Funtasmagoria: The Complete, Moving History of Animation

[Trollheart]

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.

[Trollheart]

Part One: Early Animation: Forefathers, Godfathers and Wizards



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


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.



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.


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.

[Trollheart]

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.



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.

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.

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.

[Trollheart]

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



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.


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.

[Trollheart]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Trollheart]

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


UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA

Timeline: 1910-1917

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.

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!

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.


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...

[Trollheart]

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.

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.

[Trollheart]

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.

[Trollheart]

Timeline: 1924-1927

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.


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.

[Trollheart]

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.

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.

[Trollheart]

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

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.

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.

[Trollheart]

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.


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.


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.

[Trollheart]

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...


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.

[Trollheart]

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



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

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 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.

[Trollheart]

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?

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.

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.


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