswald finds he cannot control its ascent and the trolley begins to slide back down, and when he encounters a goat who butts him, Oswald uses this by harnessing the goat via a pole to him and goading him to butt him. Of course, once they reach the summit and plunge down the other side rollercoasterlike, the thing is out of control and flings passengers out left, right and centre as it careens along.

Into a series of tunnels the trolley hurtles (handy for the animator, as several frames are totally black as the trolley enters the darkness!) and Oswald pulls off his foot and kisses it (geddit? Lucky rabbit's foot?) as he prays to be delivered. In the end, the out of control trolley screams off the side of the mountain and into a lake, and Oswald punts away to safety on a raft. I assume all his erstwhile passengers have either been thrown clear prior to the trolley leaving the tracks or have drowned, but in what would become typical cartoon fashion, nobody asks the question: after all, they're just line drawings, aren't they?

Becoming unhappy with his lot at Universal Studios in 1928 Walt Disney decided to leave, allowing Universal to keep Oswald but designing a new character over whom he would retain control as he set up his own studios. But although he would create the first true animated film with synchronised sound, there is one other we have to look at before we trace the evolution of the character who would completely redefine and transform the world of animation.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/MaxFleischerPDUS.JPG/440px-MaxFleischerPDUS.JPG)
Later famous for Betty Boop and Popeye, Max Fleischer had a different approach to animation compared to the likes of Walt Disney or even Winsor McCay, in that his technique tended to be less refined and more jerky, and his cartoons were not merely to entertain but often tackled adult issues and were on the whole darker and more mature than anything that was around at the time, or would be for some considerable time.

Max invented the rotoscope in 1915, a device which allowed a live-action sequence to be transmitted to drawings frame by frame, and so impressed John Randolph Bray that he took he and his brother Dave on in 1917. That same year Max invented the series Out of the Inkwell, which would feature Koko the clown emerging from an inkwell at the start of every episode, and playing tricks on him. This followed the basic standard of the time: cartoons were either initiated by someone reading a story and the characters coming alive, or by someone drawing them and they achieving their own life. We've seen this with Bray himself, and with Earl Hudd. Disney would later do the same, as would other animators.
It would be some time before there would cease to be a need, or excuse, or reason for the cartoon character to be there, when, to paraphrase the band Anathema,  they would just be there because they were there.

In 1921 the two Fleischers left Bray and established their own studio, which would rival Disney's and be the second greatest in the world until close to the end of the Second World War, breeding such timeless favourites as Popeye, Betty Boop and Superman.

One of his most famous animations,preceding Disney's by two full years, was My Old Kentucky Home, released in 1926 and featuring a cartoon dog blowing a trumpet and encouraging the viewer to sing the words to the old nineteenth-century song. Although crude, even by the standards Disney would set down from the off (cruder even than Oswald or, in some ways, Felix) , this animation was important as it was the first to successfully synchronise audio to the animation, so that when the dog says"Follow the bouncing ball and join in everyone,"  you can follow the shape of his mouth as the words are spoken.

Fleischer had pioneered the concept of "follow the bouncing ball" which would become a staple in animation, jumping in time with the music from word to word in a prehistoric version of karaoke. Of course, as an animation this one is boring (although I can only get an excerpt from it, and don't know if there was more than there is here, a mere fifty seconds) but it did establish an important precedent.
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Paul Terry (who would go on to produce Terrytoons, one of the least successful cartoon studios of the twentieth century, even though it did produce memorable characters such as Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse and Deputy Dawg) also brought an animation with sound to the screen a mere month before Disney stole the limelight with their cartoon. Terry's was called Dinner Time and featured what looks to be a crow (some sort of bird anyway) seeking his dinner. After unsuccessfully trying to catch a worm, he is then almost eaten by a cat as he stands on telephone wires and the cat leans out of the window of a building, trying to reel him in. Eventually the cat does catch him, but the bird flies off, taking the cat with him. The cat lets go, and clings on to the wires, but the bird returns and cuts them with his beak. As the cat falls we see ghostly images of each of his nine lives leaving him. He hits the ground, then climbs back up the nine lives, using them as stairs, to get back in the window from which he fell out.
Next we follow the adventures of a small dog, who stops at a lake and with a bone in his mouth sees his reflection holding a bone. In the improbable logic of the world of cartoons, the dog jumps into the lake, takes the reflection's bone and now has two! And so it goes on. You can see in the crude drawings the ancestors of later Popeye, and the paper used is curiously yellow, though that could be age. Still, none of the other, older cartoons looked faded. Anyway, the clip here will give you an idea, but I have to say, I don't see anything in the way of sound synchronisation, other than sound effects and the odd voice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the cartoon did not endear itself to audiences, and a month later everything changed, forever.

Every art form has its nexus point, its zenith or, if you will, and utilising my nerdy Star Trek knowledge, its singularity, that point at which something important, amazing or ground-breaking (or all three) takes place, and after that, everything changes. We've reached that point after which nothing, on television or in the cinema, would ever be the same.
Timeline: 1928-1939
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Disney's first true creation, and his most famous and enduring, Mickey Mouse was originally created as a replacement for Disney's previous character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who had been co-opted by Universal Studios and kept by them when Disney left, furious at being asked to take a pay cut and being told he had no rights over the character he had designed. Turning to his friend Ub Iwerks, he asked him to draw some preliminary sketches for a new character, and after several failed attempts Mortimer Mouse was born. Disney's wife, however, disliking the name, convinced him to change it to Mickey. The first outing for the new Disney character was 1928's Plane Crazy, beginning yet another tradition in animation, where puns would be used in titles (plain crazy/plane crazy) which also competently described the subject of the cartoon. This feature however was not screened in its original silent format, but reissued later with sound.
It features, perhaps interestingly given the character who would become Disney's second most famous and popular, a duck, in the very first few seconds, and indeed from the annoyed and irritated way the duck chases a worm, you can see the very embryonic idea for Donald. Reading a book entitled "How to fly", Mickey decides to climb aboard an aeroplane and (for some reason to the strains of "Hail to the Chief"!) attempting to emulate his hero "Lindy" (Charles Lindbergh, the first man ever to complete a transatlantic flight) but has no luck, the plane crashing before it can even get off the ground. Undeterred, and again stretching – literally – the ever-flexible physics of cartoons, he makes a plane out of a car and climbs aboard. The feature also introduces his longtime girlfriend, Minnie, who hands him a horseshoe for good luck. They get airborne but Mickey is thrown out of the plane, leaving Minnie sitting in the back, unable to control it as it chases him. Hilarity ensues. A cow gets pulled into the story, and literally dragged along for the ride, and finally Mickey makes it back into the plane, reunited with his girlfriend.

The use of perspective here is nothing short of amazing, and another thing Disney would pioneer, the anthropomorphisation of inanimate objects – here, as the plane flies towards a high steeple, it concertinas down, like a person ducking - is introduced. On regaining access to the plane however Mickey is not greeted with open arms by Minnie, who is annoyed at him (presumably for being so reckless and leaving her in a rather frightening position) and as they argue she falls out of the plane, but is able to use her bloomers as a parachute. Mickey is not so lucky, crashing and bouncing off several branches of a tree, the final insult being that the lucky horseshoe Minnie gave him hits him on the head, and when he throws it away angrily comes back, boomerang-like, to knock him out.

I can't really speculate on why nobody picked this up at the time. It was way ahead of its time, far better than anything that had come before. It really was out on its own. Perhaps the somewhat boorish attitude of Mickey towards Minnie put distributors off, feeling they might be seen to be endorsing or condoning such attributes? Well, probably more likely nobody wanted to give an unknown a chance, but that all changed a few months later.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c9/Steamboat_Willie.jpg)
If only through parody, just about everyone is going to have seen some version of this original cartoon, and it begins with a paddle steamer on a river, with the action quickly cutting to a closeup shot of Mickey at the helm. He whistles the tune that is playing, and once more Disney's anthropomorphisation of inanimate objects shows itself, as the three whistles on the boat all have mouths and seem to sing out as they let off steam. Indeed, only two in fact, while the third remains silent until kicked by the second, and then it whistles. Again a feature that would become typical of Disney, the whistles are arranged in order of descending height, so that you get the definite feeling that the smaller one is the baby, and so a family of inanimate objects is already implanted in your mind, a family with actual personalities. This I believe was unique; I haven't seen evidence of this sort of thing in any of the previous animations, not even Plane Crazy. Suddenly a large creature (whom we could perhaps take to be Mickey's boss, Pete, and who surely was the template for Popeye's nemesis Brutus/Bluto) comes in and starts hassling Mickey, making it clear that either Mickey should not be piloting the boat, or that he, Pete, is now in charge. Mickey is sent on his way.

Out on the deck, he is laughed at by a parrot and throws a bucket at it in irritation. When the steamer arrives at the jetty it does not reverse in, but simply lifts up its stern, as it it were made of rubber, and plants itself down beside the quay to load up the animals waiting there. As they leave, Minnie appears, having missed the boat, but Mickey winches her aboard. During the confusion though a goat eats her sheet music and her violin, but Mickey discovers that he can use the goat as a barrel organ, by turning its tail. An impromptu band is set up and a musical number ensues, including the classic proverbial swinging of a cat, which Mickey, again perhaps setting the template for later shows like Tom and Jerry and Sylvester, turns the tables on by reversing the traditional roles ascribed to both animals.
Annoyed at this frivilous waste of time, Pete grabs him and throws him in the bilges, setting him to peeling potatoes (an old army punishment, known, I think, as KP, though don't ask me why: Kitchen Patrol? Kitchen Punishment?) and the parrot who was laughing at him before returns, but Mickey, annoyed, throws a potato at him and knocks the bird out the porthole, laughing as he does so.

So what is the big deal about Steamboat Willie? I think the answer lies in one word: synchronisation. Everything is this cartoon is perfectly matched, from the voices speaking the mostly unintelligible words to the music, and the reactions of the various items in the short. Everything, well how I can put this other than to say, everything bounces? It's like the whole screen is constantly in motion. I know Family Guy and Futurama have parodied this Disney style, but it's quite accurate parody. Everything, from the ship almost dancing along the river to the whistles to the musical instruments and the animals, everything seems to be constantly – constantly – in motion. Even when Mickey sits on the floor at the end and laughs, things around him are moving.

And not just moving: moving in time, moving in concert, moving in – yes you guessed it – synchronisation. It's not so much like drawings animated and given a soundtrack as a finely tuned machine with every working part performing in perfect and absolute accord. Really incredible. The level of detail, the clever use of animals as musical instruments, the, well the animation of just about everything onscreen, it all works so well and it's really hard to watch it without feeling your head bob or your toes tap. No wonder it was such a huge hit.

I think it's also important that, like Plane Crazy – and indeed, Trolley Troubles – before it, the protagonist is not given a happy ending. In Plane Crazy Mickey's plane crashes, in Trolley Troubles the same happens to Oswald and he is left to drift to shore, and here Mickey's put-together orchestra is soon put a stop to and he is sentenced to peel spuds. So he doesn't win, and yet at the end of this, unlike the previous cartoon, he is laughing, mostly at the plight of the parrot, true, but possibly also at the absurdity of it all, with almost a sly wink to the audience, as if to say "Isn't this crazy?" It was, and it is, but damn if it's not funny too, and that's probably what set this apart from the failed Plane Crazy. In this one, Mickey doesn't exhibit any – shall we say, nasty traits – indeed, he helps Minnie when she misses the steamer, and he's very much more lovable, so of course audiences took to him.

It wouldn't be long before he would be the most loved and famous cartoon character in history, kickstarting a multi-billion global empire for the man who had created him.

And Ub Iwerks.

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From 1929 to 1939 Disney ventured into the era of the emerging technology known as "Technicolor", which allowed him to move beyond the boundaries of black and white cartoons and into the vibrant, bright and more realistic world of colour. Technicolor, a process of saturating film with colour to make it look more real, actually had its genesis way back in 1916, but only  became really popular and widely-used from about 1922, becoming the standard for Hollywood studios for about thirty years. It was used in such classic live-action movies as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, and of course by Disney as soon as he was able to integrate it into his animation process.

This resulted in some of the first colour cartoons, a series of seventy-five mostly unconnected shorts that if anything would be mirrored mostly by the likes of Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies in the 50s and 60s, all going under the umbrella of "Silly Symphonies" (more alliteration, you see?). These shorts were not only important due to being the first actual colour cartoons as we came to know them, but also for introducing, in The Wise Little Hen, a certain duck, who performed a sailor's hornpipe and danced  his way into audience's hearts, later becoming the second favourite Disney character, rivalling (sometimes literally; they had several face-offs) Mickey Mouse himself.
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Donald Duck (Created 1934)

I've always preferred Donald personally. Unlike Mickey, he's not a goody two-shoes (or in his case, I guess, two-feet!) and he tends to get into, and cause, the kind of trouble you expect from a cartoon character. He's the disruptive influence, the one who disagrees with most things, the sulker, the complainer, the one who loses his rag most. And yet he's an amazingly sympathetic character. I think it's because he has flaws, and doesn't try to hide them, that we (or at least I) love him so much. His iconic voice, provided by actor Clarence Nash (1934-1985) and later Tony Anselmo, says everything about his personality. He talks like someone with a kazoo in their mouth, and when he loses his temper it's hilarious to watch, not just his voice but also the way he dances in rage.
For whatever reason, Donald was conceived as wearing a sailor's suit, though to my knowledge he has never been to sea nor served in the navy. Donald was introduced to Mickey in "Orphan's Benefit" (1934) in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to sing Mary Had a Little Lamb and Little Boy Blue, but is heckled by the orphans and flies into what would become one of his characteristic fits of rage. Donald Duck had arrived! A few years later he was starring in his own film series, premiering with Don Donald, which, despite its title, was not a gritty expose of Donald's time with the Sicilian Mafia, but instead portrayed him as a Mexican duck, who tries to win his lady love, Donna Duck, soon to be recast as Daisy Duck. Although the movie was tagged as "Mickey  Mouse presents..." it was clear this was a star in the making, and Donald would go on to star in over fifty short and feature-length movies, as well as become a mascot for the armed forces during World War II, and eventually making the leap to the new medium of television. In 1938, only four years after he had been introduced and one since his second appearance on film, Donald was rated more popular with audiences than Mickey.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/49/Snow_White_1937_poster.png)
Destined to change the face of film animation forever, and despite the few other, mostly unknown to the general public, movies that predate it, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is – mostly deservedly – accepted as being the first full-length feature animation. Certainly, it was the first to use colour and sound, and unsurprisingly it became a massive hit. With an original budget of just under one and a half million dollars (surely the biggest budget for an animation at that period?) it has so far made back over four hundred times that figure. The movie was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Musical and snagged Disney his first Oscar. It was also the beginning of a, shall we say, more gentle or friendly interpretation of fairy tales and other stories, emphasising the good things about them and encouraging children who went to see the movies to sing along with the many songs that would be written specially for them. This was no retelling of the Brothers Grimm's fairy story, but what would later become known as the Disneyfication of the tale.

With its own specially-written soundtrack – and not just music, but actual songs too, that the characters sung, such as Heigh Ho, Some day my Prince will come and Whistle While You Work – this movie made further history by being the first to have its own soundtrack. Such a thing had not been even considered before. The further anthropomorphisation of animals took a huge leap forward here, where even birds sang and performed human-like tasks (I can't recall, as I was apparently so scared by the Wicked Witch that I had to be taken out of the cinema – hey! Give me a break! I was thirty-four at the time! I mean, like, five. Yeah, five – but I think they tied up Snow White's hair with ribbons?) and forest creatures helping Snow White and the dwarves. Creatures and animals were beginning to be seen, at least in cartoons, as people and not just animals, a trend that would continue, with Disney, Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes among others, all personalising their animal characters.
For the time, the animation was superb, ground-breaking. It was said (though can't be confirmed) that many of the audience, watching the characters for the first time, forgot they were watching an animation. The early days of struggling to match up voice and mouth movements were long gone now, almost in a quantum leap of improvement; what relationship does Snow White bear to Steamboat Willie, released less than ten years previous? The animation was completely fluid, everything perfectly synchronised, including the music, and the overall effect was just stunning. As a child, seeing the movie I could not of course appreciate this (also, as I mentioned above, I had to be removed from the cinema before the end: what a wimp!) but looking back on it now I can see how staggeringly real it looks, especially compared to the efforts of the others we just looked at outside of the USA. A true masterpiece, and deserves its place in cinematic and animation history.
Disney took serious liberties and artistic licence with the original story. The Grimm Brothers did not ascribe personalities or even names to their dwarves, yet here each one is named according to his character traits or disposition – Sneezy, Sleepy, Happy etc – or his perceived role, as in Dopey and Doc. In fact, Doc is the one of only two of the Seven Dwarves whose name does not end with a "y", and the only one whose name is not an adjective. In the tale, three attempts are made by the wicked Queen on Snow White's life, but Disney only used the final – ultimately, essentially successful – one, with the poisoned apple, and the queen's death is handled differently too. Nonetheless, you have to admire and respect the man, who mortaged his house to finance the movie, a chance I'm sure he, and the world, ended up being glad he took.
As this was the first recognised full-length animated film, and it was nominated for (but did not win) an Academy Award, I guess it's safe to infer from that that it was the first animated movie to do so, and therefore has yet another place in history. It was also later added to the Library of Congress, a singular honour. Not bad for a movie many in Hollywood had sneeringly described as "Disney's folly"!

But there was a rival for his crown, and though he never quite made it as big as ol' Walt, Max Fleischer would at least make history himself by creating the first full-length animation outside of Disney, two years later.

Intermission: Tools of the Trade - How Animations Became Cartoons

I think it's incumbent upon me to pause here for a moment and talk a little about not only the movies and their creators, and characters, but also the techniques which have been used in animation down the decades. As already mentioned, the first, original film animation – by Winsor McCay, back just after the turn of the century – was a simple idea based on the flicker book, whereby a series of drawings was rapidly filmed and one by one built up a moving picture. For something like this, thousands of hand-made drawings were required, and though this suited early methods it was obvious this was not going to be the standard. Who has time to draw thousands upon thousands of drawings? How many drawings would have been needed to animate something like even Steamboat Willie, never mind Snow White? This technique was vastly simplified and improved with the introduction of cel animation, which allowed the tracing of outlines onto sheets of cellulose acetate, which could then be coloured, to cut out that tedious hand-colouring required previously.

Rotoscoping, still in use today (it was used to make the lightsabers in Star Wars seem to glow) involves the tracing and removal of images called mattes – essentially silhouettes – to be used in another frame, in another scene, perhaps on a different background. Many animators frowned on this process though, as it was time-consuming and, in the early years, not particularly accurate or precise. There's also stop-motion animation, in which real objects – often puppets – are moved each frame and rephotographed to give the illusion of movement. Early stop-motion animation was not the fluid operation we see today, and could be quite choppy. Of course, virtually all of today's animation is created on computers, but we're not concerned with that here.

I hope that's made things as clear as mud for you. I'm a little confused personally about the different animation processes, which seem  very complicated, but perhaps that will give you a basic idea. Anyway, on we go.

Max Power: Anything You Can Do...

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b5/Gulliverstravelsposter.jpg)
In direct response to the unexpected and overwhelming success of and popularity of Snow White, Paramount Studios were eager to hit back, and commissioned Max Fleischer, who we met previously, he having invented the "follow the bouncing ball" animation that was used on My Old Kentucky Home, and who would later go on to create favourites like Betty Boop and Popeye, to create their own full-length feature. For his subject, Fleischer looked to the works of Jonathan Swift, creating his own take on the famous classic Gulliver's Travels, released in 1939. Like its famous antecedent, this movie liberally interpreted Swift's satirical work, making it more of a love story and of course adding specially-written songs, a precedent that Snow White had begun and which would continue throughout not only Disney but most animated movies, even up to today.
An interesting point I note as the movie begins: this seems to have been the first animated movie with music where the singing was not necessarily performed by the actor who played the part. In Snow White, Adriana Caseloti played the title role and also sung all the songs Snow White had to sing, but here, at least in the case of the male role of Prince David, one actor acts and another sings. I don't know whether it was that Jack Mercer couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, wasn't allowed to sing by his union, or didn't want to sing, but his songs were performed by Lanny Ross, who was a singer.

The animation is very good, though you would still at this point give it to Disney for vibrancy and colour, and the fact that the first half-hour or so of the movie takes place at night and in the dark makes it a little hard to really rate the animation, but once you can see it in daylight it's very decent indeed. Fleischer also took on the Disney model of adding humour and comedy to the story, imbuing the movie with a pretty good incidental soundtrack apart from the actual songs. Still, even in the light, things like Gulliver's face show a certain sense of indefinition, and it almost looks like he's carved from stone and painted or something. Also, don't the Liliputians look suspiciously like Disney's dwarfs? Fleischer still had a way to go to catch up with his rival.

Nonetheless, given that he was only allowed an eighteen-month window from start of production to finish, I think he did very well, and the movie was a hit. Not surprisingly, really, as surely cinema-goers at this point had had their appetites well and truly whetted by Snow White and were eagerly awaiting a new animated movie. Disney would not produce another one until 1940, when he would again take the world by storm, but Paramount were savvy enough to have Gulliver's Travels hit just before Christmas 1939, and so were pretty much assured of a receptive audience.

Fleischer didn't really attempt another full-length animation for some years, running into trouble with Paramount and then the outbreak of the Second World War, but as I already mentioned, he is famous mostly for Betty Boop, Popeye and later Superman, and in due course, before we move away from film animation, we will be doing a more in-depth feature on him.

Darting back over the Atlantic Ocean again for a short moment, I'd like to take a break from talking about American animators like Disney and Fleischer, and pay tribute to a woman who was and is considered one of Germany's finest in the field. Even with the, then (as kind of now though not quite as much) big handicap of being a woman working in what was almost entirely a man's field, she established herself among her peers, and her work is enthused over even today.

Coming Out Of The Shadows: The Exceptional Exception to the Rule
Part I: Securing a Place in History

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Lotte_Reiniger_1939.jpg)

Lotte Reiniger (1899 - 1981)

A native of Berlin, Lotte was born into that traumatic and turbulent time which would see Germany shake under two world wars, giving her the dubious distinction of having lived through both. Heavily influenced by the Chinese art of paper cutting and silhouette puppetry, she initially entertained thoughts of becoming an actress, but changed her focus to puppetry. In her teens she became enraptured by the newly-emerging technology of film, particularly attracted to animations such as Georges Méliès' "A Trip to the Moon".

It was, however, one of her countrymen, German expressionist actor and director Paul Wegener, who really had the most effect on her, when she attended a lecture by him on the "incredible possibilities" offered by animation, and she decided to put her energies and talents into this area, Wegener so impressed with her that he became her mentor.Though she worked in his acting class and made silhouette portraits of her fellow students, her first true animation was in 1918, when she animated wooden rats in Wegener's retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamyln, Der Rattenfänger von Hameln.

Her success on this led to her being admitted to the Institut für Kulturforschung, or Institute for Cultural Research, where she was to rub shoulders with fellow innovaters of the time such as Bertholt Brecht and Bertolt Bartosch, as well as meeting her future husband, Carl Koch. Her first animated film followed in 1919, when Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart) helped to open new doors and forge new connections for her in the world of cinema and animation. I believe we touched briefly on this in my rather sparse article on animation outside of the USA prior to 1920.

Her next major success was Aschenputtel, her animated version of Cinderella, released in 1922. Whether looking to, or ignorant of and so coincidentally copying the likes of James Stuart Blackton and others who practiced the art form known as "lightning sketches", we see a scissors appear on screen and cut out shapes from paper, shapes which resolve into figures, Reiniger literally creating her characters before our eyes.

Other than the occasional white scroll of text appearing, there are only two colours used here: black and a sort of mauve/purple, so considering such a restriction, this is really quite impressive. Reiniger would go on to use this format for the rest of her animation, which of course you'd have to say restricted her and precluded her from following in the footsteps of other animators whose technique was, really, far in advance of, but also fundamentally different to hers. I imagine it was her choice to continue in this vein rather than any sort of lack of talent beyond shadow puppetry.

Like every German animator at this time, and as already related, Reiniger supplemented her income by animating advertisements, and even had a chance to work with the great Fritz Lang when she animated a falcon in his Die Nibelungen (1924). However the previous year she had been approached to create what would become the world's first surviving feature length animated film, something which nobody had contemplated, apart from our Argentinian friend, Quirino Cristiani, who should hold the honour for the first such movie, but whose El Apostol has been destroyed and lost to time.

Perhaps somewhat like her American counterpart ten years later, Reiniger faced almost universal opposition, ridicule and warning from her contemporaries. She remembered "We had to think twice. This was a never heard of thing. Animated films were supposed to make people roar with laughter, and nobody had dared to entertain an audience with them for more than ten minutes. Everybody to whom we talked in the industry about the proposition was horrified." Nevertheless, she went ahead and in 1926 her animation was released.

Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) was, in traditional German manner, a fairytale, though the subject of the animation looks to the Arabian Nights for its substance (unsurprising, given the name of the eponymous prince). It's similar to her previous work, and yet there are very important differences here, especially with regard to the colours used.

If you've ever seen Japanese shadow puppet theatre, or even the old advertisement for Metz schnapps, featuring the angular Judderman, you'll have a decent idea what to expect here. It's dark-on-light, with the characters moving stiffly, jerking around the screen, the former black while the latter changes colour, though only per scene: in one scene it is green, the next blue, a third orange and so on, so that the background, though changing, is static when a figure is upon it (static as in, the colour does not change) and only changes for the next scene, presumably to give some interest to an otherwise black animation. Her style was called silhouette animation, and involved cardboard cut-outs and figures of lead manipulated before a camera. It allows little in the way of variation, but considering the time we're talking about here must have been seen as pretty inventive.

It's kind of hard to get a feel for what's going on, given that you're basically looking at shadows, and the fact that the text is, of course, as you would expect, all in German doesn't help either. There's no speech, just music as a background, though I do note one figure (a genie perhaps, as Aladdin is mentioned?) does manage to look quite scary, so that's quite a feat in and of itself. Nevertheless, I find myself unwilling to sit through the whole thing, but you can if you want, as I have dropped the video in here. You can also read the full story, including the plot, here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Prince_Achmed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Prince_Achmed)
Initially, it seemed her detractors were correct and that the warnings had been well-founded, as she shopped the movie around for a year without success, nobody willing to take a chance on an animation which ran for such a long time. Finally, championed by French director Jean Renoir (son of the Old Master), she managed to get it screened in Paris, where it was a hit, and from there its fame, and hers, spread worldwide.

Still ahead of the curve, if not working quite in the same medium as other animators, Reiniger developed the multiplane camera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera) and also may (I'm not sure) have been the first to have had a special score composed for her movies, something Disney would later make the norm.

Two years later, an on the back of the success of her first feature-length animation, she created Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere (Doctor Dolittle and his Animals), and was now acknowledged as one of Germany's finest animators. Whether my contention in the title is correct or not, I feel confident in saying that at this time, and for quite some time later, she also would have been the only female animator, not only in Germany, or Europe, but quite possibly in the world. My research has, at any rate, not led me to any other conclusion.

A year later, her benefactor Renoir, and her friend Bartosch, starred in her first live-action film, Die Jagd nach dem Glück (The Pursuit of Happiness), which featured a twenty-minute animation sequence, but in the distance, clouds were gathering and a terrible storm was about to break, and though I did say initially I might break from the time line to look at specific areas of animation, I don't want to disturb it too much right now, so will instead cut this short and pick up the rest of the story when the timeline permits.

So as we head back west and cross that mighty ocean till we sight the shores of America again, the question has to be asked: if Walt Disney was breaking down so many barriers and winning awards left right and centre, and setting the standard for the genre, who was left to challenge his burgeoning supremacy in the firld, and what was left for those who would be his competitors to do? Well, I'm glad you asked.

Remember this guy?
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/MaxFleischerPDUS.JPG/330px-MaxFleischerPDUS.JPG)
Though his last (and first) real full-length animation, Gulliver's Travels had been released in 1939, and it might seem he had not done much since, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, he had yet to produce another full-length animation, but as I mentioned in a previous entry, he was already very popular for two cartoon characters who would challenge the dominance of Mickey and Donald, and who are both known to just about everyone reading this, if only by reputation.
(https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51rUpYabk9L._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg)
Betty Boop (Created 1930)

Originally created as an anthropomorphic poodle figure as part of a series of shorts created by Fleischer called Talkaroons, Betty appeared in the fifth instalment as a companion to another popular character, Bimbo. Very quickly, as her own appeal became obvious, her form was changed into a far more human woman, and Bimbo, who had been positioned as the star and a potential rival to Disney's big guns, especially Mickey Mouse, faded out. Supposedly based on singer Helen Kane, Betty was depicted as a 1920s "flapper" girl, and it is perhaps ironic that while her male companion Bimbo was named as such because at that time, the word meant a man ready to fight, she would come to encompass what we would call today the characteristics of a bimbo. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought she had been based on Marilyn Monroe, though of course at this time Norma Jean Baker was a child of four years old. At any rate, Betty soon progressed beyond her role in the Talkaroons and acquired her own strip, becoming one of the most loved and well-known cartoon characters ever.
Although originally designed by Grim (seriously? A cartoonist called Grim?) Natwick, the transformation from canine to human was mostly attributed to five men – Berny Wolf, Seymour Kneitel, "Doc" Crandall, Willard Bowsky and James "Shamus" Culhane. I honestly can't think of another cartoon character so expressly sexual and attractive until 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (in which she has a cameo herself), when Jessica Rabbit made us lads all lust after a cartoon woman. She really is proportioned (other than her head) as a totally sexy woman, and her "Boop-oop-de-doop" line is maddeningly sexual too. Fleischer would create firsts of his own, rivalling Disney for the honour of presenting the first properly-proportioned sexy female cartoon character (and this in an age where sexual attitudes were still very repressed) and indeed be the first to portray sexual harassment onscreen in a cartoon, when in Boop-Oop-a-Doop (1932) she is threatened with rape by a villainous ringmaster and only saved by another character. That's strong, strong stuff for eighty years ago!
Betty's cartoon series lasted from 1932 to 1939, but the interference of that bastion of the guardians of public morality, the censor, particularly the National League of Decency and the Production Code, both forced Betty into a more conservative, less sexy role, and she began to be eclipsed by her support characters from about 1935 on. Though there were two television specials, in 1985 and 1989, Betty did not make the same transition to the small screen as did Fleischer's other, more popular character.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/00/Popeye_the_Sailor.png)
Popeye (the Sailor Man) (Created 1932) *

The first of his characters not to be created by his own studios, Popeye was licenced by Fleischer in 1932 from King Features, the publishing firm owned by William Randolph Hearst,  in whose New York Journal daily comic he had starred since 1929, (and for whom, you may recall, pioneer animator Winson McCay worked) having been created by Elzie Crisler Segar as a bit-part player in her series Thimble Theater. He instantly became so popular that not only was he brought back quickly, he took over the series and became one of the best known cartoons at that time. His appeal still lasts today, where his cartoons are regularly played all over the world.

Unlike Walt Disney's cute creatures and cuter people, Max Fleischer preferred to draw his characters in a more abstract, caricaturistic way, and with more down to earth settings reflecting the Great Depression through which he lived. Working in black and white a lot longer than Disney he used the medium to his advantage rather than feel restricted by it. I suppose you could perhaps call his cartoons a sort of film noir, certainly compared to Disney's more kid-friendly, happy and uplifting style. Or to put it another way (and anyone familiar with his work and/or film in general, correct me if I'm wrong, as I may very well be) if Disney was animation's Spielberg then Fleischer was its David Lynch. His cartoons were rougher drawn, more symbolic and surreal, and often contained hidden (or sometimes not so hidden) messages of sexual innuendo. They were also, in general, darker in content than Uncle Walt's stories of happy forest creatures or flying elephants. This in itself I guess probably prevented Disney from really seeing Fleischer as a threat (even though they were personal rivals); they were almost working at opposite ends of the spectrum, and with Disney moving on to full-length features while Max was still producing Betty Boop shorts, it seemed unlikely the one would ever challenge the other.
Popeye however did become immensely popular, starring in his own series of movies. Fleischer's last ever full-length feature, Mister Bug Goes to town (1941) was a complete disaster. Apart from the fact that a rift had developed between Max and his brother Dave, to the point where they only communicated in writing while working on the movie, it was released two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor signalled the US's entry into World War II, and Paramount lost their shirts on it. They demanded the resignation of both brothers, which they duly got, and moved in to take over the studios.

Under new management and in really what amounted to a new world now, Popeye became a war hero, starring in shorts in which he dealt out American justice to the Nazis and the Japanese. The studios were renamed Famous Studios, and in 1943 Her Honor the Mare became the first Popeye short to be released in colour. Although he was now gone, Fleischer's long association with black and white cartoons was forcibly over, and Popeye was dragged into the world of colour cartoons. In 1957 Paramount sold the rights to Popeye and three years later he made his debut on the television screens of America, but we'll pick that up when we get to the TV era in this history.
Popeye was of course a sailor (more of a sailor than Donald Duck, as he actually did go to sea) and had average strength until he ate spinach, which increased the size of his muscles and allowed him to take on whatever foes he was facing. Whether the idea of using spinach was a marketing ploy or just coincidental, it did succeed, as American (and later British) kids started eating more spinach so as to be just like the cartoon sailor. So influential was he on the sales of spinach that several statues to him were erected, including one in Chester, Illinois, home of his creator, Alma, Arkansas, said to be "the spinach capital of the world" and Crystal City, Texas. Popeye had an entourage of supporting characters, originally the main ones in the Thimble Theater series, such as his girlfriend Olive Oyl, Wimpy, The Sea Hag and Bluto or Brutus, his eternal nemesis and rival for Olive's affections.

Prior to their forced departure and the takeover of their studios, the Fleischer brothers had reluctantly accepted a commission to bring the comic book character Superman to life on the screen, and though they quoted what they believed to be an exorbitant price per episode, citing the difficulty of working in Superman's world and bringing Metropolis alive, they were bargained down and ended up being stuck with the project. Although Superman ran for a total of seventeen episodes, the Fleischers only created nine. The remaining eight are generally considered inferior to them, as the original ones had a more science-fiction theme, while the later ones leaned more in the direction of WWII propaganda films, and were created by a team of animators made up of Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber, Sam Buchwald and Dan Gordon. Kneitel had worked on the humanisation of Betty Boop for Fleischer, if you remember, so he was obviously kept on by Paramount/Famous.
One thing the Fleischers apparently are credited with, rather amazingly if it's true, is the power of flight for Superman. In the Action Comics, he was only able to leap from building to building, but when the brothers originally animated this it looked silly, and they decided to have Superman fly instead. Action, and later DC, okayed this and had the ability written into the character's canon. I think I'm also correct (though admittedly I've not researched it) that the Superman cartoons were a) the first time a superhero had been depicted onscreen b) the first time a superhero had been animated onscreen and c) the first time a character had appeared onscreen in an animation which had originally taken place in comics (as opposed to a newspaper strip, a la Popeye). So again, keeping up with Disney by pioneering the way and planting a few milestones of their own, these guys.

Later on of course, the series would follow Popeye across the divide to television, where it would entrance a whole new and younger audience, and reawaken interest not only in Superman but in superheroes, leading to such series as Batman: the Animated Series, Spiderman and others, and writers such as The Dark Knight's Frank Miller would quote the cartoons as a major influence on his writing. DC would honour the Fleischers by naming them as one of The Fifty Who Made DC Great in 1985. Max himself would succumb to Arterial Sclerosis of the brain and pass away in 1972, earning himself the title of "the dean of animated cartoons." Dave would survive him by seven years, taken in 1979 by a stroke. Both would outlive Walt Disney, who passed away in 1966.

* Refers to the creation of the character for animation purposes; Popeye was originally created in 1929

Timeline: 1940-1941
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/ba/Pinocchio-1940-poster.jpg)
We're back with Uncle Walt, who, fresh from his groundbreaking success with the world's first full-length animated feature, based on a fairy tale by the Grimm Brothers, decided to look again to children's tales for his next outing, this time to Italian storyteller Carlo Collodi, and his most famous story, The Adventures of Pinocchio. Having read the book while in production with Snow White, Disney loved it and immediately declared it would be the third movie they would work on, Bambi at the time being the second he intended to unleash on the public. But problems realistically animating animals in Bambi led to it being delayed, and so dropping all but the puppet's name for the title, Pinocchio was pushed to the forefront.

The original story does not make the title character as sympathetic as Disney's film did. In the story, he kills the cricket who would become Jiminy, his conscience, and is later attended by its ghost. He is very precocious, as you would expect, but quite unlikeable, and the story is, as these things invariably were before the likes of Disney got their hands on them, quite dark. This would of course never do for an American cartoon film audience, and so many aspects of the story were changed, such as the introduction of the genial Jiminy Cricket, a more endearing aspect being given to the puppet and the role of the blue fairy, who features only slightly in the original story, being upgraded to a companion of the puppet. Obviously, many songs were also written for it, as would become the norm for Disney cartoons.
In addition, due to the unexpected but very welcome success of his first feature, Disney wanted to have known celebrities voice his characters, and so Pinocchio became the first animated movie to have stars do the voices. Names which of course at this point in time mean nothing to us but who were big stars in their day were recruited: Frankie Darro, Walter Catlett, Evelyn Venable and the creator of the first ever million-selling record, "Ukelele Ike", Cliff Edwards, were all signed up, while the voice of Pinocchio himself, due to Disney's insistence on it being a child who voiced him, went to Dickie Jones, only twelve years old but already having worked with legendary director Frank Capra (no not Franz Kafka!), though sadly the voice that would become synonymous with later cartoons (including that of Bugs Bunny), Mel Blanc, was deleted out of the movie after it was decided that his character would be a mute.
Pinocchio became the first animated feature to utilise proper effects animation, such as the sparkles from the blue fairy's wand, and the incredible underwater scenes, which were highly praised. Despite however winning two Academy Awards (the first animated movie to achieve this feat) it was not the huge box office success Disney had expected and hoped it would be, recouping less than half of its budget by 1947. Some of this was due to the onset of World War II, which left people with more important things to do than watch movies, and less money too, but though Walt was reported to have been very depressed about the initial box office returns, it of course picked up steam and to date has made over forty times its budget, earning a place in the National Film Registry and when the American Film Institute compiled their top ten best films ever in 2008, Pinocchio came second in the animation genre, beaten only by its predecessor. It is now considered one of Disney's best films.
In comparison to many of Disney's later films, which could mostly be labelled under the terms "twee", "cloying" or "sentimental", Pinocchio is a genuine morality tale, and though there are songs that we remember from it – mostly "When you wish upon a star" - which make it fit into what would later become unofficially known as the "Disneyfication" idea, it tends not to rely too much on jokes and clever lines, instead espousing the need for honesty, friendship and a strong work ethic. If Pinocchio wants to become a real boy, he has to work for it, and accept all the baggage that comes with that.

I couldn't say for certain, not being sufficiently knowledgeable about early Hollywood films, but as far as animated movies go, this would seem to be the one that started off a trend which would mostly continue through Disney – and other animated – movies, that of the hero and the sidekick. There's a very clear relationship established between Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket, and whether it was Baloo and Mowgli in The Jungle Book or Charlie Brown and Snoopy, from this point on a huge percentage of animated movies would feature this dynamic. For animated films at least, Walt Disney had scored yet another first.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/12/Fantasia-poster-1940.jpg)
And yet again Disney broke new ground, as the idea of the Silly Symphonies was extended into full feature format to encompass The Sorcerer's Apprentice and bring Mickey Mouse into the public eye. The gloved rodent's popularity had declined somewhat with the attention being taken up by Snow White and then Pinocchio, and Disney felt it was time to remind people of his earliest creation. Moving away, for the first time, from the idea of having songs written for the movie and returning to the Silly Symphonies format of setting cartoon sequences to classical music, Fantasia was born.

The idea was quite courageous. Given that his audiences had so far seen the happy tale of a young woman living with seven dwarfs, followed by a puppet discovering how to be a real boy, and that even the previous shorts had all followed some sort of definite storyline or plot, the plan to have a series of separate "longer" shorts, all set to classical music (which might be a turn-off for younger audience members, you would think) that really never meshed to tell one cohesive story, must have seemed a pretty big gamble, but it would pay off. Securing the services (for free!) of the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, Disney was ready to create a real extravaganza, and though I've seen it once and was not terribly impressed, you can't argue with box office returns of between seventy and eighty million, for an initial outlay of just over two.
There would be no real cast for this outing, as there was no speech, only music, and one narrator, but that didn't stop the budget equalling the previous movie. Again, World War II would restrict the distribution of the movie, and combined with the expense of fitting out theatres with Disney's new Fantasound state of the art stereophonic sound system, would lead to slow uptake on the movie, but Disney insisted on the new system, as the movie stood or fell as much on the audience's enjoyment of the music as the animation. Fantasia thus became the first feature film to use stereo sound. It was also the longest animated movie at the time, clocking in at a somewhat attention-challenging two hours and six minutes.

Fantasia also became, if not the first animated movie, then the first full-length one, to mix live action and animation, as the opening sequence is live action with the orchestra tuning up. Personally, I think this takes from it, but that's just me. A brief rundown of the various sections follows.
Opening with, as mentioned, the narrator introducing the film against the background of the orchestra tuning up, we get Toccata and Fugue by Bach. This is a pretty abstract piece, moving on to a scene of growth and flowering, the changing of the seasons in Tchaikovsky's The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, with fish, flowers and mushrooms all dancing, then the most famous sequence, where Mickey Mouse is reintroduced to cinema audiences for The Sorcerer's Apprentice followed by Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, showing the birth cycle of our planet.

A scene from Greek mythology plays out against the backdrop of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony before Dance of the Hours takes us into a comic ballet scene with hippos and elephants, and finally Night on Bald Mountain features a danse macabre as the Devil summons forth the dead from their graves. An odd one to end on, though the dead are sent back to their rest at the end and it finishes with the Ave Maria and a procession of monks.

In essence, it has to be accepted that Fantasia was an animated movie – perhaps the first one ever – if not actually intended for then definitely aimed at adults. It's hard to see what children would have got out of it, other than the dances and the flashing lights, and of course Mickey Mouse and his unruly mop. But over the course of two hours, you could see kids very easily getting bored, and the music would likely have done little to assuage that boredom. So really, Fantasia sets the most precedents, at this point, for an animated full-length movie:

1. It has, basically, no cast
2. It has no speech save that of the narrator
3. It survives entirely on classical music as a soundtrack
4. It was the first to use stereo sound
5. It was the longest featured animation at that point
6. It was the first to try to reintroduce an old (perhaps even, at this time, in danger of being forgotten) character and succeed in raising him back to, and then astronomically above, the original level of his popularity
7. It was the first animated film made primarily for adults
8. It was the first full-length animation to mix in live action (Winsor McCay did this of course, but his movie was much shorter and more basic)
9. It was the first animated movie not to follow a definite, planned storyline and to use different sequences (Lotte reiniger's Die Abenteure des Prinzen Achmed uses sequences, but they're all from the same source)

That's a lot of firsts. Disney was always a man to take a gamble. They laughed at his plans for Snow White in the same way as Winsor McCay's associates laughed when he claimed he could make drawings move, and both proved their doubters completely wrong. RKO worried about his insistence in installing his Fantasound system in theatres, and the length of Fantasia, and they were proved wrong too.

Inevitably, much of the staid and stuffy classical music community railed and sniffed at the movie, declaring their music was being debased, and arguing over which parts had been changed or omitted. Stravinsky, the only living composer at the time of those whose music was used, was unimpressed. I suppose when you've created serious music it's a bit of a culture shock to see hippos dancing to it! Lighten up, guys! :laughing:

With or without these objections, it would seem that Walt Disney was unstoppable, and his studios would certainly dominate cinema animation for decades to come, though soon enough others would get in on the action, as we will see. Nevertheless, for now everything Disney touched, while not initially turning to gold, would turn out to be a winner. And that would be doubly true of his next two outings.

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With surely by now an uncharacteristic loss made on his last two movies, Disney decided to change the rules again. Dumbo would be the first of his movies to feature anthropomorphic animals in the main roles, with very few humans, and those only incidental bit-players. It would look to both a story written to sell a toy and a well-loved fairy tale, and it would, unlike his last movie, return to the man's core belief of using a story to tell a moral, and trying to express the best of humanity. Or, in this case, the animal kingdom.

At a mere sixty-four minutes - just over an hour - Dumbo was Disney's shortest full-length animation at the time, again somewhat breaking the rules he had himself written. Another aspect of this, although perhaps it could be blamed on the ongoing war, which had seen his previous two movies garner less attention than expected, and into which America would soon be dragged. Due to this, Disney's instructions to the team producing Dumbo was for it to be "simple and inexpensive", even envisaging it as a "short", though it ended up being a full movie.
In addition, and in a direct reversal of his attitude towards what was the jewel in his crown, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney did not bother with stars to voice his movie; in fact, he didn't even allow them credits. Unfortunately for him, the obstacles he was already facing by trying to have a hit animated feature movie during a war which was, unbeknownst to him, very soon to engulf his own country, were exacerbated by that terror of all industrialists and businessmen, a strike.
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Don't Take the Mickey: Cartoonists Refuse to Work for Peanuts

In the wake of a strike which closed the studios of our friend Max Fleischer in 1937 for nearly five months, the Screen Cartoonists Guild or SCG was formed, and by 1941 had managed to secure terms with every animation studio.

Except Disney.

The stage was set for a confrontation of epic proportions. Perhaps had old Walt recalled his own experiences working for Universal he might have had more sympathy with and for his employees, but memories are short in the cartoon business (or any business) once you rise to the top, and the oppressed becomes the oppressor. Not that Disney's people were oppressed - far from it. They were acknowledged as the best paid in the business (perhaps, in part, because there was no union at Disney Studios). But over time, their perks had been taken and the increasingly corporate structure of Disney began to grate upon them.

The failure of both Pinocchio and Fantasia led to layoffs, and the pay structure at the company was wildly unequal, but perhaps the biggest sticking point was that Uncle Walt claimed all credit for his animators' work, and they, not unreasonably, wished to see their names up there on the big screen, where they and their families and friends could see it. As they were not allowed to be credited, this was not happening.

Enter the SCG.
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Proving that it was not anything really like the grunts airing their grievances and going on strike while the top guys looked down on them, Art Babbitt, one of the top animators - and the most highly paid - joined the strike. Disney, for his part, was appalled, believing these guys should - get this - be grateful to him for giving them the opportunity to be part of animation history. This would not end well.

Having refused to unionise his studio, Disney made this - it has to be said, provocative and beliggerent statement in February of 1941: "In the 20 years I've spent in this business I've weathered many storms. It's been far from easy sailing. It required a great deal of work, struggle, determination, competence, faith, and above all unselfishness. Some people think we have a class distinction in the place. They wonder why some people get better seats in the theatre than others. They wonder why some men get spaces in the parking lot and others don't. I have always felt, and always will feel that the men that contribute most to the organization should, out of respect alone, enjoy some privileges. My first recommendation to the lot of you is this; put your own house in order, you can't accomplish a damn thing by sitting around and waiting to be told everything. If you're not progressing as you should, instead of grumbling and growling, do something about it."

They did. They went on strike.

The whole thing came to a head when Disney arrogantly fired Art Babbitt and sixteen other animators who had joined the union against his orders. The next day his studio was empty, as all his people came out in sympathy, and to show they couldn't be pushed around by a man they had surely begun to look upon as some sort of dictator. Perhaps not as bad as that guy over in Germany, but I'm sure they could see how the wind was blowing.

Disney's fury was, perhaps, disproportionate, with stories of his even trying to attack Babbitt on the picket line, and creating caricatures of the strikers as clowns in the movie he was trying to produce. The strike was well-supported though, and one thing animators know how to do well is draw (sorry) attention to their cause. They made a sort of carnival of it, painted colourful signs and had catchy slogans such as "There are no strings on me" (a song from the  Pinocchio).

The strike was finally resolved on September 21 1941. Three months later, America would be at war, but Disney would not forget, and shopped many of the striking animators to McCarthy, calling them communists and alleging (without proof) that the Reds had been behind the strike. The action left him with a lifelong hatred of unions, though from what I read he wasn't rushing to don military uniform himself. He had cartoons to make!

Despite all the controversy (and more to come) the movie was a huge success, easily making back its budget and more, and must have shown Disney that this was the way to go in the future: happy, sappy, simple stories about animals, and forget all that highbrow nonsense with classical music. Dumbo also may have kick-started (though I'd have to check) the idea of traditional enemies becoming friends (cat/dog or in this case, elephant/mouse) and sometimes reversing that trend. While this may not have given children watching the movie a realistic view of nature, hell, it was only a movie, entertainment and not necessarily meant to educate, although as I say it did carry a moralistic message.
In many ways, to me anyway, the story rather closely mirrors Hans Christian Anderson's beloved tale The Ugly Duckling as Dumbo, first mocked for his large ears, finds that they come into their own and end up being his big advantage when he finds he can fly by flapping them, and is then accepted by his peers. Of course, again, here we find Disney (although I suppose this can't be blamed on him really, as he didn't write the story) thumbing his nose at reality, allowing a creature to fly which could never in real life hope to leave the ground, nor should it.

Accusations of racism would dog the movie later on, with the circus workers all shown as being black, this extending to the crows, who all had Deep Southern accents and whose leader was, rather disturbingly and unwisely, named Jim. Jim Crow? Surely not. Oh yeah. They did change the name in the 1950s to Dandy, but a bit late at that stage.
Perhaps oddly, the first black animator to work at Disney - whom we will meet in part two - Floyd Norman, vigourously defended the crows, as did Whoopi Goldberg. I suppose you can say that a lot of this so-called controversy can be, not excused but explained by the prevailing attitudes of the time, which doesn't make it right, but it is perhaps telling that the first real objection to, or observation of this so-called racism I can trace comes from 1968, over 25 years later and, crucially, at the height of the civil rights unrest in America.

Whatever the good or bad points levelled against it, and leaving aside his dicatatorial attitude towards his strikers, Dumbo, while it could not be called the movie that saved Disney, did at least put him back on the proper road, a road that would, from now on, only lead in an upward direction, winding along a gently sloping hill towards a beautiful fairy castle.

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Almost five years in the making, Disney's next full-length animated movie would finally jettison any humans at all (other than oblique references to "the Man") and present a story replete with wildlife and animals, surely a treat for any child. It would also end up being one of his most successful and best-loved, with a reimagining (god curse that idea) in the offing as I write. Having bought the film right to the book Bambi, A Life in the Woods in 1937, Disney set about amending the storyline to fit in with his overall view of how nature should be portrayed in animation on the screen, dumping the harsher, more "mature" elements for safer, happier, softer fare, though he found it vital to the story to keep the death of Bambi's mother in his movie, and show me any man or woman who says they did not cry as Bambi nudged his now-dead mother and did not cry, and I'll show you a damned liar.

Going for, again, the most realistic depiction of animals as he could, he called in experts on animal behaviour, and even set up a small zoo to try to give his animators the proper idea as to how they should mimic the movements of the creatures for their drawings. With both Fantasia and Pinocchio in production at the time, Bambi got put to one side, and it was only in 1939 that work began on it in earnest, the writing for the movie finally finished in summer of 1940. I can't say for certain, but I think Tyrus Wong, the Chinese immigrant who became the lead animator on the movie, may have been one of very few, perhaps even the only Asian animator working in the US at this time, as the Chinese Exclusion Act was in force, and Wong and his father (who, rather appropriately, arrived in America on the SS China) had to pretend they had relatives here in order to be granted entry, when in fact this was not true. Wong's contribution to Bambi was hidden (possibly due to this deception and the fear the discovery of his high-profile status might bring the INS down on Disney, but given that, as we have already seen, Walt didn't like much to give credit where it was due, probably not) and only came to light relatively recently. Wong was one of those who went on strike and was subsequently fired by Disney, finding work at rival studio Warner.
Though successful, Bambi initially did not find favour with the critics. Reading between the lines, I think it's possible that America, with its grand and proud tradition of hunting, may have been embarrassed that this essentially wholesale and pointless murder of animals for sport had been thrown into harsh relief by Disney, showing up those who hunted for the hypocrites they were, but that's just me. The main issue seems to have been that there were no fantasy elements in the movie, though how you can say that about a film in which animals talk and bring you into their world is another story entirely. Many critics even thought Uncle Walt had blown it, and that this might be the end for him. Famous last words, eh?

You can certainly see the movie as perhaps the darkest Disney had attempted, in parts anyway. It is, to my knowledge, the first in which a character dies, even if it is an animal, and moreover, the first in which a mother dies. In fairness, there's a death of the main character in Snow White, but we know she's not really dead, just sleeping, and she "comes back to life" at the end, so that doesn't count. There are darker elements in Pinocchio too, such as when he's transported to Pleasure Island and begins to turn into an asshole, sorry ass, so really, I'm not certain you could call this any darker than what had gone before. I suppose to idea that, at its heart, it's the story of a young fawn trying to survive against the odds, with no fairies or crickets or dwarfs for company, might make it seem a little bleaker than previous fare.
Bambi also stands as one of the most realistic of Disney's efforts. Nature is portrayed more or less exactly as it is (except of course, animals don't talk, or if they do, it's not a language we can interpret or understand). There's no playing with physics here, no stretching of limbs or having inanimate objects get out of the way, and when a character dies, it stays dead. Nothing inanimate has anything to say, and when Bambi goes onto the ice to try to skate, he falls (literally) foul of physics, balance and gravity, and stumbles all over the place. Ironically, this is remembered as one of the most touching scenes in the movie, as the young fawn tries desperately to find and keep his balance, and emulates the worst of us learning to skate, thereby, I guess, allowing us to identify better with him.

World War II, again, rained all over Disney's party, and so initially Bambi was not the success it should and could have been, but in the end it would garner him no less than three Academy Award nominations, the first animated movie ever to achieve such a feat, and win him a Golden Globe. In the end, though the movie overran its budget, for an initial outlay of just under a million dollars, Bambi has earned, to date, more than 267 million, and has become one of those select few movies chosen for preservation in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Bambi was also the only, so far as I know, one of Disney's creations at this point to appear in advertisements, including fire safety ones, which you have to say means he did his bit to contribute to the conservation of America's forests. Even now, a computer-generated retelling of the tale is in the works, eighty years later. Not bad for a little deer who once couldn't stand up straight!

Though his impact on, and contribution to animation cannot be overstated, it's probably fair to say that with Bambi, Walt Disney had completed the "big five" of his pioneering career. These movies, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the aforementioned, set the template in a very real way for all the animation which was to follow, and showed the world that, however we on the other side of the big sea would like to believe it was not the case, America ruled.

Still, though Disney would of course go on to have huge hits with the likes of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Robin Hood, it's also fair to say that, having laid down the blueprint as it were for movie animation, although the movies that followed were all great, there wasn't really anything terribly new about them. Disney kept up and improved the quality of animated cartoons, certainly, but could you really compare a 1950s or even 1960s Disney movie to a 1940s one and see that many differences?

I don't think so, and anyway, I would be in danger of turning this into the history of Disney were I to keep going. So for now, and until we reach the age of television, we're done with Disney. We acknowledge and thank him and his animators (more credit than he ever gave them, but however), including those callously fired for standing up to him, for all he did for animation, but we must move on.

Naturally, as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck make their transition from cinema to TV screen, we'll be looking at that, but right now, we need to head back home (for me, anyway) and see what, if anything, the rest of the world was doing as Disney - and to some extent, Max Fleischer - was creating a whole new industry.

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UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA (Part II)
Timeline: Approx 1935 - 1948
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Still, as we will see shortly, very much playing catch-up, Europe was trying, but we had a very long way to go, and to be perfectly honest, once America took the lead it has more or less kept it even today, with the possible exception maybe of Japan.

In Britain, where animators were restricted mostly to writing advertisements, a few ideas were thrown about. Anson Dyer tried to animate the adventures of Sam Small, a soldier who was always getting into trouble (perhaps a precursor to such later favourites as The Sad Sack and Beetle Bailey?) and whose deeds had been described by comedian Stanley Holloway in stage monologues, but his ideas didn't really fit with the drawled, slow vocal style of Holloway and his first attempt, Sam and His Musket (1935) was a failure. You have to give him some credit for ambition though: a full four years before Walt Disney would produce the world's first full-colour animation feature, Dyer was using colour in his failed venture. His next attempt, 1937's The King with the Terrible Temper fared better, but I can find no footage of either. Meanwhile, a cartoonist working for the Daily Express newspaper tried to animate one of his characters, a horse called Steve, but was unequal to the task.

Britain may not have had much in the way of indigenous animators around this period, but for whatever reason it became a focal point for many foreign ones, among them Lotte Reiniger, of whom we have already heard, Hector Hoppin, John Lye and John Halas, the last of whom would become famous for his Halas and Bachelor cartoon studios. It was, however, the influence, however backdoor, of Disney that kickstarted British animation, when David Hand, who had worked on and directed both Bambi and the iconic Snow White joined the newly-formed GB Animation and produced the short-lived series Animaland. Unfortunately, though able to animate, Hand was no genius at giving characters personality, so that the squirrels who starred in his series were wooden and uninteresting, and he returned, despondent, to America in 1949.

In fairness, this is what I read, but looking now at one (entitled The Cuckoo (1948)) I don't agree at all. Yes, the narrator is very English and it's treated more as a nature documentary in the way a lot of later live-action Disney films would copy, but these birds have character. I also note this may be the first time that feet-running-in-a-circle to indicate a character about to run (you know the one, accompanied by someone banging coconuts or something) had been used, at least outside of the USA. Then again, I suspect Hand would just have brought that in his "bag of tricks" to be used 'cross the water. Nevertheless, I don't consider this cartoon bad. You can watch it yourself below.
Another who tried and failed was George Moreno, an American who had studied under Max and Dave Fleischer. His series, Bubble and Squeak, about a London taxi driver and his anthropomorphic taxi, though it only lasted five episodes, is possibly the first example of an inanimate object being given a personality – his taxi is born as a little tiny car as he waits anxiously outside the delivery room, and has a happy face and does that concertina-movement that would again become some popular later on, and that had been somewhat pioneered already by Disney in both Plane Crazy and earlier when Oswald the Lucky Rabbit had his Trolley Troubles. An interesting aside here, not important but hell, I'll mention it anyway cos I'm that anal: as his mates celebrate the birth of Mister Bubble's taxi in the pub, they all sing For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, but the American final line in this song is different to the British one. We sing "And so say all of us" and you guys sing "Which nobody can deny." Now, for reasons I can't work out – surely he could have just asked an English person how they sing it? - he obviously didn't want to use the Americanised version but didn't know how the English one went, so made up a new line: "A jolly good fellow is he." Odd.
Anyway, the cartoon looks to have been well made if the colour is slightly washed out and the drawing sketchier and more two-dimensional than Disney, and the humour is well handled. In one scene (the same singing scene in the pub) a huge taxi driver with a dangerous-looking eyepatch sings one of the lines in a high falsetto! Unexpected, and the kind of thing cartoons would do so well for decades. You can definitely see the influence the Fleischers had on Moreno; his characters are more exaggerated, move more almost to music, swaying, seeming to dance most of the time as opposed to Disney's often more realistic movement, and the proportions are pretty exaggerated too. Nevertheless it's a good cartoon with a clever idea and it's a pity it didn't catch on.


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Len Lye (1901-1980)

Len Lye was born in Australia and spent time in beautiful Samoa ("I couldn't do much work there: it was too wonderful for a young person") and eventually found himself in England, where with the help of grants from the London Film Society he made some animated films, among them Brith of a Robot, which is basically a puppet animation, and Rainbow Dance, which mixes a sort of cut-out silhouette of a human figure with animated sparkles, lights, colours and of course rainbows. Given that this is 1936 we're talking about it's impressive enough, but again light-years behind the USA. Even his 1939 Swinging the Lambeth Walk is a poor relation (a very poor one, almost bankrupt) and shows Lye's focus to be more on creating effects to music rather than true character animation. What would seem to have been his last proper animation before he returned to being a kinetic sculptor in 1949, Free Radicals, was clever but really only from a sense of curiosity as to what could be done with single white lines on a black background to music. It's hardly what you'd call a cartoon in any sense.

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1935 saw the first of the proper animations based on the Disney system come out of France, with Mimma Indelli's La decuverte de a'Amerique (The Discovery of America), but she only had one other film produced in the forties before changing her mind and deciding instead to study art. Andre Rigal was another who worked in the field of animation but I can't find any of his material online, however it is known that he produced some short films while France was under German occupation during the Second World War, mostly about the hero, Cap'taine Sabord, and a Russian emigrant, Bogdan Zoubowitch produced Histoire sans Paroles (Songs without words), clay figure animation was tried by Jean Painleve for Barne-Bleu (Blackbeard) in 1938, but few of these are available to me so I can't comment on them. I'm not even sure if this is Zoubowitch's cartoon below, as that phrase brings up rather a lot of results, some of which are obviously incorrect, but this one looks about right, so you know, maybe it's it.
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Paul Grimault (1905-1994)

What appears to have been the first proper colour animation to come out of France, other than Mme Indelli's effort, which I was unable to track down and so can't critique, comes from Paul Grimault, with the imaginative Les Passengers de la Grand Ourse (1941) and seems to feature the rather fantastical idea of a ship being lifted up by a great many balloons in order to fly. The book I'm reading describes Grimault's use of colour as "sobre" and I think I would have to agree. It's mostly shades of almost sepia, with blacks and whites, but it's not monochrome: it is definitely colour, but almost washed-out colour, not as vibrant as the likes of Disney or Flesicher. The cartoon also works with the idea of the sidekick started by Fleischer, and interestingly both uses a child as the main protagonist (something which I don't think had been done before, though I could be wrong as I'm a little cartooned out, researchwise) and gives him an animal, a pet dog, as his sidekick. Oh no wait: there's yer man, isn't there? Billy Bumps? Well, first in Europe then. The dog becomes more than a pet, becomes a trusted companion and one that will both get into trouble and help get its master out of trouble, something that would develop into a running theme in many cartoons. In one scene (again, I believe this is the first time but don't drag me to court if I'm wrong – I have no money anyway) Grimault seems also to invent what we would come to see as a typical cartoon trope, though it's probably taken from real-life comedy movies, where two people back away until they bump into each other, turn around and realise they have met up. The dog here, too, certainly looks like an early base for later, better-known cartoons dogs such as Droopy, Snoopy and even to an extent everyone's favourite ghost-chasing hound, Scooby-Doo.
Actually, it's not quite balloons that help the Grand Ourse (Great Bear) to fly; it's more a kind of an almost gyroscopic arrangement. The balloons turn clockwise around their centre, small ones on the outside and one huge one in the middle. Quite clever; almost presaging the helicopter/autogyro idea. I have no idea what the crewman they meet is meant to be though: he's long and sort of flexible with a wide midsection and almost stick-thin legs and arms, wide bulbous feet, Mickey Mouse-style white gloves and a clown's face, with what appear to be headphones or earmuffs on his head. Something that perhaps Disney based the Cards on in Alice in Wonderland some time later, perhaps? He also never opens his eyes, so you don't see them, just his closed lashes, making him look either sleepy or benign, even when he chases the pair.

There is no speech in the cartoon, only music, though the dog barks, and it's well made, though I believe the limitations Grimault put on his drawings – the constant and in my extremely humble and uninformed opinon, overuse, of browns, yellows, terracottas, lessens its impact and makes it a little boring on the eye. The animation's pretty first-class though, apart from that, especially the scene near the end where a vulture pursues the boy. The dog is definitely the hero, saving the boy, and again beginning a precedent in which heroic animals would save their (often dim-witted) human owners.

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Anthony Gross (1905-1984)

But while many foreign animators were making their way to England, some of the traffic went the other way. Anthony Gross was an Englishman who practiced his art in Paris, helped and financed by Hector Hoppin. Their Joi de Vivre (1934) is really more typically French in style than English, with rather realistic-looking statuesque girls running, dancing and almost flying, including an impressive section where they walk along telephone wires. Though their dresses billow up and their long legs are exposed, nothing else is, not even underwear, in what might be surprising for one of the most sexually permissive societies of the twentieth century (though bear in mind, of course, that it was being drawn by a comparatively repressed Englishman!) and it's all done, as Kenny Everett used to say, in the best possible taste. It's also all done in black and white.

There's clever usage of the location. As it's a power plant they're close to (hence all the wires and transformers) when one of the girls' shoes flies off and a boy finds it, the word on the door he opens to discover the shoe, and then set off after the girls to return it, is DANGER. While this obviously is meant to warn of high voltage, you have to wonder if there wasn't a double meaning for the girls: danger in meeting boys? The two girls – though depicted as quite adult, maybe in their late teens or even early twenties – seem the spirit of innocence and carefree fun, dancing with each other as if they have not a care in the world, and as noted, there is no reference to any sexual undertone: no flash of knickers, no stocking tops, nothing titillating at all. So are these two girls, the soul of purity, about to be corrupted by the rough male presence entering their little world? They, of course, run off, thinking he is after them when all he wants to do is return the shoe, and there follow some very intricate and clever (and quite beautiful) sequences involving butterflies, wind and flowers. There's also great use of perspective here, where at one point the girls seem to have shrunk to the size of a bee, yet we see as they come closer it's just that they are, or were, far away.
You also have to wonder if famous British animator Gerald Scarfe (remember his work on Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" video?) got some of his inspiration from Gross? Certainly, the way the boy walks is very reminiscent of the way the hammers walk in that video. Further on in the video, the girls strip off to take a dip in a pool, but again, there's more suggested than shown; very little in the way of actual nudity and more a basic idea of shape. In the typical disregard for logic and physics that would soon become endemic to cartoons, the boy simply rides his bike across the river to go in pursuit of the now once again clothed girls, who very cleverly use their billowing skirts to make them look like flowers, and so escape his attentions for the moment.

Eventually though he catches them, explaining that all he wants to do is return the girl's shoe, and having taken refuge in a signal box, the three then spend a frantic time choreographing the paths of various trains for some reason, a lot of clever superimposition of the trains over the hectic trio before the boy fits the shoe to the girl's foot and all three fly off into the clouds on his bike, fifty years before Spielberg thought of the idea, and again you wonder ...

There's certainly an element of Cinderella in this short, with the girl losing her shoe and being pursued by the boy, but it's mainly quite innocent and perhaps an object lesson to women that men are not always after the one thing. Well, not in cartoons anyway! Gross's most famous film was actually produced in London, as he was invited back there after producer/director and founder of London Films, Alexander Korda had seen the movie, so technically it's not a French effort but let's keep it here anyway. The Fox Hunt, shot in colour, is supposedly wonderful but unfortunately efforts to locate it have proven fruitless. Once again, Hitler ruined a good animator as WWII prevented Gross from working on his own material, as he was given the role of official war artist and saw action in Egypt, Syria, India and Burma among others, and though he tried to pick up his career after 1945, was only able to create a short from the original intended feature of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, which he had been working on before war was declared. He retired from animation and like Mimma Indelli, chose a career in art instead, becoming a painter. He died in 1974.

Berthold Bartosch (1893-1968)

Born in the Czech Republic, (then part of Austria-Hungary and later Czechoslovakia), Bartosch moved to Berlin and met Lotte Reiniger, with whom he worked on the already discussed Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed and later moved to Paris, where he was approached by author Frans Masereel with the idea of turning one of his books into an animated film. When he got down to it though, Bartosch found that the wood engravings made by Masereel did not respond well to animating, and he had to actually invent a whole new way of filming them, including using plates of glass with soap on them, to provide a murky, surreal effect. On the face of it a political film, L'Idea (1931) is in fact a triumph of the human spirit over the forces of evil and coercion, it says here. But it's not my cup of tea. It's very dark, the constant shimmer makes it hard to work out what's going on much of the time, it's all in black and white and this thing Bartosch did with soap doesn't work for me, but then, what do I know? Much of the time it reminds me of a prehistoric ancestor to the work of Terry Gilliam on Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Failing health would dog Bartosch after the end of World War II, in which his native country would all but disappear, and though he worked on an anti-war film/poem just prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the film was all but destroyed in the war, and he leaves us with these words of wisdom: "It must be simple. It is difficult to be simple, but it is necessary."

Alexandre Alexieff (1901-1982)

Originally of Russian descent, Alexieff moved to Paris in 1921 where he met his future wife, Claire Parker, and invented the idea of the pinscreen (http://"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinscreen_animation%22), creating his first animated movie, Une nuit sur la mont chauve (1932), based on the same Mussorgsky classical piece Disney would use to end his 1940 Fantasia, "A night on Bald Mountain". It's another affair of light and dark (though that actually suits the subject matter in this case) and you can see the almost primitive morphing effects the use of the pinscreen allowed Alexieff to achieve. It's impressive, but you can't help but notice the massive gulf between what was happening in Europe and over in the US. I mean, at this point Disney had already completed Oswald's adventures and moved on to Mickey Mouse, and each of these (even Oswald) are vastly superior to the majority of the work I've seen so far from Europe, which had a long way to go to catch up.
Disappointed at the amount of films he was told he would have to produce in order to make a proper living at animation, Alexieff and his wife decided to go into advertising instead, and produced some apparently very good animations there, but sadly again I can't find any examples. During the war, the couple fled to America, returning to Paris at its end, however they don't seem to come back into the animation story again until the fifties, and as I'm currently limiting this timeline to 1948 or thereabouts, I'll leave them here for now. I may come back to them later.

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We've already looked very quickly at what meagre animation Germany had to offer, focusing mostly on Lotte Reiniger, and we will return to her in due course. But given the dates I've selected for this timeline, it will be readily seen and understood that much, indeed most of the animation coming out from the Fatherland at this time was of necessity both political and, naturally, had to fit in with and be a mouthpiece for Nazi propaganda. This of course would result in works that may appear stunted and devoid of creativity, soulless or otherwise bland, and I think it's important that these examples are looked at in the proper context, which is to say, that most (probably not all) of these animators were prevented - indeed, prohibited - from expressing themselves as they would wish to, if it did not suit the needs of the Reich.

Even so, there's always room for an entrepreneur, and one man to recognise early the potential of cinema advertising was Julius Pinschewer, who made a point of copyrighting the animations he did for cinemas. If your animation was used in an advert then you were sure to get financed by the company that was using it, and at one time or another nearly every important German animator worked for or with Pinschewer, who left Germany in 1933, just before the storm broke.
Another who would avoid the horrors of Nazi Germany by taking American patronage was Oskar Fischinger. He invented a machine called a wax slicer, allowing him to film through cross-sections of moulded wax and clay, and it was this that was used in Reiniger's movie. But Fischinger had talents that went beyond the building of machines for animation purposes, and his most famous work is 1938's An Optical Poem, in which he suspended hundreds of tiny pieces of coloured paper on invisible wires, filmed them in stop motion and synchronised them to the tune of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody. The whole thing ran for just over seven minutes, an exercise in abstract animation.
Much of the other work Fischinger concentrated on was commercials, including this one for a cigarette company called Muratti Greft Ein before he was courted by Hollywood and ended up working (though not getting credit for) with Disney on both Snow White and Pinocchio.

Walter Ruttman, an early inspiration to Fischinger, and to whom he licenced his wax slicer, also worked in abstract art, utilising sound and colour and, like his protege, synchronising his animation to music, as in one of his Opuses, shown below. However he is best remembered for his collaboration with Leni Riefenstahl on the Nazi propaganda film "Triumph des Willens" (Triumph of the Will), still accepted as one of the best documentaries ever made, even if its central message was abhorrent.
Hungarian-born George Pal actually came from his native country to work in Germany, having set up a company to produce advertising films, and he became quite famous there until the Nazis came to power and he became another forced to flee Germany. He would later work on such seminal science-fiction films as The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, making his name in the USA as a producer. Before that though, in 1940  he became famous for the Puppetoons series, which featured, oddly enough, puppets. In fact, he won an honorary Oscar in 1943.
Other German animators working prior to the outbreak of the war included Alexander Gumitsch, who used clay figures in a time long before what became known as claymation, and Alexander von Gontscharoff-Mussalewsky, who used plastic figures, but unfortunately his animations tended to contain racial stereotypes, such as "a stupid negro"; Richard Groschopp, whose short "Die Wundersamen Abenteur des kleinen Mutz (A Boy's rocket flight to Planet X)" won the runner-up prize at the Interntational Amateur Film Festival in London in 1935, and the follow-up to which was included on a Nazi propaganda film, earning it much more acclaim and widespread distribution.

With the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi Party, and the outbreak of World War II, any remaining animators in Germany were forced to work for the glory of the Third Reich, and while perhaps some of them may have done so willingly, we don't know this and so should view their work through the lens of history and try to put ourselves in their shoes. They lived through a terrible time in their home country, when they surely faced the fear of being arrested as "undesirables", "artists" or the hated "intellectuals", and must have had to do all they could to make themselves useful, even indispensable to the Fuhrer, who was never known for his sense of humour.
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The search for the German answer to Mickey Mouse: Elves, bunnies and frogs, oh my!

In 1935 UFA, the largest and most successful animation company in Germany (their equivalent, basically, of Disney in Germany, commissioned cartoonist Otto Waffenschmidt to create a new animated cartoon character, and he settled on an elf from German folk tales, called Tilo Voss. However Waffenschmidt had not the experience of comic books and newspaper strips that were available in the USA, and his initial effort was rejected for not having "enough gags". Unexpectedly spiralling running costs then added to their problems and in the end the project was shelved, leaving the task of creating a German cartoon character to Ultra Film in 1937. However their music director, Herr Julius Kopsch, who had been asked to create a score for the film, which was to be entitled "Die drei getreuen Haschen (The Three Faithful Bunnies)" did not seem to like bunnies, and wanted to to use dogs in the film instead, and the project stalled. Finally, in desperation UFA turned to an animation studio in Paris, who promised to give them what they wanted, but shortly afterwards Snow White hit, and the rules of the game were forever changed.

The man who wrought that change upon the world visited Germany himself in 1935, though who Disney met with there is unclear, and no documents pertaining to the visit survive, but interestingly enough, Snow White became the only American movie of any kind to be passed by the German censors under Hitler's regime. Make of that what you will. Also telling is a report from a German trade paper which described Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda guru, as "Disney's No. 1 fan". In 1937 the former mayor of Graudenz, Max Winkler, who had become a big wheel in German cinema, was promoted to head of the German film industry by Goebbels,  though here I find something of a problem is cropping up. In some accounts of animation under the Hitler regime there appear to be disparities, even conflicts. One says that the Nazis viewed animation as a "degenerate art" while another cites Hitler's love of Mickey Mouse and Snow White. The abovementioned Winkler is spoken of in Animation Under the Swastika but not even referred to in A History of World Animation, even in the section which specifically deals with Nazi Germany. I suppose reliable records from that time might be harder to verify than expected.

Deutche Zeichenfilm GmbH (The German Animation Company), set up by Hitler and Goebbels in 1941, found its base changing as the Allies continually bombed Germany, eventually situating itself right beside Dachau. Art Director at the time, Gerhard Fieber, would later recall "During the working hours you were busy with trickfilm figures, at the same time you could see prisoners on the street who were harnessed in front of wagons as replacements for horses. Nevertheless you had to draw funny figures – it was awful." I'm sure it was; makes you wonder why he chose to relocate to that particular area. Despite the studio being unsuccessful, Goebbels directed DZG to create a ten-minute animation called "Hochzeit im korallenmeer (Wedding in the Coral Sea)" which was actually produced in Prague, and here again we have a problem: as Nazi Germany was occupying most of Europe from 1940 to 1944, any Nazi animation really has to be credited, as it were, to them. I don't really see any other way to do it, as I doubt, for instance, Czech animators today would wish to be associated with a Nazi-made film, though I may be wrong. I'm erring on the side of caution, anyway, and lumping them all together, as the book title I mentioned earlier says, under the Swastika.
One of the most famous Nazi animations is "Der Schneeman (The Snowman)" – no, not that one, obviously! Created in 1944 by Hans Fischerkoesen, it does actually somewhat follow the general storyline of the later and more famous Raymond Briggs' cartoon, with a snowman yearning to see summer but finding it makes him melt. Uncharacteristically for a Nazi cartoon, it is quite light-hearted and really contains no overt political or propagandist messages, nor did his next, "Verwitterte melodie (The Dilapidated Melody)" which features a bee who finds a gramaphone in a field and uses his stinger as a stylus to play a record, very Disneylike and perhaps even foreshadowing the kind of thing Fred Hanna and Joseph Barbera would do twenty years later on The Flintstones. His third, and final animation however, "Das Dumme Ganslein (The Silly Goose)" is an out-and-out piece of propaganda and has very clear anti-semite tones.
An anti-Nazi, Heinz Tischmeyer worked with George Pal in Berlin before fleeing Germany in 1937 but unable to stay in Switzerland he was forced to return to the Fatherland, where he worked on "Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten (The Town Musicians of Bremen)", based on the Brothers Grimm fairytale, and "Von Baumelein, das andere Blatter gewollt (The Little Tree that wanted different leaves)" which shows again, anti-semite leanings, though considering his stance on the Nazis we can assume this was forced upon him. Later he was recruited to work at DZG.
(Note: normally, when I find a video is no longer working, I look for an alternative link and if I can't find one, delete the video blank. Here, I'm leaving this up, as I believe (rightly or wrongly) that the reason the video "violated YouTube's terms" is due to its being anti-semitic, and if so, it's correct that they deleted it, and I think that should be applauded.)

Other important Nazi-era animations include Der Storenfried, 1940, which places a fox as the danger to a family of hares and utilises wasps, representing the Luftwaffe, to come to their rescue. Produced by Hans Held (no, seriously: that's his name) it's a very dismal effort, given that this is three years after Snow White: it's in black and white, there's much reuse of the same scene; the only decent thing really about it is the clever idea of using the wasps as divebombers and the formation flying scene. Other than that, it's not a patch on Disney or even any of the earlier cartoons that were coming out of the USA around that time. There's also one from 1943, produced in Nazi-occupied Holland, based on the French tale of Reynard the Fox, the original of which we discussed earlier in the section on French animation.

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I can find little to no information about this, apart from that it was released in 1937 and is called The Seven Ravens (Die siebe Raben) but other that that, and the fact that it was a stop-motion animation, based on the fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, I got nothing.

Van den vos reynarede though, by Egbert van Putten, takes as its yardstick the anti-semitic version of the tale written by Dutch-Belgian Robert van Genechten, and uses a rhinoceros name Joducus (an obvious reference to the character being a Jew) who tries to create a socialist republic and is chased away, along with his fellow rhinos, by the dashing Reynard. A totally skewed vision of socialism is presented, wherein the Nazi obssession with racial purity is espoused: Joducus declares that all animals may intermarry and there will be no pure race anymore. To be fair, compared to Hans Held's cartoon three years earlier, this shows a marked improvement. For a start, it's in colour, and the colours (though the one shown below has been restored from archive footage) seems quite vibrant. The sound is better (again, I accept this may have been repaired relatively recently) and the clever (though chillingly appropriate) scenes at the end, where the rhinos are drowned in the lake and their ghostly, winged spirits ascend to Heaven (although you would wonder, if they're degenerate Jews, why they're not going down to Hell?) as celestial music plays, may have been the first usage of this later common trope in animation.
Finally there's Vichy France (Occupied France, for those of you too young to know or too lazy or disinterested to look it up) which in 1944 somehow managed to make this Disney parody, using Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Popeye (?) and Donald Duck, to attack France in American bombers. From what I can make out of it, there's a family at the centre of it who welcome the liberation of France (I guess to the Vichy government they would be seen as traitors) and who are rather unlucky when a US bomb hits their house, killing them all. I must point out that whoever does the voice for Popeye sounds just like Krusty the Klown. Check it out!

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Animation in Germany may have been somewhat stifled with the rise of the Nazis and therefore the imprisonment, execution or flight to exile of some of the most creative minds in the Reich, but Spain had  its very own Civil War, which raged from 1936 to 1939, and you would wonder how, already devastated by three years of bloodshed, Spanish animators could flourish, or even survive, in such a climate, yet they did.

Joaquin Xaudaro, who had in 1917 produced the first Spanish animation Jim Trot's Adventures, created Un drama en la costa in 1933 just prior to his death, having created the previous year SEDA, the Societe Espanola de Dibujos Animados, an art collective which was responsible for four animated films in all, one of which being the abovementioned. The year of Xaudaro's death also saw the release of K-Hito (born Ricardo Garcia Lopez)'s "El Rata Primera" while the next year he created Francisca la Mujer Fatal. The final film produced at SEDA was Francisco Lopez Rubio's Seranata, also in 1934. This, sadly, means that SEDA survived for a mere two years, and just as sadly, none of the animations mentioned above seem to have survived to this day.
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The demise of Xaudro's dream however did not stop the rise of Spanish animation, and in 1935 Jose Martinez Romano and the caricature artist known only as Menda released Una de abono and the western short, Buffalo Full. Again, YouTube searches yield nothing. Puppets were then used in an animation directed by movie director Adolfo Aznar, for "Pipo y Pipa en busca de Colcin" (you guessed it: zero results!) followed by Feliciano Perez and Arturo Beringola's El intrepido Raul.
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The Edad Dorada

Anyone with most passing acquaintance with or knowledge of the Spanish language will know that the legendary city of El Dorado means "city of gold", and the period just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, from the 1940s, was nicknamed El Edad Dorada, "the golden age", as it became the pinnacle of early Spanish animation. Choosing to side with neither power in World War II, the newly-established dictator General Franco needed nationalist expression in film and animation, and so he became something of a patron of the arts – as long as they reflected traditional (approved) Spanish values and ideals, and praised his new government. However it turned out to be not the capital, Madrid, which would be the centre of the great birthplace of Spanish animation, but Barcelona.

The Reverse Disney Principle

Whereas in the USA Walt Disney worked with his animators – and had been one himself, a cartoonist first, working for another studio before he set his own up, as we saw earlier – the Spanish idea, at least in Barcelona, was for entrepreneurs to engage and employ artists and animators, and they would deal with the government offices to get them contracts and keep the finances in order. Two of the main movers in this field were Jaume Baguna and Alejandro Fernandez de la Reguera, the former of which set up Hispano Grafic Films in 1939. Their first effort was a seven-episode series based on a comic character, Juanito Milhombres, while de la Reguera founded Dibsono Films, which released SOS Doctor Marabu in 1940. It garnered praise as "one of the most remarkable, fluid and brilliant films of its time", and of course, it's nowhere to be found. :( Interestingly, it appears that the Spanish may have been the first to have a proper antihero in one of their animations, this being the crotchety old Don Cleque, a bald, sickly, ugly man, and no, I can't find a single instance of him on YouTube either.

In 1942 the two great studios merged, becoming Dibujos Animados Chamartin, which based itself in the historic surroundings of Antonio Gaudi's Paseo de Gracia and continued the adventures of sad old Don Cleque, while also adding an anthropomorphic bull (well, this was Spain!) called Civilon, both of whom were given an entire series, as was Garabatos, a caricature show which heaped scorn on El Presidente's enemies. DAC lasted till 1945 only, when the studios were to be moved to Madrid, and the company dissolved when Jaume Baguna quit.

That same year though, Arturo Moreno got the chance to make Spain's first full-length animated feature movie, thanks to an offer from animation studio Balet y Blay, and Garbancito de la Mancha would also be the first Spanish cartoon to be produced in colour. Amazingly, there actually is a clip of this, though it literally is a clip, just over a minute long. It shows promise, certainly better than some of the German animation we recently looked at, but it's hard to form an opinion on such a short excerpt. Still, it does look as if Spanish animation was in decent shape at this time.
His next project (spoken of in "A History of World Animation" as, I quote, "boring") was another feature-length effort, and again rather surprisingly I can find a small clip of it, which I've posted below. Reference to Max Fleischer's work and style has been made in the book regarding both movies, and I guess there are similarities. They are certainly more Fleishcher than Disney, anyway.
Los Suenos de Tay-Pi, produced by Franz Winterstein with the departure of Moreno for Venezuela, sounds a whole lot more interesting, with tuxedo-wearing monkeys and crying crocodiles, but this is where our luck runs out. It's also where the luck ran out for Balet y Blay, whose last film this turned out to be, and a total flop at that. Animators from the closed Chamartin studios produced Erase una vez, based on the Cinderella tale, and in contrast to the abovementioned it seems to have come in for some serious praise, though it was not a success when released, but again there is no video for it. Sadly, as the title translates to "once upon a time", there are plenty of hits, but nothing close to what I'm looking for.

In Madrid, Salvador Gijon had a successful series involving a detective and a dog, which ran right up to the sixties and is perhaps the second instance of the sidekick being a dog, the first being in the French animation I featured earlier, Paul Grimault's Les Passagers de la Grand Ourse, while puppets were back in vogue for Angel Echenique and his "Ciudad de los munecos" (1945) and ex-SEDA alumnus Manuel Alonso Anino made intriguing drawings with shadows, but the shadows were too angular and pronounced "ugly", and looked very dated. Valencia also saw its share of animators, among them Jose Maria Reyes, Carlos Rigalt and Joachin Perez Arroyo.

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Not to be outdone, those crazy Russians were also at it. Well, technically they were Soviets back then, as Russia was part of the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the world's biggest bastion of Communism. Small wonder then that when Alexander Ptushko and his team of animators reimagined the classic story Gulliver's Travels they would put a Communist twist on it. I've no intention of going into the skewed politics of it all – where capitalism was, typically, seen as the evil enemy and glorious mother Russia the hero etc etc – but if you want to sit through over an hour of it, here you go.
Oh no wait, you can't, as it's been removed and there are not other links available. Well, I doubt you're missing much, from the short glance I took through it myself when it was still available.

What is important is that it was the first animation to make extensive use of puppetry, before even Ladislas Starevich above, coming out in 1935, two years before Le Roman de Renard although apparently only begun two years after the French film. I guess that's what happens when you can call on the might of the Kremlin to provide your musicians and your technology. Maybe. Anyway it made it first, and so has gone down in history as the first full-length puppet animation.


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Another country that struggled with fascism in the thirties and forties was of course Italy, but unlike Germany's dictator, Mussolini does not seem to have had any interest in cartoons, and so the story of Italian animation (at least, early animation and probably later too) is short and contains few names, and fewer movies. Luigi Liberio Pensuti is said to have been the only animator to have worked constantly in the country, heading up the state institution for cinematography, the Isituto Nazionale Luce in 1935. Most of his work, unsurprisingly, was propaganda for the Fascist Party, like 1941's Il dottor Churkill, which lampoons Churchill as a Jekyll and Hyde figure. As an animation it's not too bad really, with the hideously deformed Hydelike creature drinking a potion labelled "Democrazia" (anyone?) and transforming into the urbane British Prime Minister. The music even changes, from dark, ominous, sub-Hammer style horror score to a breezy, nonchalant twenties upbeat swing as Churchill transforms.

He's seen envisioning the Union  Jack over all the world, and then robbing people's houses (I think; it's all in Italian obviously and a little hard to be sure) whereupon he reverts back to the Mister Hyde figure (perhaps showing his true colours? Kind of surprised the Hyde persona is not shown as a caricature of a Jew) and has to drink his "democracy" potion to again take the form of the statesman. Just as he's doing this though, an arm with a swastika on it grabs him, causing him to break the tube with the potion, and he is pursued by the Nazis in his Hyde form. He makes it to his little plane but is pursued by the Luftwaffe, which turns into a bombing raid on London, which is destroyed as the victorious Nazis fly off.
The brothers Cossio, Carlo and Vittorio, made some shorts in the thirties, including "La secchia rapita (The broken bucket)" and even a version of HG Wells's classic The Time Machine, which was released in 1937. However, as they were one of the few people experimenting with colour in Italy at the time, to say nothing of stereoscopy, the costs proved prohibitive and they abandoned their ventures. It's pretty primitive though, even if they deserve praise for trying to integrate colour into their work: most of their characters don't seem to move, or only one body part (usually the head) does at a time, and the animation itself is far from fluid, jumping all over the place where you can see clearly they used cutouts and just positioned them, filmed them, positioned them again and so on. Quite poor I feel, given the time period and the advances that were taking place half a world away.
Invited by painter Luigi Giobbe, who had made his own film in 1940, they made two more short films based on Neapolitan stories: Pulcinella e i briganti and Pulcinella et i temporale, but that seems to have been about it for the two brothers. And, indeed, Giobbe, who probably went back to painting. Ugo Siatta tried something with puppets (again with the puppets!) this time set in the Middle Ages, called Teste di legno, or Wooden Balls. Sorry. Heads. Wooden Heads. ;)

Someone a little more eceletic was Luciano Emmer, who used frescoes and shots of a famous chapel. He created an animation called "Racconto di un affresco" (Story of a fresco) – apologies for the terrible video below: I don't know why it's shaking so badly but it's the only version I can find. Probably don't watch if you're prone to epileptic seizures, as it's very jumpy indeed.
There was also Antonio Rubino, and Nino Pagot, who like most other Italian artists and animators had to work on propaganda films in order to continue to be able to eat. Pagot created the largest animation establishment in Italy and invited his brother Toni to join him there. After the defeat and death of Mussolini, and the end of World War II, he went on to create a feature film, Lalla, picolla Lalla in 1946. Although there is only a tiny fragment of it available, it already looks far superior to anything I've seen come out of Italy, with a very Disney Alice in Wonderland/Mister Bug Goes to Town feel, at least the little I've seen. As for his other feature films, I fratelli dinamite was created by him and some other Italian animators who had just returned from a German POW camp, after Italy had switched sides in the war after 1943, and it concerns the fantasy adventures of three brothers, told in narration by their aunt to dinner guests. The animation is pretty first-class, though in fairness it was released in 1949, so by now animation had made great strides and would soon move to the new medium of television. Still, for struggling Italian animation this is right up there with the best. One of the scenes takes place in Hell – a bold move which I believe not even Disney had ... oh wait, Fantasia. Yeah, well, a move which no other animator other than Disney had attempted up to then – and it's quite well done, with children being taken from a sack by a Satan figure who is sort of a cross between a carnival barker and Santa, and zipped into various costumes of animals and other things, which then become animate.
The last major animation around this period (I realise we've stretched the timeline a lot here, but there really is not much Italian animation to fill up this section) was by Anton Gino Domeneghini, and entitled La  Rosa di Bagdad, another full-length feature whose storyline borrowed liberally from Snow White, as did the design of the characters, who bear rather too close a resemblance to Disney's dwarfs than Domeneghini would perhaps have preferred. Jesus! They even have a bald one with a big nose and beard who, with a droopy cap and the beard removed, would be identical to Dopey! Though this movie did well for him in the box office, it had taken over seven years to produce, and Domeneghini was an ad-man first and last, and he promptly gave up his efforts to be an animator, returning to the world of advertising.

Finally, although there is no surviving copy of it, some mention must be made of The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le Avventure di Pinocchio), as, had it been completed, it would also have beaten Snow White, but it takes as its subject matter another fairy tale that Walt Disney would make famous, the puppet who longs to be a real boy, Pinocchio. Production issues bedevilled the project, which had a budget (surely undreamed-of at the time) of one million (and that's Pounds, not Lira!) and it was abandoned. All I can offer you are some stills from its Wiki page, the only frames that survived this ill-fated attempt to be the first Italian feature-length animation. Of course, as you can see, it would not quite have taken that title from Uncle Walt, as it was quite clearly not made in colour. Well, not as we understand it, anyway.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Le_Avventure_di_Pinocchio_%281936%29_2.jpg/440px-Le_Avventure_di_Pinocchio_%281936%29_2.jpg)
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Le_Avventure_di_Pinocchio_%281936%29.jpg/500px-Le_Avventure_di_Pinocchio_%281936%29.jpg)
The only other example of early Italian animation seems to have been based on the Three Musketeers, (for whatever reason it was called The Four Musketeers (I quattro moschettieri)though sadly, again, this has not survived or is at least not known to be available. Interesting though, as it was another puppet animation and apparently used over eight thousand actual puppets! Talk about pulling a lot of strings to get things done! :laughing: Sorry...

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/Berliner_Gedenktafel_Knesebeckstr_11_%28Charl%29_Lotte_Reiniger.jpg/440px-Berliner_Gedenktafel_Knesebeckstr_11_%28Charl%29_Lotte_Reiniger.jpg)
Coming Out Of the Shadows: The Exceptional Exception to the Rule
Part II: Flight from Tyranny: Darkness Descends

Hitler's rise to power meant that most of the animators in Germany, especially those with a) a conscience b) the means/money/connections and definitely c) any of Jewish extraction had to get the hell out of Dodge before it was too late, and Lotte was no different. She fled Germany in 1933 with her husband, but perhaps because they were Germans, they found it impossible to secure a permanent visa in any of the countries they went to. This then entailed eleven years of the couple engaging in what could almost be seen, I guess, as an international period of couch-surfing, where they went to one country on a visitor's or temporary visa, and had to leave when that ran out, heading to the next country where the same thing would happen, and so on, a situation which, incredibly, lasted almost to the end of the war. I don't see which countries these were, but I do see mention of both France and Italy. Given that a) France was free until 1940 and that b) Italy, though an Axis power, switched sides in late 1943, their presence in the former in 1935 and the latter in 1944 makes sense, though how long they lasted in each, and where else they went I have no idea, nor do I know how long temporary visas last, or lasted back then.

In la belle France they were reunited with their patron and friend, Jean Renoir, and with him began to work on integrating music into animation, as technology now began to allow sound on film, and the first "talkies" began to appear, with silent movies more or less being sidelined and phased out by 1930. They made 12 movies during her enforced exile, mostly based on operas. Though the war, heading to a brutal and climatic end, was still raging in 1944, Lotte's mother was sick and she felt an obligation to be with her, to look after her, and so, despite the danger, she and Carl returned to Nazi Germany, where Hitler forced her to make propaganda films for his Reich. One such is Die goldene Gans (The Golden Goose).
All right, let's be brutally honest here: almost twenty years on from The Adventures of Prince Achmed and I don't see a huge improvement. Well, perhaps that's not entirely fair. Her figures are better defined, and she's using some other colours, but essentially it's still cut-out puppets against a flat background, isn't it? This in a time, not to labour the point too much but it must be said, when Disney and his counterparts were already making what could be termed almost photo-realistic movies with the fluidest of motions and full sound synchronisation. I guess you have to factor in that while America was leading the world in animation by now, Europe - including Britain - was really struggling to keep up, but even so, I have to say this is poor. Allowing for the fact that she was basically on the run, no doubt fearing for her life as the Nazi war machine rolled across western Europe, and, too, that she seems to have concentrated, for most of the war years, on music to accompany movies, maybe that's not so surprising. But really, two decades later and this is what we get?

I will say that her animation is much less angular and moves better against the background, but that background is still dull tones of sepia, ochre, brown - maybe, of course, this was at the behest of the Nazi Party, so perhaps she should not be judged too harshly, and as I already said, creativity was tightly reined in and controlled by the Reich, so she may have submitted ideas that were thrown out, and told to "go back to das drawing board", as it were.

As far as Nazi propaganda is concerned, I really can't say as this is of course all in German and there are no subtitles added by the uploader, but I think I heard the word "juden", so who knows? It's clearly based on the fairy tale but presumably with a suitably Nazi twist. The music is decent, but mostly seems to be just acoustic guitar, and the background, mostly the trees, keeps shaking as if someone is moving the camera, making it look often as if they're about to fall down or something. The camera work, I would have to say, is poor, not at all steady, though maybe that's supposed to be part of its charm? Who can say what Hitler and his cronies preferred? Yeah, I guess you'd have to be a proper student of shadow puppet theatre to appreciate this. I'm sure it's a great example of the genre, but it does nothing for me, especially when you see what even the English would be doing at this time, or soon after. Hell, Pauvre Pierrot is streets ahead of this (apart from the sound, of course) and that was made, at this point, almost fifty years prior! Don't get it.

Hitler must, however, on some level have been fuming. If there ever was a logical, rational side of his brain and it could have made itself heard over the foaming tirade of invective and curses as the war began to turn against him, and his date with a bullet to the head drew closer, it must have impressed upon him that, had he not had exiled or executed, or caused to flee the cream of German animation, his country - and therefore, at this time, the Third Reich - could have been turning out far superior animation than it was. As it stood though, this was what he was left with, and I'm sorry Lotte, but to me this just shows how extremely poor the state of animation was in wartime Germany. Yeah, I see it says it in the Wiki article: "She had to work under stringent and limiting conditions to please the German state, which is why some of her work in this time period may appear creatively stifled." Certainly does.

After the war, Lotte and her husband moved to England, where in 1949 she made advertising films and worked for the film unit of the Post Office, and later formed her own animation company, Primrose Productions, which led to her producing a dozen animations for the BBC based on Grimm's Fairy Tales, though of course I can find no examples of them. Oh wait: here's one. Now just a moment here, senator! What's going on? This is dated 1931 (on the YouTube, not the actual animation) but shows Primrose Productions as the company. Yet if she only set up Primrose after 1949, how can this be made in 1931? Unless it's an older animation that she later released under her own studio?
On first glance, I'd say that guess is correct, as this is far more fluid and, well, modern, compared to her wartime and earlier efforts. Still black and white, but more striking with the contrast between the two (no boring browns or dull yellows here) the animation is sharper, more immediate than anything I've seen from her up to now. This is a long one, over 22 minutes, so I'll be damned if I'm going to watch it all, but just the first few minutes make me feel this has to have been, if not created long after '31, then redone for the almost-1950s. The horse is much better defined (compare this to the goose in the Nazi video), the signpost doesn't shake, the human figure looks more, well, untethered and real: in the other one, you could see she (or someone) was holding up cardboard cut-outs and making them move. Here, you can almost get the idea the figures move without any intervention from human hands, and I would call this the first real animation I've seen from her. It's still shadow puppets, sure, but they're a hell of a lot better than anything that has gone before.

Yeah, it's years, decades ahead of what she has been doing up to now. These figures walk - they don't seem to bounce or be shifted along the canvas/screen; you get a real sense of them being, well, real, and the detail is much much better. There's no way this could have been done by her in 1931, the uploader must have got it wrong. 1951 maybe. It's called Harlequin and the figures dance, touch, drink and play music with a fluidity I haven't seen before in her work. This perhaps also shows how stifled she was by the Nazis, and now that they're all dead or at least defeated, and the world is at peace (!) again, she can really flex those creative muscles and show what she can do.

Okay. I may have to rethink that, because now I see this one, Papageno, based on Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, was created in 1935 (and so, when she was in either France or Italy, I think the former) and again the movement here is far, far superior to the work she was forced to turn out for Hitler and his Party nine years later. Again, the figure walks rather than jerks across the screen, and is far better defined, and since the year is this time shown on the movie, we can't dispute its age. This one uses some more vibrant colours too - red, green, orange - and the music of Mozart, so is much more appealing than previous efforts.

Warning: May affect those with photo-sensitive epilepsy!

The ascent by the birdcatcher(?) into the tree via a ladder is well accomplished, for what it is, and the birds are well animated too, though I'm not entirely sure what the pulsating colours behind the scene are meant to be, whether that's supposed to be the sun or what. Nevertheless, its constant movement and almost strobing effect might be detrimental to those who suffer from photo-sensitive epilepsy, so be warned. The usage of almost (but not really) synchronisation of sound when the bird catcher (if it is he; I'm not a fan of opera) plays a row of bells strung across the tree is quite impressive for the time, and for her, and the appearance of the snake when the lovers meet (stop that!) is clever too, with the music taking on a more sinister aspect. Hmm. Looks like they kill him. Oh well, if you know the opera you probably know where this is going, but it does serve to refute my belief that Harlequin could not have been made by Lotte in 1931, so as ever, WDIK?

Actually, oddly it says "Germany 1935", but Wiki tells me Lotte and her husband fled in 1933, so I don't know what's going on there. I see, too, that the list of her work on Wiki confirms that Harlequin was made in 1931, so again, wrong, wrong, wrong Trollheart! Should be used to it by now. Outside of animation, Lotte Reiniger also illustrated books and worked with deaf children's societies, and when Carl died in 1963 she went into a period of withdrawal, but renewed interest in her work drew her back to Germany, and she later toured the USA, returning to making movies, the last of which I can find, The Rose and the Ring, was made in 1979, two years before her death.
This is another twenty-minute plus effort, so I don't intend to watch it all, but as it opens I see it's based on a story by William Makepeace Thackeray, and uses bright, warm, friendly colours like orange, peach and white, almost like looking at a piece of wallpaper, but in a good way. I also note that her figures this time are not black shadows, but colourful cut-outs, and as well as this, it's the first and only of hers I've found where the narration is in English. Whether that's her voice or not I don't know. Okay well perhaps I was a bit precipitous in saying the figures aren't black, because now they are, so maybe it's just the main one that is coloured? Good sense of humour in the story (I know it's not hers but still) particularly when the dog pees on the husband's leg! I will say the animation is far more fluid, no jerking or shaking this time, a real quantum leap for her, but then again, we're now talking being on the cusp of the 1980s, when realistic cartoons were already on the television and Pixar were waiting in the wings with the world's first completely computer animated movie, so she can still be seen as a quaint throwback to a simpler time.

Wiki says one of the reasons Lotte is so highly regarded is that her figures, being nothing more than shadow puppets, could not convey emotion (as they had no faces) and she had to do this via movement, which it says she does, but this thick Irishman don't see it, sorry. I don't begrudge her, or challenge her place in animation history, both as the first (and possibly only) German shadow puppet animator, and one of the only female ones, but this doesn't do it for me. At any rate, Lotte died in 1981 at the age of 82, and has since been honoured with the establishment of a lifetime achievement award in animation being named after her, and her work has been commemorated with extended shadow puppet scenes in such movies as Bram Stoker's Dracula and the Harry Potter franchise, and in the creation of a file format for animation vector, believed to be the most superior, which bears her name. She was awarded the Winsor McCay award posthumously this year, 2024.

And speaking of puppets...

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Puppet Masters: Dancing to Their Own Tune

As one of the most primitive, and yet enduring forms of animation, still in vogue today, it would seem churlish to present any discussion on film animation without looking at the people whose first - and often last - love was for marionettes dancing around on strings. Puppetry, of course, goes all the way back to the Greeks, who actually coined the term, which means to draw by means of strings. Puppets would be used to act out plays, or parts in plays where either using human actors was problematic, or to add a sense of surrealism to a scene or even play. There are of course many types of puppets, and while I don't intend to go into all of them, here are a few of the more popular and, for the purposes of animation, relevant.

Glove puppets

Everyone has seen these, and many of us had them as children. A simple half shape of a person or creature, the base completely open like a pillowcase, into which the hand is inserted and used to operate the puppet, its arms, paws or other appendages usually being moved by the thumb and forefinger. Mostly quite limited, though there have been famously successful examples such as Sooty and Sweep, Basil Brush and of course Punch and Judy.

Carnival or Body puppet

A huge, usually much larger-than-life puppet which is operated by several people, and most often employed in the likes of carnivals, parades or exhibitions.

Human-arm puppet

Operated by two people, one of whom is concerned with the head movements and one arm, the other takes care of the other arm. The most famous of these would of course be the Muppets.

Marionette, or String puppet

The most common form, and the one most of us will be familiar with as actual puppets. As the name suggests, they are simply operated, by one person pulling and manipulating the strings attached to their limbs, usually from above. These makes for jerky, non-realistic motions, which is part of the charm and attraction of marionettes. They're not meant to look or act like people; they are quite clearly puppet representations. There is generally a painted face, no movement whatever of the features, the action centring usually on dancing, walking and other movements involving the arms and legs, and occasionally the turning of a head, though not much more.

Rod puppet

A rod puppet is a puppet constructed around a central rod secured to the head. A large glove covers the rod and is attached to the neck of the puppet. A rod puppet is controlled by the puppeteer moving the metal rods attached to the hands of the puppet (or any other limbs) and by turning the central rod secured to the head. Some of the Muppets, including Kermit and Miss Piggy, are rod puppets.

Shadow puppet

We've explored this aspect of puppetry pretty extensively with our feature on Lotte Reiniger. A cut-out figure which is held between a source of light and a translucent screen. Shadow puppets tend to be one-dimensional, flat creations. The practice is very popular in Japan and other Asian countries, usually accompanied by music and narration.

Supermarionation

Pioneered by Gerry Anderson (and possibly used solely by him) in shows such as Thunderbirds and Fireball XL5, this process involves marionettes which have electronically controlled heads to allow for realistic speech and movement of mouth and eyes. The heads on these puppets tend to be rather disproportionate to their bodies.

Ventriloquist's Dummy

A puppet operated by hand and on which the movement of the mouth, sometimes eyes, is exaggerated as the idea is to give the illusion that the puppet is speaking, while the ventriloquist's mouth (if he or she is any good) remains still.

In medieval times, and further back, puppets would perform upon a stage, often a mobile one which could "tour" villages, and act out historical, comic or tragic plays, singing, dancing and perhaps fighting among themselves. The best known example of the last is Punch and Judy, where children would delight to the antics of Mr. Punch as he knocked seven bells out of his wife Judy. Very appropriate for kids indeed. Puppets allowed performers to display the more fantastical elements of drama, bringing strange or mythological creatures onstage, or allowing, for instance, a character to have two heads or a face on both front and back. These sort of things heightened the fantasy and enjoyment of the play.

"Puppetry is not animation" - Tess Martin, Animationworld, 17 August 2015.

I disagree with the above statement. Of course, Ms. Martin is an animator and I am not, so her opinion would be expected to carry more weight than mine, someone who finds it hard to animate himself enough to get out of bed most mornings. Nevertheless, and not to do Ms. Martin any injustice, let's look at her argument, or rather, that of the creator of the film which engendered the above quote, and her response. An email from the director stated that  "I think puppet films fall between the cracks of what is strictly defined as an 'animated film.' The characters are being 'animated' in realtime by the hand of a human performer, and for this reason, I consider it to be animation."

Ms. Martin replied that "While I respect this attitude and am grateful to Mr. McTurk for being game for this discussion, I consider this definition of 'animation' to be too broad. Just because something is 'brought to life' does not automatically make it animation. If that were the case one could say that an actor bringing his character to life is also animation. Anything that is not documentary could be called animation."

Here is where I have a problem with that, in her own words, too broad definition. When she talks about actors bringing their characters to life being animation, I think that is the very point she's missing. Actors, or actresses, bring THEIR character to life, not someone else's. They're playing a part, yes, a part written (almost always) by someone else, but it's them that is bringing that character to life. We identify "Dirty" Harry Callahan with only one person, Harrison Ford IS Han Solo and so on. This, to me, is not the same as puppetry, because puppets are, well, not alive.

That might seem a very obvious thing to say, but I think it's important. An actor or actress is alive (though some you would wonder - shut up) and so has the power to "animate", if you insist, their character, but they don't do this by pulling strings or manipulating images. They do it through their own actions, their facial expressions, their words, their looks, their emotions. In short, they use the medium of their own bodies to do this. They bring the character they play to life. Puppeteers, on the other hand, use a non-living creation to give a character that they have written life, of a sort. The puppet has no input into how or why or when it is used; it is merely a tool, is not alive, has no opinion or view on how it "acts". This all has to be conveyed by the puppeteer, and to some extent the writer, if both are not the same.

Bringing a character to life via the motions of a puppet is, to me, far, far different from bringing it to life by how you speak or move or walk or emote with your own body. The puppet is essentially anonymous: though created likely for one role, it could theoretically fulfill many, if dressed differently or painted differently or changed in subtle ways. An actor can do that too of course, but only with their own input. Nobody took John Wayne and said "no he's not working as a cowboy, let's make him an Indian instead" or whatever. You get the picture.

So personally I have to say I would definitely consider puppetry to be animation. Different to drawing or films of course, but still a form of animation. If you needed further proof of its validity as animation, you only have to look at the scores of animators across the world who started off by manipulating simple, or complex, puppets before moving on to what we (and Ms. Martin surely) would call "proper" animation.

So let's do that now.

Arthur Melbourne-Cooper: lauded as one of the godfathers of animation, we've seen his superb A Dream of Toyland, made in 1908, where the toys in a child's bedroom come to life and have a grand old time. Tell me that's not animation!

Edwin Stanton-Porter: We haven't covered him, as he doesn't seem to have made, again what we will allow as "real" animation, but he directed a puppet animation (the word is used in Badazzi's book, which possibly proves or maybe slightly dilutes my point) called The "Teddy" Bears, which was well received, in 1907.

Emile Cohl: We did cover him, and extensively. He also worked with puppets before graduating to drawn animation, and indeed his last film was Fantoche cherche un logement (The Puppet Looks for Lodging), 1921.

Howard S. Moss, working in Chicago, was a specialist in puppet animation (again the words are used concurrently).

Willis O'Brien, one of the first innovators of what would become claymation, worked extensively with puppets.

Charles Bowers, the one who seemingly cheated Raoul Barre, also worked a lot with puppets.

Earl Hurd, who created Bobby Bump, created the Pen and Ink Vaudeville Sketches, an entire puppet theatre production.

Bob Clampett, who helped make Looney Tunes such a success, was a keen puppeteer.

Len Lye made a puppet film, Birth of a Robot.

Bogdan Zoubowitch, a Russian ex-pat, created his Histoire Sans Paroles as a puppet animation.

I could go on, but it would probably just get boring. What do you mean, you're already bored? Well don't worry; we're leaving it at that. The point is that I believe, with all due respect to Tess Martin and her opinion of them, that puppets very definitely can be accepted as a form of animation, in some ways the oldest and truest form of the art. Too many animators have worked with them either before, during or after their animation career (by which I mean, of course, their cartoon career - drawing, filming etc) for them to be pushed to the side and regarded as second-class. I realise this is not what Ms. Martin is doing, and she says she has great admiration for puppeteers, as should anyone: it can't be easy to do that and do it well. But though she denies it, I can't help wondering at the fact that her own film was beaten by the puppet one for an award, and asking if her beef is truly rooted in selfless discourse?

Or is she just someone's puppet? Sorry.

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UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA (Part III)


Now before anyone starts whining on about my racism, how animation isn't only a white and western form of entertainment, don't bother. I know. I've just been reading up on it and waiting for the proper time to cross over  to the east.

And now is that time.
Time to look into
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Of course, anyone who knows even the slightest bit about animation will know that the Japanese form of it called Anime more or less took over in later years, leading to some stunning advancements in the trade, however that will be dealt with when we come a little more up to date on things. But while all these developments, large and small, were going on in the west, how was the other side of the world looking at this? Well, like most things, China can almost claim to be the original inventor of animation; as far back as the first century BC, during the Han Dynasty, Ding Huan, an engineer, claimed to have invented a prehistoric version of the zoetrope, but it was the 1920s before proper animation began to be explored in China, with the arrival of the first foreign animation to their shores in 1918, Max Fleischer's "Out of the Inkwell".
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Wan Laiming (1900-1997)

Considered China's first animator, Wan and his brothers would go on to produce the greater part of Chinese animation in the early period. As children, the Wans would eagerly await the return of their father, a silk merchant, from his business trips, when he would bring picture cards, paintings, drawings, illustrations, cigarette cards and all kinds of art home to them. The boys would then study them and practice drawing. Their father had personal cause to regret this though, as believing art to be a mere distraction he was aghast when his children chose it as a career, believing they could never make a living at it.

Wan (Laiming) became interested in book illustration, believing that this helped one appreciate the characters better, and also shadow puppet theatre, performances of which he and his brothers put on themselves. But static images was one thing, and the Wans agonised over how to make the images move, gaining inspiration from a Mutoscope they saw at the Great World, an entertainment centre.

Wan's first animation was a commercial for a Chinese typewriter company, after which he was invited, with his three other brothers Wan Guchan, Wan Chaochen and Wan Dihuan to the Great Wall Studios in Shanghai, where they produced China's first cartoon, 10 to 12 minutes of Uproar in the Studio (大闹画室), no footage of which seems to exist. It seems to follow the idea, not surprisingly,  of Fleischer's  Out of the Inkwell series. In Uproar in the Studio, an artist is working on his cartoons when they suddenly come to life and start running around the studio, causing trouble.

In 1932 Wan Dihuan decided that photography was a better and safer career for him, and left the studio, while the remaining brothers produced China's first animation with sound, The Camel's Dance (骆驼献舞) about which little is known, and no copy survives. In fact, it's becoming depressingly clear that though even very old western cartoons right back even the end of the nineteenth century can be found on YouTube, virtually nothing from China at least is available - I guess I'll find out about the rest of Asia as I go along - so for now here's a video someone helpfully made about the history of Chinese animation. Obviously, this goes further than we want to look right now, as we're only exploring the beginnings of the industry in the east, but it will give you an idea of what was happening over there at the time.
The Wans produced two cartoons based on tales, these being The Race of the Hare and the Tortoise and The Grasshopper and the Ant, and then in the 1930s patriotic films such as Wake Up (1931), Compatriot (1932) and The Price of Blood (1934), all to decry the Japanese attacks on Shanghai and Shenyang. Then from 1933 to 1937 they produced Cartoon Collection, some of which were again patriotic films, such as The Year of Chinese Goods, which encouraged viewers to buy Chinese products, while The New Wave and The Painful History of the Nation denounced imperial aggression.

The Wan Brothers were effusive in their praise for western animation, particularly American, German (huh?) and Russian, but wanted to find their own national style rather than just copy Disney and Co. They also stated their intention of educating as well as entertaining, to teach history and moral lessons through their animation. Not that western animation does not do this sometimes too, of course, but it's hard to see what lessons can be learned from Plane Crazy or My Old Kentucky Home... Speaking of that old "bouncing ball" animation, the Wans copied Fleischer's lead, but in order not to necessarily entertain but to, as they had said, educate, making films about the Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion of their homeland and encouraging those who watched the films not only to sing along patriotically, but to join the fight.

Having by now moved to Wuhan, the remaining Wan brothers experienced the phenomenon of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1939, and decided to see if they could come up with anything similar. Attached now to the Xinhua Film Company, the only studio left after the Japanese occupation of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, they came up with an adaptation of the novel Journey to the West resulting in the release in 1941 of Princess Iron Fan, the first full-length Chinese feature animation.

And yay! Here it is!
Now you can see obviously that it is massively inferior to Disney's masterpiece. For one thing, it's still in black and white, and this is after all four years after Disney had wowed the world with full colour animation and synchronised sound. In fact, you can go back to the Silly Symphonies of the early thirties and see that America had already well sorted out the colour and sound aspect, and hell, even Winsor McCay's Little Nemo was in colour, if not sound, and that was back at the turn of the century almost. But it should also be taken into account that this was a) a country which had never attempted real animation before, whereas the USA and to some extent Europe had at this point had about forty-odd years to tinker around with it and iron out the bugs, and that b) we're talking also about a country that had been at war, been invaded and occupied and finally c) this is a much more, let's not say repressive but not exactly as permissive or expressive country as those of the west, where ideas were not always received with enthusiasm and where financing might have been difficult. So with all that in mind, this ain't half bad.

The first thing that strikes me about it though is the way white light keeps bleeding through. It's very harsh on the eyes, like someone shining a torch in your eyes, or like a candle flame that keeps flickering behind the screen. The figures are more one than three-dimensional - drawings more than animated figures, though there are some good touches, like the tears/beads of sweat and the use of perspective, especially at the castle or temple. I can see that Journey to the West would be well known to people of my generation as the story behind the action/comedy TV series Monkey, which aired in the eighties, about four pilgrims, one of whom is a Buddhist monk, travelling to India to obtain sacred Buddhist texts and bring them back to China. Obviously the Wans had not got the idea of sound synchronisation sussed, as the mouths move but nowhere near in rhythm with the words, but it's a good effort for a nation which is a fledgling in animation while its western cousins are soaring in the clouds, riding the updrafts.

The film was a major influence on Osamu Tezuka when it reached Japan in 1942; Tezuka would go on to be the most famous and respected and influential animator in Japan, earning himself the title "The Godfather of Manga". Princess Iron Fan took three years to animate, and ran for seventy-three minutes, ten shy of Disney's ground-breaker. Here though I'd like to take a quote from Giannalberto Bendazi's excellent book Animation: A World History, which perhaps illustrates the kind of conditions this movie was produced under.

This production, on the 'orphan island' of the French Concession in the middle of the war, was a real feat not only on the artistic level but also on the technical level: seventy artists, in two teams, worked without a break for a year and four months, all in the same room, in limited space, in the cold of the winter, and in the atrocious heat of the summer.

Can't see Disney's animators going for those sort of conditions, can you? To ensure accuracy, human actors were often filmed as a guide to the animators, and if you look closely, yes, you can see what appear to be real faces looking out of the cartoon ones. In 1950 the Shanghai Animation Film Studio would be established and two years later Wan Laiming would be elected its director, leading to his creation of, in 1956, China's first colour animation, Why is the Crow Black Coated (乌鸦为什么是黑的), again looking back to folk tales for its inspiration.

Wan's next project, Uproar in Heaven, would fail to see the light of day due to the withdrawal of investors and would not resurface until 1961 as Havoc in Heaven, a full colour animation which would even go on to win international awards and establish China as a force in world animation. This burgeoning industry would however come to a shuddering halt in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao Zedong would purge China of any western influences and establish the iron grip of Communism over the country, throttling the animation industry for decades. Wan Laiming passed away in 1997 in the city in which he had worked most of his life, Shanghai honouring him by erecting a statue to him in recognition of his contribution to Chinese animation.

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Compared to China, Japan was a lot more ahead of the curve, beginning their experiments with crude animation around 1907, a full ten years before the Wan Brothers even saw Fleischer's work and seventeen before they began working on anything. This isn't that surprising; Japan always had a rich tradition of theatre, puppetry and even magic lantern shows, and of course there's a wide and diverse catalogue of stories and history to draw from. The very first recorded Japanese animation was called Katsudō Shashin (活動写真, "motion picture"), also sometimes known as The Matsumoto Fragment, after Natsuki Matsumoto, the iconography expert who discovered it. It runs for a mere three seconds, and features a boy writing characters on a wall, then turning, bowing and removing his hat.

Although the film - film fragment really - can't be categorically dated, it is believed to have been created before 1912, and again although its creator is a mystery, it places the film very close to being the first animation, ahead of the likes of Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay. Cohl indeed has the distinction of having been the first to have had one of his animations play in Japanese theatres, this being 1911's Nipper's Transformation.
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Ōten Shimokawa (1892-1973)

One of the "big three" godfathers of Japanese anime, Shimokawa worked in Tokyo as a political cartoonist and manga artist. When asked by Tenkatsu Production Company to create a short film animation, he tried out several unique techniques, such as using chalk or white wax on a dark board background to draw characters, rubbing out portions to be animated and drawing with ink directly onto film, whiting out animated portions. This helped save on costs, and also allowed the animation to be completed more rapidly than normal, resulting in The Story of the Concierge Mukuzo Imokawa (芋川椋三玄関番の巻 or 芋川椋三玄関番之巻, Imokawa Mukuzō Genkanban no Maki) which was to be shown in theatres, therefore making it the first Japanese animation to be seen by the public. Shimokawa's other works, however, precede it, such as 凸坊新画帳・名案の失敗 (Dekobō shingachō – Meian no shippai, Bumpy new picture book – Failure of a great plan) and Otogawa Shinzo Gate of the Entrance, though these were never shown publicly.

Bad health dogged Shimokawa's life and cut short his career, forcing him to take breaks from work and when he returned it was not as an animator but as a consultant and editor. Nonetheless, for producing Japan's first proper anime film, and for his work in the early part of his life, he is considered one of the fathers of Japanese anime.

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Jun'ichi Kōuchi (1886-1970)

Another who can claim the title of godfather of Japanese anime, he does seem to have been almost a reluctant animator, preferring drawing political cartoons, as he began his career in 1912 with Tokyo Comic. He was commissioned to create a feature animation, The Dull Sword (なまくら刀), in 1917, but when the company decided to get out of animation he returned to drawing political cartoons, drawing (sorry) the attention of one of the House of Representatives, who was impressed with his work and engaged him to draw cartoons promoting his party. Kouchi's last animation was Cut up Serpent (ちょん切れ蛇) in 1931, after which he again went back to drawing political cartoons for the papers.
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Seitarō Kitayama  (1888-1945)

As an aside, though not relevant, how interesting to have both been born and died in such, as his neighbours the Chinese would say, interesting times. 1888, the year of Kitayama's birth, was the year the feared Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of London, murdering and never being caught, and of course 1945 was a bad year for Japan, the year the Second World War ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki both being all but obliterated by American atomic bombs. But away with such things, with which we are not concerned here. 

Something of a patron of young artists, Kitayama would purchase art materials for promising new talent, host galleries and shows, and publish their work in catalogues. His first animation, Monkey and Crabs (猿蟹合戦), also came out in 1917, which seems to have been something of the age of discovery for Japanese animators. Working with other artists, Kitayama helped develop and propel the nascent industry, and built a studio in 1921. This, however, fell victim to a huge earthquake two years later, and Kitayama moved to Osaka, where he took a job as a cameraman, never more returning to animation.
Here's, against all odds, the video of that animation. Kind of odd, when you look at the translation, that the characters seem to use bullying and intimidation against first the seed ("Hurry up and grow, seed, or I'll destroy you with my pincer!") then the tree and then the fruit, threatening them each time. Talk about impatience! The monkey looks decidedly human, so I guess he just drew a human body and stuck a monkey head on top of it. It's really not that bad, considering what the likes of Felix was still doing nearly ten years after this. You have to give him credit too for realism, in that the crab, when chasing after the monkey, who has robbed the fruit out of their tree, runs sideways. Nice touch. Dark, too: the monkey kills the crab (unintentionally, I think) and his son vows revenge on his father's killer. How traditional eh?

The son seeks the aid of some weird individuals, who may be monks, or gods, and they attack the monkey in his house. We get a good old-fashioned Japanese swordfight, which is choreographed okay, but it's three to one and the monkey is soon defeated.

With the destruction of Kitayama's studio in 1923 almost all of the films from pre-war Japan were lost, so it's time to move on, as we've spoken of all we can up to this period.

Legacy Leaders: Those Who Carried On

Two major names stand out after the "big three" have walked off the stage, as it were, and they are
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Ofuji Noboro (1900-1961)

A student under Jun'ichi Kōuchi, he experimented with many styles, including mixing live-action with animation, as in his A Story of Tobacco (1928) which has a cartoon man berate a human woman for taking his cigarette. The interaction between the two is pretty fluid, given the time, and the state of Japanese animation then. None of these are on YouTube, unsurprisingly, but I came across a Japanese animation archive where you can view them: https://animation.filmarchives.jp/en/works/view/41025 (https://animation.filmarchives.jp/en/works/view/41025)

In 1921 or possibly 1925 (two sources at least differ) he founded his own production company, Jiyu Eiga Kenkyujo, and produced Bagudajo no tozoku (Burglars of Baghdad Castle) in 1926. This is a parody of the famous Hollywood movie The Thief of Baghdad, and used a form of animation that utilised ornamental paper called chiyogami. It's very primitive for the time, considering what was going on on the other side of the world.
https://animation.filmarchives.jp/en/works/view/15479 (https://animation.filmarchives.jp/en/works/view/15479)

His major film came the next year though, and Kujia (The Whale) so impressed a French distributor that they bought it in order to show it in Europe. Rather surprisingly, this is not held at the archive, and though there is a version on YT it's a reissued one from 1952, so it would make little sense linking it here, at least until we get closer to that era. Staying with the twenties, The Golden Flower (1929) runs for 17 minutes, though from what I can see it's very similar to the Burglars of Baghdad Castle, showing, to me, little progress in three years, but what do I know?

I am interested to see the usage of a Chinese dragon (I guess a Japanese one, but I'm used to associating that figure with Chinese mythology and celebrations, not Japanese ones) - okay, it mentions the Harvest Festival, so I guess they used dragons too. What's also notable is that the animation contains a puppet theatre, and given the popularity of that in both Japan and China that's not too surprising but it is quite innovative to marry the two.
https://animation.filmarchives.jp/en/works/view/42165 (https://animation.filmarchives.jp/en/works/view/42165)

Ofuji's first attempt at a movie with sound (which failed) was the same year, and The Black Cat was followed by At the Inspection Station, released 1930, his first successful attempt. Sadly, I can't get any of these, not even from the archives. Even sadder, seven years later he managed his first colour animation, but Princess Katsura is also lost to time it would seem. Unlike Disney and Fleischer to some degree, and Paul Terry in the USA, Ofuji did not see animation as a means of comic entertainment, but wanted to create a more cinematic, dramatic atmosphere with them, and was devoted to his art. He was recognised as one of the very greatest Japanese animators after his death, when the Ofuji Award was instigated, presented to outstanding animators annually.

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Masaoko Kenzo (1898-1988)

Again, it amuses me how the birth date here is a numerical anagram for the date of his birth, but enough out of me. Unlike the other artists we've read about so far, Masaoko worked in Kyoto, where his first major film, Saragushima (The Monkey's Island), made in 1930, was wildly popular and spawned a sequel, something I haven't seen been true of any of his contemporaries, not even the so-called godfathers of Japanese anime. The animation is pretty primitive, again compared to that going on in the west; the motion of the ship in the first scene is almost zero, a slight movement back and forth, though the storm is well done. Unfortunately, it seems Masaoko tried to use the same effect for the sea with the result that it looks as if the ship, supposed to be tossing on the waves, is actually in the clouds! For some reason someone has left a baby in a box on deck, and it's getting wet. You can guarantee it's going overboard, and so it does, and floats towards (anyone?) Monkey Island, where it's found by (again, anyone?) monkeys.

An interesting point here I see is that, unlike Kitayama's monkey in Monkey and the Crabs, these ones walk on all fours, like animals, not upright. The animation when they scatter up the trees as the baby howls is quite smooth, and while I've not of course watched all that much early anime I think this may be the first time we see a Japanese animator using the trope that would become synonymous with western cartoon, the shower of stars to indicate an impact or something happening.

It's also significant, I feel, that Masaoko here shies from the Disney idea of exaggerating and distorting the laws of physics: when the monkeys venture back down from the trees they don't elongate and touch the ground, the trees don't bend down and smile or shrink back in shock from the baby. No. Real physics is used. In order to slowly descend from their perches a monkey each lowers his mate down in a sort of two-man chain, just as perhaps humans would do, if they were in such a position.

The cartoon seems to somewhat follow Kipling's Jungle Book, as the monkeys discover the castaway baby and I assume raise him as their own (I haven't watched the whole thing) and while the action is limited, being on an island and with just - so far as I can see - these protagonists, it works quite well and is well drawn, certainly an improvement over Kitayama's effort. I think this may also be the longest Japanese anime to this date, exceeding Ofuji Noboro's The Golden Flower by seven minutes.

Chikara to onna no yononaka (The World of Power and Women, 1933) was the first Japanese animated movie with sound, using humour and a slight sexual bias, where an office worker falls in love with his secretary (how original!) to the chagrin of what Roger Waters would later term his "fat and psychopathic wife". Nice. Unfortunately, and disappointingly, given its huge significance to the history of anime, no trace of it can I find. Masaoko became known as "the Japanese Disney" for his work on later titles such as  Chagama ondo (A Dance Song with a Kettle), 1934 and Mori no yosei (A Fairy in the Forest, 1935), while his use of music in Benkei tai Ushikawa (Benkei the Soldier Priest and Little Samurai Ushikawa, 1939) was highly commended.

Masaoka was one of the first Japanese animators to make the move from drawing on paper to celluloid, which, though it looked better and made better films, was very expensive and so avoided by most others for as long as they could. Japanese animators had always used cut-out paper in a nod back to shadow puppet theatre and kabuki, but the quality of the animation using such methods was vastly inferior, and of course celluloid was seen eventually as the way to go. His greatest achievement, 1943's Kumo to churippu (The Spider and the Tulip, earned him the wrath of the military censor, as it could not be seen as a propaganda movie. He may also have been the first to embrace the western idea of anthopomorphising animals, in his  Suteneko Torachan (Tora-chan, an Orphan Kitty, 1947, in which a family of cats adopt an orphan kitten.

Then there's others like
(https://animation.filmarchives.jp/images/writer/writer13.jpg)
Seo Mitsuyo (1911-2010)

The man who produced the first ever full-length Japanese animation, Momotaro, umi no shinpei (Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors) in 1944, Seo worked on propaganda and military recruitment movies for the government during World War II, having also had contributed to Masoka Kenzo's The World of Power and Women.

Seo obviously learned from Disney the importance of music, which features all through his own cartoon, whereas what little I watched of the Chinese effort seemed to have not a lot if any. Naturally enough, the animals who are the heroes of this film – a bear, a pheasant and (what else?) a monkey – are all enlisted into the Japanese army and manage to retake an island which has been occupied by the British. Oddly enough, not the Americans, who you would have thought would have been seen as the main enemy: it would be them, after all, who would unleash the atomic holocaust on Japan's two cities. Anyway, being a propaganda film it can only end one way, in victory for the Japanese animals.

Of course, again, the film is in black and white and the animation is vastly inferior to what was coming out of the West, but then, I suppose the real point here was to inspire those who watched it (mostly children, you would have to expect) to fight and die for the Emperor, and to teach the lesson that the enemy was evil and could be repulsed. Fantasy indeed.

It's not too easy to make out the animation, as the film suffers from that sort of flickering effect that many of the old monochrome movies did, but even here you can see, though it's nothing on Disney or Fleishcer, this Japanese animation is streets ahead of the Chinese one. Of course, by now there's a gap of four years between the two, but still, the difference in quality is quite startling. I guess given the involvement of the Navy (and thus, the government) resources would not be as slim as perhaps was the case in the Wan brothers' effort. The audio quality is much better too, especially the music, which comes through clearly, whereas in the Chinese one it's very tinny and weak.
I will just add though that the Momotaro spoken of in the title is a figure from Japanese mythology, a hero god who was used extensively by the Japanese military during their propaganda for the war. I will also mention, again, that given this is now 1944, the disparity between the quality of, let's say American animation at this period and what the Japanese studios were doing was still very evident.

For instance, here we are, seven years after the release of Snow White and the Japanese have either not yet figured out or can't afford to create in colour. They're being left far behind, though of course they will have the last laugh, becoming the standard in time. Right now though, while you can praise certain aspects of their animation - the usage of music, the synchronisation of objects to that music (though not the synch of voices to mouths - most times, when someone speaks it's either a long shot so you can't see the mouths move or a shot from behind) and the embracing of anthropomorphisation, something that would almost completely take over cartoons in the coming decades - you can see how far behind the curve they are.

Seo's last project was an animated musical, Osama no shippo (The King's Tail), which he tried to get shown in 1949 but failing to do so, gave up animation soon after, to pursue the trade of draughtsman.

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Part Two: The Golden Age of Animation

As much as we on the side of the water would like to think our cartoons mattered at this time, they did not. Nobody gave a damn about Bubble and Squeak, or Renard the Fox, or any other non-American animation. Like it or not, America was where it was at. Disney was the gold standard by the mid to late 1930s, and while they had their challengers and contemporaries, all of them were American. Although it would be fair to say that animation was born in Europe, or maybe that it was conceived there, it walked, talked and found its fortune in the land of the free, and all the best cartoons, for decades after, would be associated with and come from the United States.

Giants of the Golden Age: Drawing the Future of Animation

As has been related already, the king of cartoons by the late 1930s was Disney, who had few competitors. Max Fleischer had done all right, but really only had the Superman cartoons and Popeye and Betty Boop in his stable, while Terrytoons was, well, just not very good. But if you're of my generation, and grew up sitting on the floor starting up at the television rather than going to the movies, it won't really be Uncle Walt's creations you'll remember dancing, flying, running and chasing across the small screen. For most of us, our first recollection of cartoons on the telly was a bright colourful shield, and the sound almost of an elastic band being stretched back before the familiar music began, and Looney Tunes exploded onto our screens. The man behind that, the man who would become, if not the king of cartoons then certainly its crown prince, and who would dare to take on the might of Disney, and successfully, was this man.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3c/Leon_Schlesinger_portrait_ca._1917.jpg/440px-Leon_Schlesinger_portrait_ca._1917.jpg)
Leon Schlesinger (1884 - 1949)

He was a movie producer who ran the gargantuan Warner Bros. studios, and truth to tell, the movie giant wasn't really looking to get into the cartoon business as such. Cartoons didn't sell. But they wanted to combat Disney's monopoly on "shorts". A "short" was a cartoon or cartoons that would run before a movie, essentially either "warming the audience up" for the main feature or, as was often the case, allowing latecomers not to miss the movie, as they could hear the sounds of the cartoon and knew the main film was next. I have fond memories myself of listening outside as my mother paid for the tickets and the booming roar of an anvil falling on Tom the cat, or the "Meep-meep!" of the Roadrunner, while the pounding frenetic music that accompanied these cartoons thundered out from behind the swinging cinema doors, and grabbing her coat in an effort to hurry her up, whining "Ma! We're missing the cartoons!" For kids of my age (seven, eight maybe) often the cartoons were what we went to see more than the actual movie.

In 1929 Disney had cornered this market, and so had managed to secure a free shop window for their creations. The kids would love them, and so would the adults, as the cartoons kept the kids quiet. There was nothing quite so breath-taking for a child of my age than to see the desert stretching away in the distance as Roadrunner streaked away down the dusty trail, seeming to go so much farther than he could on the TV, or Bugs Bunny tunnelling under the ground to come up in a Florida that seemed huge compared to the one we usually saw back home. Everything was bigger, louder and even seemed brighter, probably due to the darkness in the cinema. It was quite an experience.

But before those characters could claim their place on the silver screen, and push Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck off, Warners had to have them created, and for this they hired Leon Schlesinger, initially to help promote their music, having just acquired Brunswick Records. Schlesinger hired two ex-Disney animators, Rudolph Ising and Hugh Harman, and their first production was the decidedly-racist-looking Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid.
Bosko obviously owes some of his look to Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit, on whom the two had worked for Disney, as previously featured, and also to Disney's Alice's Adventures as well as Fleishcher's Out of the Inkwell. Using a combination of live-action and animated drawing, Ising is shown bereft of ideas until he creates the character of Bosko, who then shows him what he can do. Look, this is 1929 so you would have to forgive them for what we would today decry as utterly abominable racism, but even so: the character talks in very much a black man's voice, calls Ising "boss" and is essentially put through his paces by his "massa". Not only that, he, Bosko, also imitates in a very unflattering manner a Chinese character. It's quite disturbing, but as I say, it was a different time.

What's even more unsettling is that the voice of Bosko, Carman Griffin "Max" Maxwell, was not even black, which makes the put-on-black-boy voice even more insulting, but again, as I say, product of its time I guess. Leaving all that aside though, you can see where Ising and Harman brought what they had learned during their time at Disney, particularly working on Oswald, to their new creation. Bosko's tongue unravels and he winches it back in by taking off his hat and turning a hair on his head, the piano notes ripple like water, a duff key is taken out and replaced in the bass register, and the piano stool on which he sits gallops like a small dog towards the piano. All very surreal, all very pioneering Disney ideas that would become standard in cartoons as they developed.

Bosko's body elongates to impossible lengths, his head in fact stretching so far that his neck becomes a spring and he is unable for some time to get it back on his shoulders. In perhaps yet another disturbing scene, Bosko is "destroyed" by his creator as he is forcibly sucked back into the pen out of which he was created, but I guess it's all right, as he cheekily pops up out of the ink bottle and waves everyone goodbye, also blowing a raspberry at his creator, which maybe gives some small amount of power to the character (the black man?) and which may be - though I think not - the first instance of a character being rude to the artist who drew him, again something in particular that Warners would come back to occasionally.

Schlesinger was so impressed with Bosko that he hired the pair, and they went on to create the first ever cartoon for Warners, which would star Bosko (the original was never shown in cinemas) in his first adventure, Sinkin' in the Bathtub (1930). Longer than the original appearance of Bosko by a good three minutes, the short features more of the non-logic of cartoons, as the shower sprays water into the bathtub but the water level remains the same, and even the water which leaks out in drops over the side just vanishes. Nothing gets flooded. Bokso then starts playing the water as it comes out of the shower head in four straight lines, like a harp, then hops out of the tub, which itself begins to dance around with a toilet roll. No seriously. Other weird, cartoony things happen during the short, like Bosko redirecting the flow out the window and it becoming like a slide he can ride to the outside, his car sometimes driving and sometimes walking, and a goat who eats his flowers performing impossible contortions.
To presumably cater to the female audience members, Bosko is given a girlfriend, Honey, so strongly modelled on Minnie Mouse that Walt must have considered suing. I mean, she even has the big spotted ribbon in her hair! The animation follows the Disney model again when, unimpressed by Bosko's rendition of "Tip-toe Through the Tulips" she pours water into his horn (ooer!) and he starts blowing bubbles from it, the music soundtrack turning smoothly to "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles", which she seems to appreciate more. Honey then uses the bubbles to dance on and eventually float to the ground. I must say, it's surprising how that got by the censor, as she sways and gyrates and her knickers fall down to her ankles. I mean, there's nothing there, just black flesh, but still, for the thirties I would have thought quite suggestive. Still, Betty Boop was on the horizon, so I guess in terms of the new decade, maybe not so risque?

I would have to be critical here and say firstly, the title is shite, as only the first thirty seconds to a minute focus on the bathtub, and also, secondly, once the two go off in Bosko's car, the plot, such as it is, mirrors so closely Oswald's Trolley Troubles that it has to be considered a blatant rip-off of that cartoon. Whether Ising and Harman did this on purpose to give Walt the finger, since he had lost the copyright for that character in 1928, or it was just easier to use what they had already created I don't know, but this is poor in terms of originality. Honey's frantic "save me!" arm waving mirrors the later gestures of Fleischer's Olive Oyl, Popeye's girlfriend. Again, whether the rival animator watched this cartoon and took the idea for his female character or not I don't know, but if not, it's an interesting coincidence. Minnie did no such thing in Plane Crazy.

Like Trolley Troubles they both end up in the water, though I do have to admit the car seems to have turned into a bathtub now. The scene as they race around and down a mountain reminds me of that Chinese production, Princess Iron Fan, though I might be misremembering; been a while since I updated this journal. At the end of the cartoon we see it is the first in what will become a series of well-loved cartoons, and a phrase that will be remembered by all kids from the 1970s and 1980s: a Looney Tune. Bosko also uses for the first time the farewell phrase which will be taken up by a later creation of the studio, Porky Pig, when he grins "That's all folks!" (Without the stammer, at this point).

Bosko was a hit, and would go on to star in almost forty adventures, transferring in the 1950s to the new medium of television. There's a lot of apologist nonsense I read about him being the "most balanced portrayal of blacks in cartoons to that point", but I don't buy it. They even try to say his race was "ambiguous." Absolutely. So those exaggerated lips, the squat nose, the deep southern voice, the usage of words like "sho'nuff", "them people" and "dat sho' is mighty fine" are all just coincidental, are they? No intention to make this character look and sound like a black man? If so, why not make him look more like, well, anything? Alien even, or an elf? Because people would not respond to, identify with/against and most importantly, laugh AT (not with) such a figure. Do me a favour. Unintentional my arse.

However, intentionally racist or not, it didn't matter, as mostly it was "white folks" who went to - or were allowed into - cinemas, and their needs and requirements must always be first and foremost attended to and catered to, so Bosko went on to great success, though he did undergo something of a revamp, perhaps oddly being made more clearly black, so you know, shrug. Warner would not reap the success of the character though, as after an argument over budget restrictions Ising and Harman quit and took the copyright to Bosko with them, moving to MGM Studios, where they produced the rest of their cartoons until being fired from there in 1938. Left with no characters and no animators, Schlesinger hired Earl Duvall, who created Buddy, the only character Schlesinger had for his now-vacant cartoon spots.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/ba/Buddy1.jpg)
There's no question in my mind that this guy bears a startling resemblance to a certain donut-holding statue in Springfield, and Lard Lad must have been based on him. Buddy would take again the idea of a small boy and use it to flesh out the character, giving him the sort of adventures Bosko would have on "the other side", i.e., at MGM. Unfortunately, whether it was down to the animators or the scriptwriters (I don't know if the work was shared or if the cartoonists also wrote the cartoons, though I suspect the latter) the stories were dull and lifeless, nothing like Bosko's crazy, logic-defying world, and they did poorly. They were, after all, as Bosko had been, supposed to be merely vehicles to sell sheet music and phonograph recordings of the music in the Brunswick stable, so Buddy's cartoons concentrated more on the hard sell of the music and dispensed with the zany antics. As a result, he was never popular and though the second of the Looney Tunes characters, he is not remembered today and his last cartoon was screened in 1935, two years before Disney would change the game totally with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Meanwhile, over at MGM the two rebel animators were doing just fine with their Bosko cartoons, the character far more popular than Buddy ever would be, though they were of course unable to promote him as a Looney Tunes character, as Warner owned the rights to the name. They got around this by calling their franchise Happy Harmonies (so close to later Warners' Merrie Melodies that you'd imagine they knew) and under this banner Bosko ran for four years and over thirty-five films, though not very many of them featured Bosko as they created new characters to fill in the franchise. This seems to have been the first attempt by the new studio (in terms of animation) to introduce anthropomorphic animals into cartoons. Yes, there was a goat in Bosko's first feature, but it wasn't human-like. It acted like a goat, stood on four legs and chewed grass, did not talk, and apart from evincing an almost human irritation with the little guy, was like any other goat.

This series features frogs, ducks, crows, pigs, chickens, some performing as the animals they are, some sitting at tables, using hammers etc. The idea of anthropomorphic animals had of course already been born with Disney and Mickey Mouse, but these may have been the first colour cartoons of that nature. Some were made in what was called "two-strip technicolor" and other, later ones in three-strip. As the process is a little long-winded and hard to explain, and as I am a lazy bastard, I've copied and pasted the relevant descriptions of these two processes from Wiki.

This is an incredible and exhaustive study! I'm loving it! I'm in awe of how in-depth your journals are on an astonishingly vast array of subjects!

I'll share a related item I saw yesterday from Pawn Stars. A fellow offered original shares of Disney stock from 1955 signed by Walt and his brother Roy the year that Disneyland was opened. The shares today would be worth billions.

Here's the clip.

Two-color Technicolor

Process 1

Technicolor originally existed in a two-color (red and green) system. In Process 1 (1916), a prism beam-splitter behind the camera lens exposed two consecutive frames of a single strip of black-and-white negative film simultaneously, one behind a red filter, the other behind a green filter. Because two frames were being exposed at the same time, the film had to be photographed and projected at twice the normal speed. Exhibition required a special projector with two apertures (one with a red filter and the other with a green filter), two lenses, and an adjustable prism that aligned the two images on the screen.

The results were first demonstrated to members of the American Institute of Mining Engineers in New York on February 21, 1917.[10] Technicolor itself produced the only movie made in Process 1, The Gulf Between, which had a limited tour of Eastern cities, beginning with Boston and New York on September 13, 1917, primarily to interest motion picture producers and exhibitors in color.[11] The near-constant need for a technician to adjust the projection alignment doomed this additive color process. Only a few frames of The Gulf Between, showing star Grace Darmond, are known to exist today.

Process 2

Convinced that there was no future in additive color processes, Comstock, Wescott, and Kalmus focused their attention on subtractive color processes. This culminated in what would eventually be known as Process 2 (1922) (often referred to today by the misnomer "two-strip Technicolor"). As before, the special Technicolor camera used a beam-splitter that simultaneously exposed two consecutive frames of a single strip of black-and-white film, one behind a green filter and one behind a red filter.

The difference was that the two-component negative was now used to produce a subtractive color print. Because the colors were physically present in the print, no special projection equipment was required and the correct registration of the two images did not depend on the skill of the projectionist.
The frames exposed behind the green filter were printed on one strip of black-and-white film, and the frames exposed behind the red filter were printed on another strip. After development, each print was toned to a color nearly complementary to that of the filter: orange-red for the green-filtered images, cyan-green for the red-filtered ones. Unlike tinting, which adds a uniform veil of color to the entire image, toning chemically replaces the black-and-white silver image with transparent coloring matter, so that the highlights remain clear (or nearly so), dark areas are strongly colored, and intermediate tones are colored proportionally.

The two prints, made on film stock half the thickness of regular film, were then cemented together back to back to create a projection print. The Toll of the Sea, which debuted on November 26, 1922, used Process 2 and was the first general-release film in Technicolor.

Although successful commercially, Process 2 was plagued with technical problems. Because the images on the two sides of the print were not in the same plane, both could not be perfectly in focus at the same time. The significance of this depended on the depth of focus of the projection optics. Much more serious was a problem with cupping. Films in general tended to become somewhat cupped after repeated use: every time a film was projected, each frame in turn was heated by the intense light in the projection gate, causing it to bulge slightly; after it had passed through the gate, it cooled and the bulge subsided, but not quite completely.

It was found that the cemented prints were not only very prone to cupping, but that the direction of cupping would suddenly and randomly change from back to front or vice versa, so that even the most attentive projectionist could not prevent the image from temporarily popping out of focus whenever the cupping direction changed. Technicolor had to supply new prints so the cupped ones could be shipped to their Boston laboratory for flattening, after which they could be put back into service, at least for a while.

The presence of image layers on both surfaces made the prints especially vulnerable to scratching, and because the scratches were vividly colored they were very noticeable. Splicing a Process 2 print without special attention to its unusual laminated construction was apt to result in a weak splice that would fail as it passed through the projector. Even before these problems became apparent, Technicolor regarded this cemented print approach as a stopgap and was already at work developing an improved process.

Process 3

Based on the same dye-transfer technique first applied to motion pictures in 1916 by Max Handschiegl, Technicolor Process 3 (1928) was developed to eliminate the projection print made of double-cemented prints in favor of a print created by dye imbibition. The Technicolor camera for Process 3 was identical to that for Process 2, simultaneously photographing two consecutive frames of a black-and-white film behind red and green filters.

In the lab, skip-frame printing was used to sort the alternating color-record frames on the camera negative into two series of contiguous frames, the red-filtered frames being printed onto one strip of specially prepared "matrix" film and the green-filtered frames onto another. After processing, the gelatin of the matrix film's emulsion was left proportionally hardened, being hardest and least soluble where it had been most strongly exposed to light. The unhardened fraction was then washed away. The result was two strips of relief images consisting of hardened gelatin, thickest in the areas corresponding to the clearest, least-exposed areas of the negative.

To make each final color print, the matrix films were soaked in dye baths of colors nominally complementary to those of the camera filters: the strip made from red-filtered frames was dyed cyan-green and the strip made from green-filtered frames was dyed orange-red. The thicker the gelatin in each area of a frame, the more dye it absorbed. Each matrix in turn was pressed into contact with a plain gelatin-coated strip of film known as the "blank" and the gelatin "imbibed" the dye from the matrix. A mordant made from deacetylated chitin was applied to the blank before printing, to prevent the dyes from migrating or "bleeding" after they were absorbed.

Dye imbibition was not suitable for printing optical soundtracks, which required very high resolution, so when making prints for sound-on-film systems the "blank" film was a conventional black-and-white film stock on which the soundtrack, as well as frame lines, had been printed in the ordinary way prior to the dye transfer operation.

Okay, so now you know. Or don't. I'm still confused. On we go.

The first of Ising and Harman's Happy Harmonies to feature anthropomorphic (you know what? I'm getting tired of writing that word: let's just call them anthros from now on, okay?) animals seems to have been When the Cat's Away (1935), which also happens to be in colour. The cat here, perhaps going against the later trend, is a female one and is lured away from the fire and out of the house by the amorous attentions of a tom, leading also perhaps to the first instances of cats singing onscreen in a cartoon? Oh no, I forgot Felix of course. Well, the first instance of it happening in colour and with sound? Possibly. The mouse then emerges, with a nod (intended or not I don't know) to Alice in Wonderland, from the tea pot and goes exploring, now that, well, the cat's away. He locks the cat out and then goes back into the mousehole to invite all his friends out. It's interesting that he is the only one you could call an anthro, with a voice and wearing denim dungarees, and using his "hands", while the rest are, well, just mice, there to make up the numbers and I guess it was easier for the boys to just draw standard mice.
The title of the film is literal: within a minute of its start the cat is gone from the cartoon, and the mice are running the show. It's hard not to see the hand of Disney here, as the boys have the mouse turn on the cooker and the pots and kettles thereon begin singing and dancing, in a fashion very reminiscent of the whistles in Steamboat Willie. The cartoon also uses - maybe for the first time, but I sort of doubt it - the idea of "drunken music". You know the kind of thing: someone gets pissed and starts staggering around and you have a violin played slowly and somewhat with a warp in the tune to make it sound like the instrument, or player, is drunk. I suppose the idea of mice getting (hah) rat-arsed would be frowned upon today, and no doubt the likes of the Temperance Society had much to say about such shenanigans, but then, these aren't people but animals, so maybe they were told where to stick their high-minded concerns and comments, if they had them.

Then, as would happen in many cartoons down the decades, there is conflict as the bad guy, a big muscly rat who bears something of a passing resemblance, I feel, to Popeye's nemesis, Brutus or Bluto, enters the fray and tries to steal the mouse's girl away. Unable to beat him on his own terms, the mouse uses guile: he jumps up to the window and lets the cat back in, who then chases the rat back into his hole. Cute.

I want to see if I can see an appreciable difference between two and three-strip technicolor, and luckily I can here, as this cartoon was in two-strip, but after May of 1935 MGM changed to the more popular and upgraded three-strip, like in The Old Mill Pond (1936). And yes, right away I can see we now have blues and greens, which we didn't in the other cartoon. It's almost like looking at an old sepia photograph compared to a modern monochrome one. Not quite colour yet (though this is, but you know what I mean) but far sharper and clearer than the previous. This system, more than the other, deserves the epithet of technicolor. It's interesting that the frogs sing in chorus here, making me wonder whether Paul McCartney knew of or saw this cartoon before penning "We All Stand Together"? If not, it's another weird coincidence. Let me see if it says anything about it on Wiki. No, according to that, the song is based on a Rupert the Bear movie from 1983. Well, coincidence certainly, unless the makers of the movie are just not admitting their influence, or it's not spoken of there.

Again, the racism. These frogs are very definitely meant to be black people - the mannerisms, the walk, the dance, the music, the speech, the exaggerated lips and pure-white teeth. It doesn't say who does the voices, but I'm willing to bet at this point they are white, despite the fact that black artists such as Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway are all, um, caricatured, it says here. Yeah it's basically a musical performance. The animation is excellent all right, but there's not a lot to write about. Another three-strip is To Spring (1936) which seems to concern some sort of hibernation ending, though the creatures look like gnomes or goblins or something - they are basic humanoid but have large pointed ears - who have been sleeping through the winter.
The animation here is first-class, especially the passage of a droplet of water down several levels of a cave, till it hits the windmill arm of a cuckoo clock. I also like that when the main character wakes up and gets out of bed, his leg is asleep. Such attention to detail marks this cartoon out as particularly special. Whatever these creatures are, they appear to be trying to engineer the return of spring, like workers in a nature factory or something. It's very well put together and the animation is very smooth. It also features something Disney would do a lot, which is to focus on one other, ancillary character, who is performing some act, and to keep cutting back to that character. Here, one of the little guys is trying, without success, to put his trousers on, and every time we go back to him he is still trying. The fairies, or whatever they are, battle a white ghostly figure - presumably meant to represent winter - and though they are at first repulsed they work together and beat him, allowing spring to come forth.

Warners however turned out to be the true powerhouse of American animation, and with future legends such as Tex Avery, Friz Freleng and the "man of a thousand voices", Mel Blanc, new characters began to pop up, the likes of which we still recognise today and who formed, at least for me, a major part of my growing up. The first new face was Beans the Cat, quickly superseded by Porky the Pig, both of whom debuted in the Merrie Melodies short I Haven't Got a Hat (1935).

I'm confused about this one. It says it's in colour (and being 1935 you would expect it to be, at this stage) yet the only full video I can find on YouTube has it in black-and-white, and not only that, a sort of storyboard idea. There are colour clips, but they range from a few seconds to just over a minute. I can get the story from the b/w one but I can't comment really on the animation unless I can see the full colour video, which I can't, and this is a pity, as, like I say above, this is the debut of Porky Pig. Anyway, let's see what we got. Well actually I have one here in colour that's almost two and a half minutes long - that's about a third of the actual film, not bad - but I think I have to say the colour is not as good as in, say, To Spring or even The Old Mill Pond. It looks a little washed out.

Another thing that would become standard in cartoons is here, baby animals following their mother in lines, especially ducks (and of course one goes astray) and it's also clever how the teacher, a cow, uses her cowbell to ring for the class. I rather expected the stammer would be added later to Porky Pig, but no, it's here, although a little perhaps too pronounced, making it all but impossible to make out what he's saying. In later incarnations he would just stutter over a few words, but here it's almost every word. Beans the Cat is just a poor copy of Bosko; doesn't even look anything like a cat. The full film is below, in that weird sketchy black and white I spoke of.
Oh no, neither are. Since I wrote this, both videos have been taken down, so I guess you'll have to do with my synopsis.

The basic idea of a school talent show is a good one, gives the animators a lot of scope. A haughty owl plays a piano, two sheep sing the song "I Haven't Got a Hat" (in case, like me, you were wondering where the title came from) and a very embarrassed and shy, um, something, hard to see in the sketch, recites Mary Had a Little Lamb. In the end of course, it all ends up in a schoolkid scuffle and fight, led by Beans the cat. Porky has just the one role in the cartoon and then is not seen afterwards, though he does take up the major part of it.

That's very interesting though. As already related, another legend of cartoons had made his debut a few years earlier, trying to say the same nursery rhyme, but that's obviously not Donald Duck. Perhaps, again, the boys were flipping the bird (sorry) to their old boss, saying we know you know, but you can't prove it so suck it. I mean, there are so many other nursery rhymes this character could have attempted, and coming so soon after Donald's first appearance, and also of course given that these guys were with Disney at the beginning, maybe they just wanted to show Uncle Walt they were just as good as him. I mean, they weren't, but still.

Another trope to be taken up is the idea of someone's voice speeding up to the point where it is virtually unintelligible, something we as kids used to do with records, to riotous laughter. Ah, ye had to be there.

Ah right, I see this is a two-strip technicolor cartoon, which accounts for the washed-out look. Apparently Disney had the rights on the three-colour one until the autumn (fall) of  1935, and this was released in March. Interestingly, at the end it's not Porky who says "That's all folks" but a sort of jester figure, and of course the stammer at the beginning is yet to come.

Quote from: innerspaceboy on Apr 20, 2024, 11:35 PMThis is an incredible and exhaustive study! I'm loving it! I'm in awe of how in-depth your journals are on an astonishingly vast array of subjects!

I'll share a related item I saw yesterday from Pawn Stars. A fellow offered original shares of Disney stock from 1955 signed by Walt and his brother Roy the year that Disneyland was opened. The shares today would be worth billions.

Here's the clip.

Ah, my man! Welcome along! I know you were reading this on MB way back when, so was hoping  you would catch up with it again as I repost it here. I've been reading a bunch of books on animation history, watching documentaries and as usual utilising a combination of Wiki and, in this case, my own personal memories, some of which open the introduction to part two.

Thanks for your compliments. I just have a wide range of interests and when I get into something and want to write about it, I go for it in order to do the best job I can. I'm currently working on a history of the Roman Emperors, and that's fun too.

I loved the clip - my god, it seemed to go for a lot less than I would have expected. But amazing to see something that rare, although I have a few choice comments about Disney, having read about the strike and how he treated his workers. Nonetheless, can't be denied that he deserves his place in animation history, so good to see it.

Hope you enjoy the rest of the journal as we head into the Golden Age. Lots more to come! Welcome aboard, and th-th-that's NOT all, folks!

Ub Mice and Men: Mickey's Parents Divorce

But no matter what we might say of this or that studio, and how one or the other, or a certain number of them would come to prominence and challenge their position as top dog, it's a fact that even right into the twenty-first century Disney remains the "gold standard" and was largely responsible for what was termed the Golden Age of American Animation. We've already looked into the creator himself, but what of those who worked for him? Well, we have read about Ising and Harman, but a man more closely associated with the early Disney products, while not quite airbrushed from the history of animation, has nevertheless sort of been pushed a little into the background in recent years, but he is basically the one whom we have to thank, or curse, for the creation of Disney's greatest and most famous character.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/95/Ub-iwerks.jpg)

Ub Iwerks (1901 - 1971)

Surely the strangest name ever for an American animator, Iwerks was born in Missouri to German parents, hence I guess the odd name. His father was by all accounts what we would call today a bastard-maker, fathering children and leaving them and their respective mothers behind as another man might throw away a crisp packet when he was done. True to form, when Ub was born his father, then 57, fucked off and left him, and Ub never forgave him. On learning of his death, Ub was reputed to have opined that his father could be thrown in a ditch. I know how he felt. Ub met Walt Disney in 1919, the first to partner up with the father of American cartoons and together they opened a studio and created their first successful character, as already related, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When creative control of the character was taken from Disney, he and Iwerks began working on a new character, the rights of which the two would own. This was of course the most famous cartoon character in history.

Life with Disney however was not by any means all roses, and Iwerks resented the fact that he was not getting the credit he deserved, not only on the creation of Mickey Mouse but on other characters too. Apparently, when anyone wanted a sketch of the famous mouse, Disney would turn to Ub and sneer, "draw the picture", or somesuch, a real order, which must have irked the other animator. He had, after all, single-handedly animated what would go on to become, until the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world's most famous cartoon, Steamboat Willie, the first to use synchronised sound. Besides this, he found Disney's style dictatorial, and so in 1930, after a particularly acrimonious spat, he left to set up his own studio. It was not, to be fair, successful, and again to be fair, or not, Disney did not fall apart without him, even though many believed Iwerks to be the real genius. Walt Disney hired other animators, and the studios continued to grow and influence the emerging animation market, eventually becoming the colossus it is today.

Iwerks, in the meantime, created a new character, Flip the Frog, who would star in over thirty features from 1930 to 1933. He also created others, but Flip was supposed to be his main one, his Oswald or Mickey. As already explained, his ex-boss had an exclusive contract to use the three-strip technicolor system so Ub, like other animators in other studios, was constrained to the two-colour, and it shows. The cartoon looks faded and washed out, though I consider the possibility that this may be the first time proper sound effects were used in a cartoon, such as the slide-whistle thing when the tortoise, with what would become typical cartoon logic, examples of which we have already seen in Plane Crazy and Trolley Troubles, and even the Felix the Cat cartoons, extends its shell like a scissors lift and ejects him off it. The sound synchronisation, though minimal, is quite impressive. I see he rather cheekily included some mice who bear a striking resemblance to Disney's main character, down to the white gloves and red shorts, but then, since he was also involved in the creation of Mickey Mouse, why not?
The cartoon seems to use little if anything in the way of speech or voices, despite the original sort of singing by Flip, and relies mostly for its sound on music and sound effects. This, I suppose, was in order to make it easier to animate. If you don't have the characters talking, you don't need to worry about lining up the words with the movement of their mouths. Overall I can see how Fiddlesticks wasn't successful: it's good animation but basically it's over twelve minutes of watching a frog and various animals play music and dance, and let's be fair, this has been done before. And better. Did it improve with time? Let's see. Two years on we have Flip and the Milkman, famous (or infamous) for using so-called curse words. Well, I can't say for sure, but the version I can find is in black and white, and I have to say at this point I already dislike Flip the Frog with an intensity I haven't experienced for other cartoon characters. He's just very annoying, and not in a comic way.
Anyhow, let's see how this plays out. Well it may be the first time the sun is anthropomorphised, haven't seen that before that I remember, and for a kid's cartoon yeah, it is quite violent, and with speech this time, not just sound. I must say though, Flip looks so much less like a frog now than he did in 1930, and you can certainly hear Mickey's voice in his. The idea of another character Ub created for Disney, Clarabelle Cow, is again explored here, and while Flip has the high-pitched voice of Disney's star, the insect on the cow who backtalks him has a thick Bronx accent or something, very deep and masculine. Two flies coming with a stretcher to take away the squashed one (with attendant Death March music on maybe kazoo) is clever, though again slightly dark for children? This sort of thing would of course become a mainstay of shows like Roadrunner and Tom and Jerry in time to come, but quite brave, I feel, in 1932.

Early usage, too, of "action lines": Flip passes a dustbin in which a child is hiding and it vibrates with his cries, the line showing that it's moving, and also tears flying from the child's eyes. The cartoon logic comes into play when, as one milk bottle falls from the window sill of one of the houses, the other comes to life and catches it, smiling as it resettles it on the sill. Cute when the "bad word" is said - "What the hell do we care?" - it's said by the horse pulling the milk cart, and Flip tells it "mustn't say that bad word." Kind of giving the censor the finger there, Ub! Yeah, a lot better: much more going on and despite the very limited speech and the lack of colour, quite entertaining.
Let's cut to the end, to Flip's final cartoon, released in 1933, so still stuck on those two-colour - oh. No. Still in black and white, according to YouTube. Hmm. Soda Squirt sees Flip opening his drug store, and I don't know what the rules were on copyright at this time, but Ub has caricatures of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers and possibly Mae West? Some Hollywood screen goddess anyway. A little risque for the times, as Flip, obviously into her, holds an ice cream cone and it melts in his hand. Oh, I see: drug store means something different than I thought it did. Seems to be a soda parlour, I believe you guys called them back then. Makes sense, given the title. Clever usage of rhymes to keep the audience's attention, though for some reason Flip seems to be dancing a lot. Bit macabre near the end when a customer drinks a soda and turns into some sort of monster.

After Flip ended on a rather less than grandiose note in 1933, Ub went on to tackle a series of fairy tales under the title of Comicolor, using a different colourising process called Cinecolor (which never caught on as Technicolor became the standard) in order, I presume, to circumvent Disney's exclusive contract and yet allow him to produce proper colour cartoons. In Sinbad the Sailor (1935) he seems to have pioneered, or at least popularised the idea of characters running while getting nowhere, which again would become standard in cartoons, along with the sound of coconut shells being banged together, or some sort of bongo drum beat, whatever they used; we all know the sound, accompanied by a circle of moving feet and a cloud of dust, making the person seem to have more than two feet, almost like wheels really. Sinbad himself looks like some sort of mad cross between Elmer Fudd and Popeye, while it is very interesting to see what I believe is the first representation of a character meant to be gay, as a very effeminate-looking pirate is pinned to the cabin doors with swords thrown at him, in what must surely be an early version of gay-bashing on screen, even if it doesn't result in anything.
More things coming to life, with the actual skull-and-crossbones flag talking and doing things like using its bones as telescopes and pointing, and a very reluctant cannon spitting out a cannonball that has been forced into it by a very angry pirate. Typically American then, Sinbad starts playing baseball with the cannonballs, knocking them back towards the pirate ship. Meanwhile his ship, which for some reason is a Viking longship, and, Steamboat Willie-like, develops legs and runs over the water, but the pirate captain throws his anchor like a shot putt or lasso and catches it, dragging it back to him where a fierce fight ensues. All to upbeat music, of course. Again, not much in the way of speech here.

It's actually quite hilarious that all through everything - fighting the pirates, firing from the topmast, having to walk the plank, even sinking to the bottom of the sea, the pipe never falls from Sinbad's mouth, not once. Ub then channels the Three Stooges in a fight among the pirates on the island Sinbad ends up washed up on, when he, perched in the tree, throws coconuts at one and that one thinks the guy beside him is responsible, and they start fighting. Yeah, pretty damn good I would say. You can see how removing the restrictions imposed upon him by Disney's monopoly of the Technicolor three-strip freed him to really express himself in terms of colour, light and effect, and it really works so much better than the poor, drab cartoons of the Flip the Frog era. There's still a certain zing lacking here compared to what you see in early colour Disney, but it's streets removed from the earlier stuff.

Ub's lack of commercial success after nearly six years in business saw his backers all head for the hills, and as finance dried up his studio closed. He worked for three years for Leon Schlesinger on Looney Tunes cartoons, but eventually as the work became harder to come by he was forced to return, tail between his legs, to Disney. The overall impression given of his return was one of coldness by Walt Disney; the two men had been friends but had fallen out, and when Ub returned he was not, by all accounts, greeted as Walt's old partner but just as another guy working for him. Ub remained at Disney for the rest of his working life, retiring in 1964 at the age of 63, having worked on some mega hits such as Song of the South and 101 Dalmatians, as well as sequences on the live-action Mary Poppins. He died, aged 70, in 1971.

In the end, though an extremely talented animator, Ub Iwerks lacked the imagination and flair of others of his contemporaries. Chuck Jones is on record shrugging "he just wasn't a funny guy", and this is hard to disagree with when you look at the Flip the Frog cartoons. Okay, I only watched three, but none of them made me laugh once, and his Comicolor tales, while clever, aren't really that funny either. Ub also stuck to a more rigid, older style of animation, reluctant to take chances and embrace the new techniques. This is evident from the first Flip cartoon, Fiddlesticks, although it can be allowed that he was prevented from using the three-strip by Disney. Still, it's a pretty boring, if well-drawn piece of animation, and unlikely to hold anyone's attention, I feel. The last of these, as we looked at above, is just a little too surreal and yet rooted in the real world to work; unlike Disney's efforts, nothing comes alive or is treated really as anthro - everything relies on the characters, which, making it worse really, are caricatures of real people, meaning you have to know them to get the joke, if there is one. It makes the cartoon very dated indeed, and the Jeckyll-and-Hyde idea seems uncomfortably tacked on at the end, as if he had run out of ideas and didn't know how to end the cartoon.

He certainly deserves the credit for Mickey Mouse though, and other Disney creations, but unfortunately for him it probably would have been better had he remained and stuck to what he knew. Even at this early stage in his career, it was clear to anyone who knew him that getting on the wrong side of Walt Disney could buy you a one-way ticket to oblivion. Disney had his revenge, got all the credit, and while Ub Iwerks is recognised within the animation industry, I would venture to say few people outside of it have even heard his name. Which is sad, but perhaps a cautionary tale. Sometimes the grass isn't greener on the other side, and sometimes maybe it's best to just get your head down and do the work. It takes a special kind of talent to enable a man or woman to go out on their own and carve their personal path in the world, and sadly Ub Iwerks was just not that kind of man.

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Tom and Jerry. Just, you know, not the ones you're thinking of: Van Beuren and Paul Terry.

We previously met Paul Terry, about whom it's said his Terrytoons were poorly made, badly received and which are generally seen as being quite unsuccessful. Well Terry worked for Fable Pictures, renamed in 1928 as Van Beuren Pictures after its new owner, but left a year after the takeover to pursue his somewhat doomed own venture. In the meantime, Van Beuren Pictures released a series about two mismatched men who went under the names of, yes you guessed it, Tom and Jerry. This was, to be fair, over a decade before the world's favourite cat and mouse team would appear on our screens, and while I won't accuse MGM of robbing the name, what is certain is that if, even today, the names are mentioned it's always the cat and mouse who come to mind.

Be that as it may, back in 1931 Van Beuren unleashed his Tom and Jerry on the world, and if they're memorable for anything it's for the talents of one Joseph Barbera who worked on the series, and who would later team up with William Hanna to create a legendary animation team which brought us, amongst others, The Flintstones and Top Cat. Reading further now (always a good idea before writing, something I never do) I see that the pair actually invented Tom and Jerry - the famous ones - when they moved to MGM in 1940. So the name is not coincidentally the same, it's deliberate, and you'd wonder how they were able to copy it. Sure, the names are common enough, but in the same team of cartoon characters? Van Beuren must have been fuming.

Anyway, what were they like? Well according to Wiki they were of the old style (though in colour, presumably two-strip as our man Walt was holding on to three-strip like a man trying desperately to retain his grip on the winning lottery ticket) and utilised little speech, mostly conveying their intentions through the medium of music. Tom and Jerry (these ones) were a sort of tramp duo, perhaps something similar to Mutt and Jeff, and one was very tall while the other was very short. My intention is to check out, if I can, three of the movies, beginning with the first ever, 1931's Wot a Night (for you Americans, that's a colloquial English way of saying what a night).

Oh. So not in colour then, at least not this first one. All right. Well in this one they appear to be taxi drivers, and the cab also has a face, sneezing in the driving rain, the wind so strong it literally uplifts everything including buildings, and makes it seem as if they're going to blow away. They don't, but the effect is good. The idea of cars and other objects having faces and making expressions, even speaking, once sound came properly to cartoons, would become another thing cartoons did, and we saw be used  by George Moreno at the tail end of the 1940s, with his cartoon, also about a taxi, called Bubble and Squeak.
There are some clever ideas here. Although the train follows the Disney standard of seeming to dance along the tracks, when the rail is flooded oars come out of the carriages, and when the passengers, having alighted from the train and been picked up by our heroes, end up going underwater again in the heavy rain, there's a boat lowered from the cab to save them and bring them back on board. Realism pops its head in when the passengers then calmly leg it without paying their fare, and when Tom and Jerry pursue them towards a castle (rich bastards huh? And let's be honest here: they're made very much to look like Jews) a portcullis slams down and traps them in the courtyard. A stormcloud comes along and starts playing the battlements of the castle like the keys of a piano (again with the piano!) and our heroes have no choice but to venture inside the castle in search of their fare.

It seems to be some sort of ghost castle, as it's peopled with some weird flying bird with bat wings, skeletons and, oh yeah, ghosts. Good usage of the screw principle, which is to say, one skeleton, when he sees Tom and Jerry, is so scared he screws himself right down into the plughole of the bath he's been washing himself in, while another, creating a piano (yeah I know) by basically painting it screws himself down when the piano stool is too short. Oh, and there are black skeletons too. And then Tom and Jerry are turned into skeletons. Guess they never get their money then.

Meh, emphasis on the clever animation and the sounds, but you'd have to say nothing Disney and others had not done previously. Most importantly, to me, the story makes no sense. I know it's a cartoon but still: who were the "Jews"? Why did they not pay, and why, in the name of sanity, did they turn Tom and Jerry into skeletons? Very weird, and really not very satisfying. Let's see if they improved. That was 1931. How were they a year later?
We're back with pianos, but then, what would you expect in a short entitled The Piano Tooners? Note the pun on the word tuner/toon duh. Plenty of Mickey-like mice here, and I wonder who had the idea first of the ambulance coming for a fallen comrade, Van Beuren or Iwerks? Both cartoons came out in 1932, but whose was released first in the year? Looks like this was second, as it's November before it's out, so unless our man Ub released his Flip the Frog cartoon The Milkman in December then he would have had the idea first. Or at least, got it out there first. Were his shown in cinemas? It looks as if they were. But I wonder would there have been time, between the showing of The Milkman and the release of Piano Tooners to incorporate, i.e., steal the idea of the first-aid thing? Maybe it's just a coincidence. In any case, they do it better here, with a small ambulance complete with siren coming to take away a stricken mouse.

And again we see a form of violence used - although cartoons, particularly Looney Tunes, would become all but synonymous with violence, it's still odd to see it in the staid and button-down world of 1930s America - when an errant note in the piano is caught, and, well, killed and flushed down the toilet. The fact that it's made look so cute and innocent, for me, makes this even more disturbing. I know: I need to get out more. Or at all. There's a seemingly unnecessary joke about a fat woman - a very fat woman - coming in and displacing all the guests at a concert, then some more risque stuff as we see the pianist get dressed and in rather revealing lingerie, caught on stage as the curtain raises prematurely, still trying to fasten her suspender belt (garter, to you). All a little chauvinistic, if not actually misogynist. Yeah, for a kid's cartoon there's a whole lot of leg and ample cleavage on show. Hmm.
Tom and Jerry only ran for three years, so their final adventure comes in summer 1933, and perhaps attempting to cash in on the science fiction serials such as Flash Gordon and Commander Cody which were popular around this time, The Phantom Rocket features the pair being launched into space. Tying in too with growing practice of cartoons to tend towards mischief and mayhem, the rocket is hijacked by a desperado and, well, pretty much kills everyone, wrecking a ferris wheel, pulling up telephone lines and eventually diving underwater. This gives the animators plenty to do, with various fish and even mermaids coming out of a shipwreck in a state of undress, followed quickly by divers hastily putting their helmets back on, so again more sexual innuendo that the kids would of course not have got but the adults may have. It ends up crashing - into the local jail, where Tom and Jerry are rewarded, and so their final cartoon ends up making them rich, a good reason to stop getting into all sorts of scrapes and capers, and settle down somewhere.

With the exit of Tom and Jerry, Van Beuren went on to produce a series of animated shorts called Rainbow Parade between 1934 and 1936. The first of these, Pastry Town Wedding, was in the drab old two-strip Technicolor (Disney's hold on three-strip wouldn't expire for another two years) but looks a lot better than the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Yes, those are in black-and-white, or at least the ones I can find are, but overall the animation here is better. Again it's based on musical performance and like the final Tom and Jerry above, looks to have had this song written for it perhaps; it's quite clever, almost giving me a sense of The Nightmare Before Christmas in terms of the song. I must say, the head baker, who we see first, looks quite evil for some reason. Maybe it's the curled moustache or the thick eyebrows. Sound/speech sync is not too bad. It's clever, and the ideas are well thought-out, but you can see where it would have benefit from three-strip if only Walt hadn't been such a greedy fucker.
The first of the Rainbow Parade cartoons to use three-strip then was Molly Moo-Cow and the Butterflies (1935), and immediately you can see the difference. The colours are brighter, deeper, more alive. And of course, there are more of them. I guess in such a circumstance, as they change over from two to three-strip Technicolor, butterflies was a good choice to display the expanded use of colour, and it works well. No speech in this one; they seem to be relying on showing off their new colours and do so through the medium of music and dance. I would point out that Molly Moo-Cow bears more than a passing resemblance to Ub Iwerks's Clara Cowbelle.
Oh I'm wrong: now there is speech, as a butterfly collector enters the scene and captures all Molly's friends, then for some reason begins singing about how he loves catching butterflies, as Molly tries to come up with a plan to release the insects and set them free. She eventually hits upon the idea of disguising herself as a butterfly and so... well, it's a silly story but what the hell. Nobody ever said cartoons had to make sense, and to be honest, if there's one thing I've learned writing and researching the history of animation it's that it's damned hard work. But if there's another thing I've learned it's that it is totally futile and a waste of energy to try to ascribe logic to cartoons. So the fact that a professional lepidopterist would easily - as would anyone else - see through such a disguise, or that his net is way too small to capture this huge "butterfly", to say nothing of the fact that cows can't fly, is all beside the point. It's a cool and not terribly funny but clever cartoon. Let's check out one more.
This is the first of several that featured my little pal Felix the Cat (Van Beuren must have had some deal going with Sullivan to use him) and it's interesting for several reasons. It's the first time, I think, that I've come across a cartoon using someone else's creation, not to mention that it's the first time I've seen Felix in colour (though of course he remains black) and also heard him speak. In Felix and the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, they're obviously plundering the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, bringing two well-loved characters, if you will, from folklore together, and though I'm not familiar with this series (Rainbow Parade) or indeed Felix's own adventures, this also seems to feature his arch enemy, Captain Kidd?

The idea is that Felix is using the Goose to give out aid to the needy from what is termed the "Relief Office", but Captain Kidd wants the goose for himself of course. Felix recognises him, disguised as an old woman, and a chase ensues. Good to see that Felix retains his zany cartoon logic, turning himself into a cannonball and firing himself at the pirate ship when Kidd makes off with the goose and sails away. Interesting to hear Kidd say to Felix "Why you little.." sixty years before it would become one of Homer Simpson's catchphrases. Felix of course saves the day and showers the town in gold fired from the ship's cannon, thus completely screwing up the town's economy, but that's cartoons for ya!

Looks like Rainbow Parade were Van Beuren's last ventures in animation; RKO, their distributor for the series, went with Disney instead, and after 1936 they diversified into live-action and adverts, with founder Amadee J. Van Beuren actually dying two years later of a heart attack. I suppose, if you were very cruel and unfair, you could suggest that Disney literally killed his competition.

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We have to give a shout-out to Charles Mintz, whose company Screen Gems produced the Colour Rhapsody series from 1934 all the way up to 1949. Notably, other than Disney this seems to have been the first animation studio to be nominated for an Academy Award (though I guess it didn't win, as it's only shown as nominee), and throughout its run, though it would never win any, it was nominated for a further four. Very impressive. Our man Ub Iwerks was on their staff for a time, and in fact it was Mintz who, when working at Winkler Pictures (which he owned, after marrying its founder, Katherine Winkler) both greenlit the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and later stole all the animators working on the cartoon when Disney and Iwerks refused to cut costs, and started up his own studio. Perhaps in a move of poetic justice, Oswald was then taken by Universal and given to their in-house animator, Charles Lantz, but Mintz continued on without him and decided to concentrate on a sort of mash-up of Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse called Krazy Kat.

To properly check this little guy out we have to emulate Felix and push the timeline back momentarily, and as the clock hands spin in reverse around the dial and the little black-and-white feline strains against an imaginary line, forcing it backwards, we arrive in 1913, when most animators around the world are still struggling with how to make simple drawings move on paper. Not so George Herriman, for such was, initially, not his interest. His character, the aforementioned Krazy Kat, was perfectly happy living as a two-dimensional occupant of a newspaper strip, and would not see film animation for another twenty years.

In point of fact, he goes back further than that, three years in fact, to 1910, as Krazy Kat was a spin-off character (the first in comic strip history? A subject for a journal on comics, should anyone undertake one - oh look! I'm doing that!) from a previous strip, The Dingbat Family. In a very offbeat treatment of the cat/mouse dynamic, Krazy was in fact in love with the mouse, Ignatz, though the feeling was most certainly not mutual, the mouse reciprocating by way of hurling bricks at the cat. I couldn't say that's the first instance of violence in a cartoon strip - it most certainly is not; see The Return of John Bull in my Childhood Heroes: A Comic History journal - but it may be the first instance of one anthro inflicting violence on another. A lot of interesting stuff for me to dissect when the time comes for me to feature this in the other journal, but right now we're concerned with the animated version of Krazy Kat, so we'll leave all the philosophical stuff, the differently-sized and arranged panels, the odd landscapes and the frankly flowery dialogue for another time.

It must be pointed out that just as Disney had the protection (exclusive contract) of Technicolor for the three-strip colour cartoons, and as, in another journal, I explain Pan American Airlines were shielded by the US Government from competition in their formative years, Herriman had his own champion in the titanic figure of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (the figure, of course, on whom Charles Foster Kane is based in Welles' iconic movie), and whom we've run into a few times in part one, who loved Krazy Kat so much that he rejected criticism of the strip, even though most seemed to believe it too highbrow and not slapstick enough, and even arranged for Krazy Kat's first transition to the screen in a black-and-white silent in 1916. Actually, it's the seventh, now that I check, but it's the earliest I can get a video for.
Beaten to it only a year before by Raoul Barré with The Animated Grouch Chasers, Herriman here uses circling stars when Krazy crashes his bike, plus lines of sight when he looks at something. Though in fairness,  Barré's effort was mostly live-action, and this is a full cartoon, if an early one, so maybe the process could be credited to Herriman. Oh well maybe not; seems he wasn't involved in the film versions. Doesn't say who was. A pity, as it does seem a pioneering effect that would be used until sound/speech came into more common use a decade or two later.

The cartoon isn't much to write home about (you can see it above) - the light has that sort of bulb-about-to-blow feel of coming and going, the story is all but negligible, the relationship between Ignatz and Krazy is ignored (both seem good friends - also both appear male) and not a single brick is thrown, the hallmark of the newspaper strip. Nothing much happens either, but to be fair, the animation is fluid and doesn't jerk or jump, and the speech balloons work well in the place of actual spoken dialogue so you can tell what's going on: so much better and more personal, I feel, than cutting to a title card every time someone says something. For the time it's pretty impressive really, and points the way towards the direction animation would take.

The first Krazy Kat short made by the John Randolph Bray studio (we learned about him before) came out in 1920, so let's have a look and see if there is any major difference. Obviously, we're still talking black and white here, and probably silent I would say, but four years on, has the animation improved, has the story become any more engaging?

Okay sorry but again the Doomsday Machine (in-joke for Star Trek nerds) has swept over YouTube and swallowed up the video, and to be honest I don't remember which one it was, so I can't find an alternative, if one exists. So again, you'll have to take my word for it that the following describes accurately what was in the video, and that my reading of it is accurate.

Well I would say the music is worse, a lot more tinny sounding and quite warped (admittedly this is 1920 but still, the 1916 one sounded smooth and clear) and to be honest, the animation has not improved much. Now Bray is using those damned title cards, which annoys me, and Krazy looks less like a cat than he did in Bugologist: more like a dog really. As an aside, I've always wondered where the myth began that mice eat cheese? They don't, but the lie has been perpetrated down through animation and mice eating, or stealing, or wanting cheese has become a staple of cartoons. I will give Bray this much, that when Ignatz tries to stomp a huge wheel of cheese into his impossibly tiny bag, a face appears on it as if it's grimacing. But again, meh, it's nothing great overall.

The last Bray animation of Krazy Kat was only a year later, but I can't comment on the soundtrack as some idiot has clearly added his own modern one. The animation overall is still what I would call poor. Yes, it's 1921 but still, this is weak. Bray uses what would become a tried-and-tested method of time saving (and cost saving) by drawing a crowd but repeating the same figures several times to make it look like there are more there than there actually are. This would be done later with backgrounds too, especially houses and streets. Hmm. He seems to use the occasional speech balloon (square ones, well, rectangular ones) but mostly relies on title cards. Also, again, the relationship between the two is far friendlier than it should be; there's no sign of the conflict prevalent when one person is in love and the other is not. Again, no bricks. Usage of exclamation marks (points) and question marks too. Overall again I'd have to say a poor effort.

This is where Charles Mintz comes back into the picture, as he lost Oswald and pinned his animation future on Krazy Kat. However, frustratingly, I can find no early Winkler Pictures cartoons on YouTube, (not that many Krazy Kat at all really) and so the first time we see what Mintz's animators were doing with him is as the timeline snaps back like an overstretched elastic band and Felix is cat-apulted (sorry) all the way to our present timeline, to 1932, where we find Seeing Stars (1932).
Well by now the little guy has undergone a major makeover, which really can be called more a, what would we call it? Cloning? Basically he's now very like Felix with a dash of Mickey, and essentially any originality he had, any identity has been thrown away in the desperate attempt by Mintz to be like the Disney character who was taking America by storm, and soon to do the same worldwide. He even dances, where before he did not. And there are some very Mickey-looking Ignatzes (well, mice anyway - I don't know if Ignatz has even been retained at this stage) lifting - oh dear god help us! Another fucking piano! Don't these cartoon characters know how to play anything else? :rolleyes: Stand by for the usual by-now-standard high jinks with the piano, and yes, there are the Marx Brothers emerging from it. Sigh. Didn't Ub Iwerks already do this with Flip the Frog? More, I assume, famous Hollywood stars of the thirties being caricatured, though I don't recognise any. Okay, I recognise Laurel and Hardy, and maybe that's Charlie Chaplin?

The point is, the cartoon is pretty bereft of imagination, copying others that have done the same thing, although in fairness this is over ten years down the line since Mintz's studios took over the character. Still, he hasn't progressed much, in fact I'd say he's regressed, till he's just a poor man's Felix really. Damned boring if you ask me. I don't know if the video shown is deteriorating after nearly ninety years, but The Masquerade Party (1934) seems to have a really annoying reddish cast to it
While The Trapeze Artist, from the same year, seems to suffer from way too much blue/purple.
As does Highway Snobbery from two years later. Basically, I'd have to say that either these films have not been well preserved or that the animation was pretty shit for the time compared to other studios, and I'd have to think it's the latter. Krazy Kat may have been a big influence on a lot of animators and artists, but mostly I think through the original comic strip, as these cartoons leave very much a lot to be desired. Krazy Kat's theatrical adventures ended in 1940, though really he looks to have been winding down by 1936/37 and by  1939 he had had at best staggered appearances compared to previous years, with his final appearances being a mere two shorts in 1940. Mintz did not live to see the last films, dying of a heart attack (what is it with all these animators dying of heart attacks?) in 1939. Walt Disney apparently praised him for "high quality cartoons": I would not agree, based on what I've seen here.

Before we judge him too harshly though, let's check out the series that opened this article on him, the Color Rhapsodies, which ran from 1934 to 1949. The first of them, Holiday Land (1934) suffers of course from the lack of three-strip but the animator, Art Davis, does what he can within the limits he's forced to remain. A lot of blue, red and black, sort of like those old computer games before you upgraded to an EGA card. What the fuck are you talking about, Trollheart? Never mind, never mind. Forget I spoke. I wonder is this the first instance of that old favourite, particularly beloved of the Pink Panther in later years, of waking up and grabbing a hammer to silence the alarm clock? First time I've seen it anyway.
Some cute ideas. The calendar flipping as important dates are blown off (is this meant to indicate the passage of time, and if so, is this another first? Or is it just the wind blowing the pages off?) and the related figures come out of them and parade around is clever. Father Christmas for December 25, Old Man Time for New Year's Day, turkeys on Thanksgiving and so on (but do you Americans celebrate Halloween on October 30? It's the 31st for us, but that calendar page shown is October 30) and I like how one of the ducks parading for easter drops a small egg and out of it comes a duckling, who, seeing he's being left behind, uses the half-shell as a small boat and rows along behind the others, trying to catch up.

The idea, then, seems to be that a lazy child who won't get up is visited and taken on a tour of all the major holidays by a tiny Father Time, presumably to show him how if he sleeps his life away he will miss all the good things in life? Well, whatever but this is already far better than the Krazy Kat efforts coming out at this time from Mintz's studios. As I say, these continued almost into the 1950s, but as our timeline here is only concerned with up to 1940, let's take one from, oh let's say 1938. By now, Walt had lost his monopoly on three-strip Technicolor, so let's see what our friend Ub Iwerks did with that while working for Mintz.
This is, then, Midnight Frolics (1938) and though - unsurprisingly, given the title - it takes place at night, you can already see the change. The colours are richer, deeper, more resonant. The blues and purples are very deep, the pink is quite rosy. You can almost get a feeling of early Scooby-Doo about this. The transparency of the ghosts is handled well: you actually can see through them, but in a kind of more translucent way. But damn it, eight years on and it's still bloody musical based! Clever ideas again. I like the ghost salesman who keeps trying to sell the other ghosts things, and it's interesting to have a cartoon based entirely on ghosts - I mean, there's a mouse, but for once he's just an observer, and also a cuckoo in his clock, but the cartoon revolves around the exploits of the ghosts. Yeah, not bad.

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As the new decade bore down upon the world and the dark clouds of war began to gather, though not yet for America, Warner Bros set about mounting a serious challenge to Disney, a task it has to be said they achieved. The creation of the very first Looney Tunes character, Porky Pig, was followed in relatively rapid succession by names which would reverberate down the annals of animation and cartoon history: Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Bugs Bunny. For almost forty years Looney Tunes and its companion series Merrie Melodies would thrill and make children laugh in cinemas, and later on television, and even today these cartoons are still shown and appreciated, as much by the adults who grew up on them as by the kids of today. Some cartoons are timeless, and some subjects are evergreen - one character getting constantly hurt by another, traps, schemes, wacky machines, hunger, chases, territorialism and all the other things that go up to make relationships between cartoon characters kept Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies fresh, even if in general, the same basic plot was being rehashed each time.

Wile E. Coyote employs more and more zany and unreliable methods to catch Roadrunner, methods which invariably fail. Sylvester tries in vain to eat Tweety-Pie. Tom chases Jerry. Bugs outsmarts the hunter, and often Daffy too. Speedy Gonzales is the fastest mouse in the south, and Yosemite Sam is the fastest gun in the West (and also possesses the largest moustache and biggest hat). Foghorn Leghorn cannot convince that kid that he is a sparrowhawk, not a chickenhawk, and Porky still has his endearing stammer. Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies never really broke with what was a successful formula. If Wile E. Coyote bought something from ACME we knew it would end up turning against him. If Tom caught Jerry we knew the mouse would get away. It wasn't really new stuff that attracted us, it was the repetition of the old. I mean, who didn't laugh every time that cloud of dust came up from the desert floor as the luckless coyote impacted it? A real case of, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
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So Warner based their cartoons around the predictable, the expected and the familiar. Not the actual events, but you could tell how things were going to turn out at the end. The animation from the first was better than good, and would of course end up top-class, and unlike Disney, who would, for a long time, stick to having songs in their cartoons, Warner would have incidental music but usually no actual songs, except on odd occasions, like maybe if Bugs serenaded someone or Daffy was in a band or whatever. With Looney Tunes (let's just assume Merrie Melodies is included in that; I'm tired of writing both) it was all about the zaniness of the cartoon, the illogical universe the characters inhabited, and their personalities. With Disney it was definitely more story-based, as their features tended to plunder old fairy tales - Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio etc - and also literature, as they tacked Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and the like. Story before personality, really, though that's not to say they didn't imbue their characters with personality. But can you really remember much about the prince in Sleeping Beauty, or Wendy in Peter Pan?

Looney Tunes characters would be known for their catchphrases and the things they did. Bugs nibbling a carrot asking "What's up Doc?" or Daffy telling someone - usually the rabbit - they were despicable. Sylvester would exclaim "Suffering succotash!" (and we all wondered what the hell succotash was, though nobody really cared) and Speedy would cry "Yee hah! Yee Hah! Hondolay!" and streak off. The vast majority of Looney Tunes' anthros would have no clothes, and yet there was no suggestion of nudity. Foghorn Leghorn, Bugs, Daffy and Sylvester strode around as nature intended, and there were no irate telephone calls to the network. Others were dressed: Speedy wore a sombrero and Spanish garb, Porky wore a tweed suit, Elmer Fudd a hunting outfit, and of course Yosemite Sam was dressed as a cowboy. Often these disparate characters would star in their own cartoon solo, but often too they would meet or be paired up with others, most famously Bugs and Daffy, who seldom got on.

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Tex Avery (1908 - 1980)

One of the most recognisable names in cartoons, and one of those who helped usher in the non-Disney part of the Golden Age of American Cartoons, Frederick Beans "Tex" Avery was of course as you would expect born in Texas, just outside of Austin. From such small acorns... Beginning his career as a lowly inker with Winkler Pictures, he was perhaps privileged to have worked on the early cartoons of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but left Winkler to go to Universal Studios, again as an inker initially but soon his talent was recognised and rewarded, and he was the animator who worked on Oswald after production was moved to Universal. He also began his directing career here.

An office accident led to his losing the sight in one eye when one of his co-workers shot a paper clip his way via rubber band and, warned by another colleague to look out, he turned at the wrong time and the paper clip hit his eye. In 1935, unhappy with his wages, he began to let his standards slip, hoping to be fired. He was, and then moved to Leon Schlesinger's studio, where he worked on the Looney Tunes, which were at this time, and until 1940, in black and white still, and also Merrie Melodies, which had been in Technicolor since 1935. Working with other directors, including Jack King and Friz Freleng, Avery had the use of four animators - Chuck Jones, Sid Sutherland, Bob Clampett and Virgil Ross, and they all moved into a new five-room bungalow at Warners when they outgrew the main studio. Due to its dilapidated condition and insect infestation, this became known as "Termite Terrace".

Within his first year at Warners Avery had discounted the character meant to be the main one, Beans the Cat, in favour of Porky Pig, whom he redesigned the next year to be cuter and more cartoon-like. Reportedly a good boss to work for, Avery talked to his animators and often went to the lengths of explaining some of his ideas if they didn't get them. He was always smiling and pleasant, and often lent his voice to some of the characters. He presided over the creation of Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny (though he did not like the name, preferring instead Jack E. Rabbit, but was overruled by the studio) and became a household name. In 1941 he left Warners to work at MGM, where he really came into his own, even creating some very risque (for the time) cartoons such as Blitz Wolf, which parodied the Three Little Pigs fairy tale with Adolf Hitler, and Red Hot Riding Hood, which you can probably guess at. All told, he worked at MGM till 1953, with one year off in 1950, the longest he had worked at any studio.

Avery later became quite depressed and withdrawn when his son committed suicide, and he moved into television commercial cartoons, but never seemed happy in the medium. He died in 1980 of cancer, remembered as one of the men who made cartoons into what they are today.


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Friz Freleng (1905 - 1995)

Some of the names of animator, directors and producers just stuck in my mind as a kid a) because they were so prominent in the opening credits and b) they were weird to me. Quimby, Avery, and this guy. I always thought it was odd that he wasn't Fritz Freleng, but Friz. His actual name was Isadore, and he was from the same town which could almost be called Cartoon City, Kansas City in Missouri, from which had already sprung Ub Iwerks, Rudolph Ising, Hugh Harman and Carmen Maxwell. Oh yeah, and some guy called Walt. After he moved to Hollywood, Disney invited the Kansas City mob to join him at his new studio, and Freleng followed the others in 1927. As with so many of Disney's animators though, Freleng found the way he was treated unconducive to remaining and instead joined Ising and Harman on the Bosko cartoons, but worried these might not be successful he headed to New York where he worked on Krazy Kat for Charles Mintz.

He returned to take up a position as director for Leon Schlesinger on the Looney Tunes, and was instrumental in bringing Porky Pig to life. He had a short spell with MGM but returned to Warners in 1939. He was heavily involved in the development of Sylvester and Tweety Pie, Yosemite Sam and Speedy Gonzales. During his time he won four Academy Awards and was nominated for six more. Later he would move to Hanna-Barbera and with David DePatie create the iconic Pink Panther, among others. He died in 1995, perhaps one of the few animators not to die of cancer, but of natural causes. He was 89 years old.
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Bob Clampett (1913 - 1984)

Perhaps a less well-known name, maybe because he only remained in cartoons till 1945, Bob Clampett nevertheless was important to the creation and development of some of Warners Looney Tunes best-known characters, such as Sylvester and Tweety, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. One of the only animators to be born in California, and perhaps one of the only Irish-American ones, his parents being immigrants from County Tipperary, Clampett lived next door to Charlie Chaplin and knew Harold Lloyd, and was a child prodigy, already excellent at art by age five. He was involved with Walt Disney when, on the basis of a sketch he made at the cinema, his aunt created a line of Mickey Mouse dolls to sell, with Disney's approval.

At age seventeen, Clampett joined Ising and Harman on Schlesinger's Merry Melodies, and worked under Friz Freleng, who took him under his wing. In 1934 he submitted a drawing of a pig to Schlesinger, who was looking for a new character, and so Porky Pig was born. Later he moved into the infamous "Termite Terrace" under Tex Avery and worked with his animators, and in 1937 when Avery created Daffy Duck it was Clampett who animated him. Clampett was largely responsible for the increasingly surreal universe the Looney Tunes characters inhabited, as he threw the rule book out the window. After setting fire to it. His style went down so well at cinemas that Schlesinger instructed his other animators to follow suit, leading to Warners becoming the standard for crazy, zany, off-the-charts cartoons, with things like characters running off the page, being rubbed out, finding themselves in black or white nothingness, and on more than one occasion, directly addressing the animator. Roadrunner's weird non-logic world came from this idea too, the likes of train tunnels drawn on walls by Wile E. Coyote becoming passable for Roadrunner but not for him.

Clampett left Warners in 1946 and though he worked for a short time for Charles Mintz's Screen Gems, he soon turned his attention to puppets, which would win him three Emmys for the show Time for Beany, and then took to the lecture circuit, sharing his experience and expertise with college students and would-be animators. He died in 1984 of a heart attack. His genius may have come at a price though; his colleagues did not have much good to say about him, some of them claiming he took credit for their ideas, others annoyed at the way he and only he seemed able to break the rules at Warner. He is on record claiming creation of both Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, and Daffy Duck. I suppose it depends on who you decide to believe; a friend of Clampett's maintains it was all a smear campaign by Chuck Jones, who didn't like Clampett.
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Chuck Jones (1912 - 2002)

Another name we would see in my day written large at the start of our favourite cartoons, Chuck Jones was another Warners animator, who could be said to have inherited his artistic ability from his father, though not really. Charles Adam Jones was no artist, but a businessman, however he supplied his children regularly with previously-imprinted stationery as each venture failed, giving them all an interest in drawing. Chuck worked first for Ub Iwerks as a cel washer, then a painter, and so on up the ladder until he was taken on as an assistant animator by Leon Schlesinger on the closure of Iwerks's studio in 1933. Two years later he was promoted to assistant animator and moved into "Termite Terrace" along with Tex Avery, Sid Sutherland, Virgil Ross and Bob Clampett.

Truth to tell, Jones did not get on well at Schlesinger's studio, patterning his creations more on the Disney principle and being seen as "just not funny", an accusation, ironically, he would direct at Disney's Ub Iwerks. Schlesinger did in fact want to fire him but could not find a replacement; his involvement in attempting to unionise the studio would not have done much to mollify his boss either. The two butted heads and this led to a short strike at the studio, led by Jones, and in turn leading to the reluctant acceptance of defeat by Schelesinger as the union was established at his studio. During World War II Jones worked with Dr. Seuss, otherwise known as Theodor Geisel, on army educational cartoons called the Private Snafu series. He would work with him again after the war, particularly on How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 1966.

During the short closure of Warners in 1953 he moved to Disney, where he worked on the feature film Sleeping Beauty, though he received no credit for his work, then rejoined Warner when they reopened. There, his most famous creations were Pepe Le Pew, Marvin the Martian and the iconic Wile E. Coyote and RoadRunner. In 1963, when Warners closed down for good, he set up his own studio but this was quickly (within a year) taken over by MGM, and he found himself working on "sanitising" (removing the content seen as objectionable, read, racist) the theatrical Tom and Jerry cartoons for distribution to the new television medium. In 1975 he wrote to Tex Avery, accusing Bob Clampett of stealing his ideas and those of other animators, and taking credit for work that was not his.

Jones was nominated for two Academy Awards and won two more, including an honorary Lifetime Achievement Award, for "the creation of classic cartoons and cartoon characters whose animated lives have brought joy to our real ones for more than half a century." He died in 2002 of heart failure.

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Mel Blanc (1908 - 1989)

Quite rightly called "the man of a thousand voices", Mel Blanc was the one who brought our favourite cartoon characters to life by giving them a voice. Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and the rest could draw them and direct them, but they were silent until Blanc spoke for them. His most famous voice is of course that of the wisecracking rabbit Bugs  Bunny, but in his time he also voiced Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Barney Rubble, Speedy Gonzales, Elmer Fudd, Pepe Le Pew, Yosemite Sam, Marvin the Martian, Tweety Pie, Sylvester, Foghorn Leghorn, Secret Squirrel, Captain Caveman and many others too numerous to list in this short article.

Always interested in utilising his voice, and changing his name from its original Blank to Blanc because a teacher had told him rather callously that his surname was appropriate, as he would amount to nothing, Blanc first worked on radio, starting at age 19 and finding a place on the popular Jack Benny Program in 1935, remaining a regular on the show until it ended twenty years later. His popularity on the show led to him having one of his own, which ran for a year up to 1947. It was however with Warner Bros - originally Leon Schlesinger's studio - that he found his greatest fame, voicing most of the cartoon characters being created there, as detailed above. Soon he was one of the most recognisable voices in America, and indeed the world. He also worked with Chuck Jones and Dr. Seuss during the war, creating the voice for the hapless Private Snafu.

Later in his career he would go on to provide voices for characters for the Hanna-Barbera Studio, including Wally Gator and Barney Rubble, and in 1961 he was involved in a serious car accident, only reached in the coma into which he had fallen by the doctors addressing not him, but his cartoon characters. He in fact provided the voice for Barney for many episodes of The Flintstones from hospital, lying on his back with the other cast members gathered around his bed. He set up his own production company and, like Clampett, got on the college lecture circuit.

Mel Blanc died in 1989 from complications brought on by emphysema, and coronary artery disease. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as does Bugs Bunny, his most famous voice. His headstone, at his request, contains the epitaph "That's all folks!"