Funtasmagoria: The Complete, Moving History of Animation

[Trollheart]

Timeline: 1940-1941

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

The original story does not make the title character as sympathetic as Disney's film did. In the story, he kills the cricket who would become Jiminy, his conscience, and is later attended by its ghost. He is very precocious, as you would expect, but quite unlikeable, and the story is, as these things invariably were before the likes of Disney got their hands on them, quite dark. This would of course never do for an American cartoon film audience, and so many aspects of the story were changed, such as the introduction of the genial Jiminy Cricket, a more endearing aspect being given to the puppet and the role of the blue fairy, who features only slightly in the original story, being upgraded to a companion of the puppet. Obviously, many songs were also written for it, as would become the norm for Disney cartoons.

In addition, due to the unexpected but very welcome success of his first feature, Disney wanted to have known celebrities voice his characters, and so Pinocchio became the first animated movie to have stars do the voices. Names which of course at this point in time mean nothing to us but who were big stars in their day were recruited: Frankie Darro, Walter Catlett, Evelyn Venable and the creator of the first ever million-selling record, "Ukelele Ike", Cliff Edwards, were all signed up, while the voice of Pinocchio himself, due to Disney's insistence on it being a child who voiced him, went to Dickie Jones, only twelve years old but already having worked with legendary director Frank Capra (no not Franz Kafka!), though sadly the voice that would become synonymous with later cartoons (including that of Bugs Bunny), Mel Blanc, was deleted out of the movie after it was decided that his character would be a mute.

Pinocchio became the first animated feature to utilise proper effects animation, such as the sparkles from the blue fairy's wand, and the incredible underwater scenes, which were highly praised. Despite however winning two Academy Awards (the first animated movie to achieve this feat) it was not the huge box office success Disney had expected and hoped it would be, recouping less than half of its budget by 1947. Some of this was due to the onset of World War II, which left people with more important things to do than watch movies, and less money too, but though Walt was reported to have been very depressed about the initial box office returns, it of course picked up steam and to date has made over forty times its budget, earning a place in the National Film Registry and when the American Film Institute compiled their top ten best films ever in 2008, Pinocchio came second in the animation genre, beaten only by its predecessor. It is now considered one of Disney's best films.

In comparison to many of Disney's later films, which could mostly be labelled under the terms "twee", "cloying" or "sentimental", Pinocchio is a genuine morality tale, and though there are songs that we remember from it – mostly "When you wish upon a star" - which make it fit into what would later become unofficially known as the "Disneyfication" idea, it tends not to rely too much on jokes and clever lines, instead espousing the need for honesty, friendship and a strong work ethic. If Pinocchio wants to become a real boy, he has to work for it, and accept all the baggage that comes with that.

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

[Trollheart]

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

The idea was quite courageous. Given that his audiences had so far seen the happy tale of a young woman living with seven dwarfs, followed by a puppet discovering how to be a real boy, and that even the previous shorts had all followed some sort of definite storyline or plot, the plan to have a series of separate "longer" shorts, all set to classical music (which might be a turn-off for younger audience members, you would think) that really never meshed to tell one cohesive story, must have seemed a pretty big gamble, but it would pay off. Securing the services (for free!) of the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, Disney was ready to create a real extravaganza, and though I've seen it once and was not terribly impressed, you can't argue with box office returns of between seventy and eighty million, for an initial outlay of just over two.

There would be no real cast for this outing, as there was no speech, only music, and one narrator, but that didn't stop the budget equalling the previous movie. Again, World War II would restrict the distribution of the movie, and combined with the expense of fitting out theatres with Disney's new Fantasound state of the art stereophonic sound system, would lead to slow uptake on the movie, but Disney insisted on the new system, as the movie stood or fell as much on the audience's enjoyment of the music as the animation. Fantasia thus became the first feature film to use stereo sound. It was also the longest animated movie at the time, clocking in at a somewhat attention-challenging two hours and six minutes.

Fantasia also became, if not the first animated movie, then the first full-length one, to mix live action and animation, as the opening sequence is live action with the orchestra tuning up. Personally, I think this takes from it, but that's just me. A brief rundown of the various sections follows.

Opening with, as mentioned, the narrator introducing the film against the background of the orchestra tuning up, we get Toccata and Fugue by Bach. This is a pretty abstract piece, moving on to a scene of growth and flowering, the changing of the seasons in Tchaikovsky's The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, with fish, flowers and mushrooms all dancing, then the most famous sequence, where Mickey Mouse is reintroduced to cinema audiences for The Sorcerer's Apprentice followed by Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, showing the birth cycle of our planet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Trollheart]

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

At a mere sixty-four minutes - just over an hour - Dumbo was Disney's shortest full-length animation at the time, again somewhat breaking the rules he had himself written. Another aspect of this, although perhaps it could be blamed on the ongoing war, which had seen his previous two movies garner less attention than expected, and into which America would soon be dragged. Due to this, Disney's instructions to the team producing Dumbo was for it to be "simple and inexpensive", even envisaging it as a "short", though it ended up being a full movie.

In addition, and in a direct reversal of his attitude towards what was the jewel in his crown, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney did not bother with stars to voice his movie; in fact, he didn't even allow them credits. Unfortunately for him, the obstacles he was already facing by trying to have a hit animated feature movie during a war which was, unbeknownst to him, very soon to engulf his own country, were exacerbated by that terror of all industrialists and businessmen, a strike.

Don't Take the Mickey: Cartoonists Refuse to Work for Peanuts

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

Except Disney.

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

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

Enter the SCG.

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

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

They did. They went on strike.

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

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

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

Despite all the controversy (and more to come) the movie was a huge success, easily making back its budget and more, and must have shown Disney that this was the way to go in the future: happy, sappy, simple stories about animals, and forget all that highbrow nonsense with classical music. Dumbo also may have kick-started (though I'd have to check) the idea of traditional enemies becoming friends (cat/dog or in this case, elephant/mouse) and sometimes reversing that trend. While this may not have given children watching the movie a realistic view of nature, hell, it was only a movie, entertainment and not necessarily meant to educate, although as I say it did carry a moralistic message.

In many ways, to me anyway, the story rather closely mirrors Hans Christian Anderson's beloved tale The Ugly Duckling as Dumbo, first mocked for his large ears, finds that they come into their own and end up being his big advantage when he finds he can fly by flapping them, and is then accepted by his peers. Of course, again, here we find Disney (although I suppose this can't be blamed on him really, as he didn't write the story) thumbing his nose at reality, allowing a creature to fly which could never in real life hope to leave the ground, nor should it.

Accusations of racism would dog the movie later on, with the circus workers all shown as being black, this extending to the crows, who all had Deep Southern accents and whose leader was, rather disturbingly and unwisely, named Jim. Jim Crow? Surely not. Oh yeah. They did change the name in the 1950s to Dandy, but a bit late at that stage.

Perhaps oddly, the first black animator to work at Disney - whom we will meet in part two - Floyd Norman, vigourously defended the crows, as did Whoopi Goldberg. I suppose you can say that a lot of this so-called controversy can be, not excused but explained by the prevailing attitudes of the time, which doesn't make it right, but it is perhaps telling that the first real objection to, or observation of this so-called racism I can trace comes from 1968, over 25 years later and, crucially, at the height of the civil rights unrest in America.

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

[Trollheart]

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

Going for, again, the most realistic depiction of animals as he could, he called in experts on animal behaviour, and even set up a small zoo to try to give his animators the proper idea as to how they should mimic the movements of the creatures for their drawings. With both Fantasia and Pinocchio in production at the time, Bambi got put to one side, and it was only in 1939 that work began on it in earnest, the writing for the movie finally finished in summer of 1940. I can't say for certain, but I think Tyrus Wong, the Chinese immigrant who became the lead animator on the movie, may have been one of very few, perhaps even the only Asian animator working in the US at this time, as the Chinese Exclusion Act was in force, and Wong and his father (who, rather appropriately, arrived in America on the SS China) had to pretend they had relatives here in order to be granted entry, when in fact this was not true. Wong's contribution to Bambi was hidden (possibly due to this deception and the fear the discovery of his high-profile status might bring the INS down on Disney, but given that, as we have already seen, Walt didn't like much to give credit where it was due, probably not) and only came to light relatively recently. Wong was one of those who went on strike and was subsequently fired by Disney, finding work at rival studio Warner.

Though successful, Bambi initially did not find favour with the critics. Reading between the lines, I think it's possible that America, with its grand and proud tradition of hunting, may have been embarrassed that this essentially wholesale and pointless murder of animals for sport had been thrown into harsh relief by Disney, showing up those who hunted for the hypocrites they were, but that's just me. The main issue seems to have been that there were no fantasy elements in the movie, though how you can say that about a film in which animals talk and bring you into their world is another story entirely. Many critics even thought Uncle Walt had blown it, and that this might be the end for him. Famous last words, eh?

You can certainly see the movie as perhaps the darkest Disney had attempted, in parts anyway. It is, to my knowledge, the first in which a character dies, even if it is an animal, and moreover, the first in which a mother dies. In fairness, there's a death of the main character in Snow White, but we know she's not really dead, just sleeping, and she "comes back to life" at the end, so that doesn't count. There are darker elements in Pinocchio too, such as when he's transported to Pleasure Island and begins to turn into an asshole, sorry ass, so really, I'm not certain you could call this any darker than what had gone before. I suppose to idea that, at its heart, it's the story of a young fawn trying to survive against the odds, with no fairies or crickets or dwarfs for company, might make it seem a little bleaker than previous fare.

Bambi also stands as one of the most realistic of Disney's efforts. Nature is portrayed more or less exactly as it is (except of course, animals don't talk, or if they do, it's not a language we can interpret or understand). There's no playing with physics here, no stretching of limbs or having inanimate objects get out of the way, and when a character dies, it stays dead. Nothing inanimate has anything to say, and when Bambi goes onto the ice to try to skate, he falls (literally) foul of physics, balance and gravity, and stumbles all over the place. Ironically, this is remembered as one of the most touching scenes in the movie, as the young fawn tries desperately to find and keep his balance, and emulates the worst of us learning to skate, thereby, I guess, allowing us to identify better with him.

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

[Trollheart]

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

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

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

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


UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA (Part II)
Timeline: Approx 1935 - 1948

Still, as we will see shortly, very much playing catch-up, Europe was trying, but we had a very long way to go, and to be perfectly honest, once America took the lead it has more or less kept it even today, with the possible exception maybe of Japan.

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

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

In fairness, this is what I read, but looking now at one (entitled The Cuckoo (1948)) I don't agree at all. Yes, the narrator is very English and it's treated more as a nature documentary in the way a lot of later live-action Disney films would copy, but these birds have character. I also note this may be the first time that feet-running-in-a-circle to indicate a character about to run (you know the one, accompanied by someone banging coconuts or something) had been used, at least outside of the USA. Then again, I suspect Hand would just have brought that in his "bag of tricks" to be used 'cross the water. Nevertheless, I don't consider this cartoon bad. You can watch it yourself below.

Another who tried and failed was George Moreno, an American who had studied under Max and Dave Fleischer. His series, Bubble and Squeak, about a London taxi driver and his anthropomorphic taxi, though it only lasted five episodes, is possibly the first example of an inanimate object being given a personality – his taxi is born as a little tiny car as he waits anxiously outside the delivery room, and has a happy face and does that concertina-movement that would again become some popular later on, and that had been somewhat pioneered already by Disney in both Plane Crazy and earlier when Oswald the Lucky Rabbit had his Trolley Troubles. An interesting aside here, not important but hell, I'll mention it anyway cos I'm that anal: as his mates celebrate the birth of Mister Bubble's taxi in the pub, they all sing For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, but the American final line in this song is different to the British one. We sing "And so say all of us" and you guys sing "Which nobody can deny." Now, for reasons I can't work out – surely he could have just asked an English person how they sing it? - he obviously didn't want to use the Americanised version but didn't know how the English one went, so made up a new line: "A jolly good fellow is he." Odd.

Anyway, the cartoon looks to have been well made if the colour is slightly washed out and the drawing sketchier and more two-dimensional than Disney, and the humour is well handled. In one scene (the same singing scene in the pub) a huge taxi driver with a dangerous-looking eyepatch sings one of the lines in a high falsetto! Unexpected, and the kind of thing cartoons would do so well for decades. You can definitely see the influence the Fleischers had on Moreno; his characters are more exaggerated, move more almost to music, swaying, seeming to dance most of the time as opposed to Disney's often more realistic movement, and the proportions are pretty exaggerated too. Nevertheless it's a good cartoon with a clever idea and it's a pity it didn't catch on.



Len Lye (1901-1980)

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

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

Paul Grimault (1905-1994)

What appears to have been the first proper colour animation to come out of France, other than Mme Indelli's effort, which I was unable to track down and so can't critique, comes from Paul Grimault, with the imaginative Les Passengers de la Grand Ourse (1941) and seems to feature the rather fantastical idea of a ship being lifted up by a great many balloons in order to fly. The book I'm reading describes Grimault's use of colour as "sobre" and I think I would have to agree. It's mostly shades of almost sepia, with blacks and whites, but it's not monochrome: it is definitely colour, but almost washed-out colour, not as vibrant as the likes of Disney or Flesicher. The cartoon also works with the idea of the sidekick started by Fleischer, and interestingly both uses a child as the main protagonist (something which I don't think had been done before, though I could be wrong as I'm a little cartooned out, researchwise) and gives him an animal, a pet dog, as his sidekick. Oh no wait: there's yer man, isn't there? Billy Bumps? Well, first in Europe then. The dog becomes more than a pet, becomes a trusted companion and one that will both get into trouble and help get its master out of trouble, something that would develop into a running theme in many cartoons. In one scene (again, I believe this is the first time but don't drag me to court if I'm wrong – I have no money anyway) Grimault seems also to invent what we would come to see as a typical cartoon trope, though it's probably taken from real-life comedy movies, where two people back away until they bump into each other, turn around and realise they have met up. The dog here, too, certainly looks like an early base for later, better-known cartoons dogs such as Droopy, Snoopy and even to an extent everyone's favourite ghost-chasing hound, Scooby-Doo.

Actually, it's not quite balloons that help the Grand Ourse (Great Bear) to fly; it's more a kind of an almost gyroscopic arrangement. The balloons turn clockwise around their centre, small ones on the outside and one huge one in the middle. Quite clever; almost presaging the helicopter/autogyro idea. I have no idea what the crewman they meet is meant to be though: he's long and sort of flexible with a wide midsection and almost stick-thin legs and arms, wide bulbous feet, Mickey Mouse-style white gloves and a clown's face, with what appear to be headphones or earmuffs on his head. Something that perhaps Disney based the Cards on in Alice in Wonderland some time later, perhaps? He also never opens his eyes, so you don't see them, just his closed lashes, making him look either sleepy or benign, even when he chases the pair.

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

[Trollheart]

Anthony Gross (1905-1984)

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

There's clever usage of the location. As it's a power plant they're close to (hence all the wires and transformers) when one of the girls' shoes flies off and a boy finds it, the word on the door he opens to discover the shoe, and then set off after the girls to return it, is DANGER. While this obviously is meant to warn of high voltage, you have to wonder if there wasn't a double meaning for the girls: danger in meeting boys? The two girls – though depicted as quite adult, maybe in their late teens or even early twenties – seem the spirit of innocence and carefree fun, dancing with each other as if they have not a care in the world, and as noted, there is no reference to any sexual undertone: no flash of knickers, no stocking tops, nothing titillating at all. So are these two girls, the soul of purity, about to be corrupted by the rough male presence entering their little world? They, of course, run off, thinking he is after them when all he wants to do is return the shoe, and there follow some very intricate and clever (and quite beautiful) sequences involving butterflies, wind and flowers. There's also great use of perspective here, where at one point the girls seem to have shrunk to the size of a bee, yet we see as they come closer it's just that they are, or were, far away.

You also have to wonder if famous British animator Gerald Scarfe (remember his work on Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" video?) got some of his inspiration from Gross? Certainly, the way the boy walks is very reminiscent of the way the hammers walk in that video. Further on in the video, the girls strip off to take a dip in a pool, but again, there's more suggested than shown; very little in the way of actual nudity and more a basic idea of shape. In the typical disregard for logic and physics that would soon become endemic to cartoons, the boy simply rides his bike across the river to go in pursuit of the now once again clothed girls, who very cleverly use their billowing skirts to make them look like flowers, and so escape his attentions for the moment.

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

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

Berthold Bartosch (1893-1968)

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

Failing health would dog Bartosch after the end of World War II, in which his native country would all but disappear, and though he worked on an anti-war film/poem just prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the film was all but destroyed in the war, and he leaves us with these words of wisdom: "It must be simple. It is difficult to be simple, but it is necessary."

Alexandre Alexieff (1901-1982)

Originally of Russian descent, Alexieff moved to Paris in 1921 where he met his future wife, Claire Parker, and invented the idea of the pinscreen, creating his first animated movie, Une nuit sur la mont chauve (1932), based on the same Mussorgsky classical piece Disney would use to end his 1940 Fantasia, "A night on Bald Mountain". It's another affair of light and dark (though that actually suits the subject matter in this case) and you can see the almost primitive morphing effects the use of the pinscreen allowed Alexieff to achieve. It's impressive, but you can't help but notice the massive gulf between what was happening in Europe and over in the US. I mean, at this point Disney had already completed Oswald's adventures and moved on to Mickey Mouse, and each of these (even Oswald) are vastly superior to the majority of the work I've seen so far from Europe, which had a long way to go to catch up.

Disappointed at the amount of films he was told he would have to produce in order to make a proper living at animation, Alexieff and his wife decided to go into advertising instead, and produced some apparently very good animations there, but sadly again I can't find any examples. During the war, the couple fled to America, returning to Paris at its end, however they don't seem to come back into the animation story again until the fifties, and as I'm currently limiting this timeline to 1948 or thereabouts, I'll leave them here for now. I may come back to them later.

[Trollheart]

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

Even so, there's always room for an entrepreneur, and one man to recognise early the potential of cinema advertising was Julius Pinschewer, who made a point of copyrighting the animations he did for cinemas. If your animation was used in an advert then you were sure to get financed by the company that was using it, and at one time or another nearly every important German animator worked for or with Pinschewer, who left Germany in 1933, just before the storm broke.

Another who would avoid the horrors of Nazi Germany by taking American patronage was Oskar Fischinger. He invented a machine called a wax slicer, allowing him to film through cross-sections of moulded wax and clay, and it was this that was used in Reiniger's movie. But Fischinger had talents that went beyond the building of machines for animation purposes, and his most famous work is 1938's An Optical Poem, in which he suspended hundreds of tiny pieces of coloured paper on invisible wires, filmed them in stop motion and synchronised them to the tune of Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody. The whole thing ran for just over seven minutes, an exercise in abstract animation.

Much of the other work Fischinger concentrated on was commercials, including this one for a cigarette company called Muratti Greft Ein before he was courted by Hollywood and ended up working (though not getting credit for) with Disney on both Snow White and Pinocchio.

Walter Ruttman, an early inspiration to Fischinger, and to whom he licenced his wax slicer, also worked in abstract art, utilising sound and colour and, like his protege, synchronising his animation to music, as in one of his Opuses, shown below. However he is best remembered for his collaboration with Leni Riefenstahl on the Nazi propaganda film "Triumph des Willens" (Triumph of the Will), still accepted as one of the best documentaries ever made, even if its central message was abhorrent.

Hungarian-born George Pal actually came from his native country to work in Germany, having set up a company to produce advertising films, and he became quite famous there until the Nazis came to power and he became another forced to flee Germany. He would later work on such seminal science-fiction films as The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, making his name in the USA as a producer. Before that though, in 1940  he became famous for the Puppetoons series, which featured, oddly enough, puppets. In fact, he won an honorary Oscar in 1943.

Other German animators working prior to the outbreak of the war included Alexander Gumitsch, who used clay figures in a time long before what became known as claymation, and Alexander von Gontscharoff-Mussalewsky, who used plastic figures, but unfortunately his animations tended to contain racial stereotypes, such as "a stupid negro"; Richard Groschopp, whose short "Die Wundersamen Abenteur des kleinen Mutz (A Boy's rocket flight to Planet X)" won the runner-up prize at the Interntational Amateur Film Festival in London in 1935, and the follow-up to which was included on a Nazi propaganda film, earning it much more acclaim and widespread distribution.

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

The search for the German answer to Mickey Mouse: Elves, bunnies and frogs, oh my!

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

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

Deutche Zeichenfilm GmbH (The German Animation Company), set up by Hitler and Goebbels in 1941, found its base changing as the Allies continually bombed Germany, eventually situating itself right beside Dachau. Art Director at the time, Gerhard Fieber, would later recall "During the working hours you were busy with trickfilm figures, at the same time you could see prisoners on the street who were harnessed in front of wagons as replacements for horses. Nevertheless you had to draw funny figures – it was awful." I'm sure it was; makes you wonder why he chose to relocate to that particular area. Despite the studio being unsuccessful, Goebbels directed DZG to create a ten-minute animation called "Hochzeit im korallenmeer (Wedding in the Coral Sea)" which was actually produced in Prague, and here again we have a problem: as Nazi Germany was occupying most of Europe from 1940 to 1944, any Nazi animation really has to be credited, as it were, to them. I don't really see any other way to do it, as I doubt, for instance, Czech animators today would wish to be associated with a Nazi-made film, though I may be wrong. I'm erring on the side of caution, anyway, and lumping them all together, as the book title I mentioned earlier says, under the Swastika.

One of the most famous Nazi animations is "Der Schneeman (The Snowman)" – no, not that one, obviously! Created in 1944 by Hans Fischerkoesen, it does actually somewhat follow the general storyline of the later and more famous Raymond Briggs' cartoon, with a snowman yearning to see summer but finding it makes him melt. Uncharacteristically for a Nazi cartoon, it is quite light-hearted and really contains no overt political or propagandist messages, nor did his next, "Verwitterte melodie (The Dilapidated Melody)" which features a bee who finds a gramaphone in a field and uses his stinger as a stylus to play a record, very Disneylike and perhaps even foreshadowing the kind of thing Fred Hanna and Joseph Barbera would do twenty years later on The Flintstones. His third, and final animation however, "Das Dumme Ganslein (The Silly Goose)" is an out-and-out piece of propaganda and has very clear anti-semite tones.

An anti-Nazi, Heinz Tischmeyer worked with George Pal in Berlin before fleeing Germany in 1937 but unable to stay in Switzerland he was forced to return to the Fatherland, where he worked on "Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten (The Town Musicians of Bremen)", based on the Brothers Grimm fairytale, and "Von Baumelein, das andere Blatter gewollt (The Little Tree that wanted different leaves)" which shows again, anti-semite leanings, though considering his stance on the Nazis we can assume this was forced upon him. Later he was recruited to work at DZG.

(Note: normally, when I find a video is no longer working, I look for an alternative link and if I can't find one, delete the video blank. Here, I'm leaving this up, as I believe (rightly or wrongly) that the reason the video "violated YouTube's terms" is due to its being anti-semitic, and if so, it's correct that they deleted it, and I think that should be applauded.)

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


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

Van den vos reynarede though, by Egbert van Putten, takes as its yardstick the anti-semitic version of the tale written by Dutch-Belgian Robert van Genechten, and uses a rhinoceros name Joducus (an obvious reference to the character being a Jew) who tries to create a socialist republic and is chased away, along with his fellow rhinos, by the dashing Reynard. A totally skewed vision of socialism is presented, wherein the Nazi obssession with racial purity is espoused: Joducus declares that all animals may intermarry and there will be no pure race anymore. To be fair, compared to Hans Held's cartoon three years earlier, this shows a marked improvement. For a start, it's in colour, and the colours (though the one shown below has been restored from archive footage) seems quite vibrant. The sound is better (again, I accept this may have been repaired relatively recently) and the clever (though chillingly appropriate) scenes at the end, where the rhinos are drowned in the lake and their ghostly, winged spirits ascend to Heaven (although you would wonder, if they're degenerate Jews, why they're not going down to Hell?) as celestial music plays, may have been the first usage of this later common trope in animation.

Finally there's Vichy France (Occupied France, for those of you too young to know or too lazy or disinterested to look it up) which in 1944 somehow managed to make this Disney parody, using Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Popeye (?) and Donald Duck, to attack France in American bombers. From what I can make out of it, there's a family at the centre of it who welcome the liberation of France (I guess to the Vichy government they would be seen as traitors) and who are rather unlucky when a US bomb hits their house, killing them all. I must point out that whoever does the voice for Popeye sounds just like Krusty the Klown. Check it out!

[Trollheart]

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

Joaquin Xaudaro, who had in 1917 produced the first Spanish animation Jim Trot's Adventures, created Un drama en la costa in 1933 just prior to his death, having created the previous year SEDA, the Societe Espanola de Dibujos Animados, an art collective which was responsible for four animated films in all, one of which being the abovementioned. The year of Xaudaro's death also saw the release of K-Hito (born Ricardo Garcia Lopez)'s "El Rata Primera" while the next year he created Francisca la Mujer Fatal. The final film produced at SEDA was Francisco Lopez Rubio's Seranata, also in 1934. This, sadly, means that SEDA survived for a mere two years, and just as sadly, none of the animations mentioned above seem to have survived to this day.

The demise of Xaudro's dream however did not stop the rise of Spanish animation, and in 1935 Jose Martinez Romano and the caricature artist known only as Menda released Una de abono and the western short, Buffalo Full. Again, YouTube searches yield nothing. Puppets were then used in an animation directed by movie director Adolfo Aznar, for "Pipo y Pipa en busca de Colcin" (you guessed it: zero results!) followed by Feliciano Perez and Arturo Beringola's El intrepido Raul.

The Edad Dorada

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

The Reverse Disney Principle

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

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

That same year though, Arturo Moreno got the chance to make Spain's first full-length animated feature movie, thanks to an offer from animation studio Balet y Blay, and Garbancito de la Mancha would also be the first Spanish cartoon to be produced in colour. Amazingly, there actually is a clip of this, though it literally is a clip, just over a minute long. It shows promise, certainly better than some of the German animation we recently looked at, but it's hard to form an opinion on such a short excerpt. Still, it does look as if Spanish animation was in decent shape at this time.

His next project (spoken of in "A History of World Animation" as, I quote, "boring") was another feature-length effort, and again rather surprisingly I can find a small clip of it, which I've posted below. Reference to Max Fleischer's work and style has been made in the book regarding both movies, and I guess there are similarities. They are certainly more Fleishcher than Disney, anyway.

Los Suenos de Tay-Pi, produced by Franz Winterstein with the departure of Moreno for Venezuela, sounds a whole lot more interesting, with tuxedo-wearing monkeys and crying crocodiles, but this is where our luck runs out. It's also where the luck ran out for Balet y Blay, whose last film this turned out to be, and a total flop at that. Animators from the closed Chamartin studios produced Erase una vez, based on the Cinderella tale, and in contrast to the abovementioned it seems to have come in for some serious praise, though it was not a success when released, but again there is no video for it. Sadly, as the title translates to "once upon a time", there are plenty of hits, but nothing close to what I'm looking for.

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

[Trollheart]

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

Oh no wait, you can't, as it's been removed and there are not other links available. Well, I doubt you're missing much, from the short glance I took through it myself when it was still available.

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



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

He's seen envisioning the Union  Jack over all the world, and then robbing people's houses (I think; it's all in Italian obviously and a little hard to be sure) whereupon he reverts back to the Mister Hyde figure (perhaps showing his true colours? Kind of surprised the Hyde persona is not shown as a caricature of a Jew) and has to drink his "democracy" potion to again take the form of the statesman. Just as he's doing this though, an arm with a swastika on it grabs him, causing him to break the tube with the potion, and he is pursued by the Nazis in his Hyde form. He makes it to his little plane but is pursued by the Luftwaffe, which turns into a bombing raid on London, which is destroyed as the victorious Nazis fly off.

The brothers Cossio, Carlo and Vittorio, made some shorts in the thirties, including "La secchia rapita (The broken bucket)" and even a version of HG Wells's classic The Time Machine, which was released in 1937. However, as they were one of the few people experimenting with colour in Italy at the time, to say nothing of stereoscopy, the costs proved prohibitive and they abandoned their ventures. It's pretty primitive though, even if they deserve praise for trying to integrate colour into their work: most of their characters don't seem to move, or only one body part (usually the head) does at a time, and the animation itself is far from fluid, jumping all over the place where you can see clearly they used cutouts and just positioned them, filmed them, positioned them again and so on. Quite poor I feel, given the time period and the advances that were taking place half a world away.

Invited by painter Luigi Giobbe, who had made his own film in 1940, they made two more short films based on Neapolitan stories: Pulcinella e i briganti and Pulcinella et i temporale, but that seems to have been about it for the two brothers. And, indeed, Giobbe, who probably went back to painting. Ugo Siatta tried something with puppets (again with the puppets!) this time set in the Middle Ages, called Teste di legno, or Wooden Balls. Sorry. Heads. Wooden Heads.

Someone a little more eceletic was Luciano Emmer, who used frescoes and shots of a famous chapel. He created an animation called "Racconto di un affresco" (Story of a fresco) – apologies for the terrible video below: I don't know why it's shaking so badly but it's the only version I can find. Probably don't watch if you're prone to epileptic seizures, as it's very jumpy indeed.

There was also Antonio Rubino, and Nino Pagot, who like most other Italian artists and animators had to work on propaganda films in order to continue to be able to eat. Pagot created the largest animation establishment in Italy and invited his brother Toni to join him there. After the defeat and death of Mussolini, and the end of World War II, he went on to create a feature film, Lalla, picolla Lalla in 1946. Although there is only a tiny fragment of it available, it already looks far superior to anything I've seen come out of Italy, with a very Disney Alice in Wonderland/Mister Bug Goes to Town feel, at least the little I've seen. As for his other feature films, I fratelli dinamite was created by him and some other Italian animators who had just returned from a German POW camp, after Italy had switched sides in the war after 1943, and it concerns the fantasy adventures of three brothers, told in narration by their aunt to dinner guests. The animation is pretty first-class, though in fairness it was released in 1949, so by now animation had made great strides and would soon move to the new medium of television. Still, for struggling Italian animation this is right up there with the best. One of the scenes takes place in Hell – a bold move which I believe not even Disney had ... oh wait, Fantasia. Yeah, well, a move which no other animator other than Disney had attempted up to then – and it's quite well done, with children being taken from a sack by a Satan figure who is sort of a cross between a carnival barker and Santa, and zipped into various costumes of animals and other things, which then become animate.

The last major animation around this period (I realise we've stretched the timeline a lot here, but there really is not much Italian animation to fill up this section) was by Anton Gino Domeneghini, and entitled La  Rosa di Bagdad, another full-length feature whose storyline borrowed liberally from Snow White, as did the design of the characters, who bear rather too close a resemblance to Disney's dwarfs than Domeneghini would perhaps have preferred. Jesus! They even have a bald one with a big nose and beard who, with a droopy cap and the beard removed, would be identical to Dopey! Though this movie did well for him in the box office, it had taken over seven years to produce, and Domeneghini was an ad-man first and last, and he promptly gave up his efforts to be an animator, returning to the world of advertising.

Finally, although there is no surviving copy of it, some mention must be made of The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le Avventure di Pinocchio), as, had it been completed, it would also have beaten Snow White, but it takes as its subject matter another fairy tale that Walt Disney would make famous, the puppet who longs to be a real boy, Pinocchio. Production issues bedevilled the project, which had a budget (surely undreamed-of at the time) of one million (and that's Pounds, not Lira!) and it was abandoned. All I can offer you are some stills from its Wiki page, the only frames that survived this ill-fated attempt to be the first Italian feature-length animation. Of course, as you can see, it would not quite have taken that title from Uncle Walt, as it was quite clearly not made in colour. Well, not as we understand it, anyway.


The only other example of early Italian animation seems to have been based on the Three Musketeers, (for whatever reason it was called The Four Musketeers (I quattro moschettieri)though sadly, again, this has not survived or is at least not known to be available. Interesting though, as it was another puppet animation and apparently used over eight thousand actual puppets! Talk about pulling a lot of strings to get things done! Sorry...

[Trollheart]

Coming Out Of the Shadows: The Exceptional Exception to the Rule
Part II: Flight from Tyranny: Darkness Descends

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

In la belle France they were reunited with their patron and friend, Jean Renoir, and with him began to work on integrating music into animation, as technology now began to allow sound on film, and the first "talkies" began to appear, with silent movies more or less being sidelined and phased out by 1930. They made 12 movies during her enforced exile, mostly based on operas. Though the war, heading to a brutal and climatic end, was still raging in 1944, Lotte's mother was sick and she felt an obligation to be with her, to look after her, and so, despite the danger, she and Carl returned to Nazi Germany, where Hitler forced her to make propaganda films for his Reich. One such is Die goldene Gans (The Golden Goose).

All right, let's be brutally honest here: almost twenty years on from The Adventures of Prince Achmed and I don't see a huge improvement. Well, perhaps that's not entirely fair. Her figures are better defined, and she's using some other colours, but essentially it's still cut-out puppets against a flat background, isn't it? This in a time, not to labour the point too much but it must be said, when Disney and his counterparts were already making what could be termed almost photo-realistic movies with the fluidest of motions and full sound synchronisation. I guess you have to factor in that while America was leading the world in animation by now, Europe - including Britain - was really struggling to keep up, but even so, I have to say this is poor. Allowing for the fact that she was basically on the run, no doubt fearing for her life as the Nazi war machine rolled across western Europe, and, too, that she seems to have concentrated, for most of the war years, on music to accompany movies, maybe that's not so surprising. But really, two decades later and this is what we get?

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

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

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

After the war, Lotte and her husband moved to England, where in 1949 she made advertising films and worked for the film unit of the Post Office, and later formed her own animation company, Primrose Productions, which led to her producing a dozen animations for the BBC based on Grimm's Fairy Tales, though of course I can find no examples of them. Oh wait: here's one. Now just a moment here, senator! What's going on? This is dated 1931 (on the YouTube, not the actual animation) but shows Primrose Productions as the company. Yet if she only set up Primrose after 1949, how can this be made in 1931? Unless it's an older animation that she later released under her own studio?

On first glance, I'd say that guess is correct, as this is far more fluid and, well, modern, compared to her wartime and earlier efforts. Still black and white, but more striking with the contrast between the two (no boring browns or dull yellows here) the animation is sharper, more immediate than anything I've seen from her up to now. This is a long one, over 22 minutes, so I'll be damned if I'm going to watch it all, but just the first few minutes make me feel this has to have been, if not created long after '31, then redone for the almost-1950s. The horse is much better defined (compare this to the goose in the Nazi video), the signpost doesn't shake, the human figure looks more, well, untethered and real: in the other one, you could see she (or someone) was holding up cardboard cut-outs and making them move. Here, you can almost get the idea the figures move without any intervention from human hands, and I would call this the first real animation I've seen from her. It's still shadow puppets, sure, but they're a hell of a lot better than anything that has gone before.

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

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

Warning: May affect those with photo-sensitive epilepsy!

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

Actually, oddly it says "Germany 1935", but Wiki tells me Lotte and her husband fled in 1933, so I don't know what's going on there. I see, too, that the list of her work on Wiki confirms that Harlequin was made in 1931, so again, wrong, wrong, wrong Trollheart! Should be used to it by now. Outside of animation, Lotte Reiniger also illustrated books and worked with deaf children's societies, and when Carl died in 1963 she went into a period of withdrawal, but renewed interest in her work drew her back to Germany, and she later toured the USA, returning to making movies, the last of which I can find, The Rose and the Ring, was made in 1979, two years before her death.

This is another twenty-minute plus effort, so I don't intend to watch it all, but as it opens I see it's based on a story by William Makepeace Thackeray, and uses bright, warm, friendly colours like orange, peach and white, almost like looking at a piece of wallpaper, but in a good way. I also note that her figures this time are not black shadows, but colourful cut-outs, and as well as this, it's the first and only of hers I've found where the narration is in English. Whether that's her voice or not I don't know. Okay well perhaps I was a bit precipitous in saying the figures aren't black, because now they are, so maybe it's just the main one that is coloured? Good sense of humour in the story (I know it's not hers but still) particularly when the dog pees on the husband's leg! I will say the animation is far more fluid, no jerking or shaking this time, a real quantum leap for her, but then again, we're now talking being on the cusp of the 1980s, when realistic cartoons were already on the television and Pixar were waiting in the wings with the world's first completely computer animated movie, so she can still be seen as a quaint throwback to a simpler time.

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

[Trollheart]

And speaking of puppets...


Puppet Masters: Dancing to Their Own Tune

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

Glove puppets

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

Carnival or Body puppet

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

Human-arm puppet

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

Marionette, or String puppet

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

Rod puppet

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

Shadow puppet

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

Supermarionation

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

Ventriloquist's Dummy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let's do that now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or is she just someone's puppet? Sorry.

[Trollheart]

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


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

And now is that time.
Time to look into



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

Wan Laiming (1900-1997)

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

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

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

In 1932 Wan Dihuan decided that photography was a better and safer career for him, and left the studio, while the remaining brothers produced China's first animation with sound, The Camel's Dance (骆驼献舞) about which little is known, and no copy survives. In fact, it's becoming depressingly clear that though even very old western cartoons right back even the end of the nineteenth century can be found on YouTube, virtually nothing from China at least is available - I guess I'll find out about the rest of Asia as I go along - so for now here's a video someone helpfully made about the history of Chinese animation. Obviously, this goes further than we want to look right now, as we're only exploring the beginnings of the industry in the east, but it will give you an idea of what was happening over there at the time.

The Wans produced two cartoons based on tales, these being The Race of the Hare and the Tortoise and The Grasshopper and the Ant, and then in the 1930s patriotic films such as Wake Up (1931), Compatriot (1932) and The Price of Blood (1934), all to decry the Japanese attacks on Shanghai and Shenyang. Then from 1933 to 1937 they produced Cartoon Collection, some of which were again patriotic films, such as The Year of Chinese Goods, which encouraged viewers to buy Chinese products, while The New Wave and The Painful History of the Nation denounced imperial aggression.

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

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

And yay! Here it is!

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Trollheart]

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

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

Ōten Shimokawa (1892-1973)

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

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


Jun'ichi Kōuchi (1886-1970)

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

Seitarō Kitayama  (1888-1945)

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

Something of a patron of young artists, Kitayama would purchase art materials for promising new talent, host galleries and shows, and publish their work in catalogues. His first animation, Monkey and Crabs (猿蟹合戦), also came out in 1917, which seems to have been something of the age of discovery for Japanese animators. Working with other artists, Kitayama helped develop and propel the nascent industry, and built a studio in 1921. This, however, fell victim to a huge earthquake two years later, and Kitayama moved to Osaka, where he took a job as a cameraman, never more returning to animation.

Here's, against all odds, the video of that animation. Kind of odd, when you look at the translation, that the characters seem to use bullying and intimidation against first the seed ("Hurry up and grow, seed, or I'll destroy you with my pincer!") then the tree and then the fruit, threatening them each time. Talk about impatience! The monkey looks decidedly human, so I guess he just drew a human body and stuck a monkey head on top of it. It's really not that bad, considering what the likes of Felix was still doing nearly ten years after this. You have to give him credit too for realism, in that the crab, when chasing after the monkey, who has robbed the fruit out of their tree, runs sideways. Nice touch. Dark, too: the monkey kills the crab (unintentionally, I think) and his son vows revenge on his father's killer. How traditional eh?

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

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

[Trollheart]

Legacy Leaders: Those Who Carried On

Two major names stand out after the "big three" have walked off the stage, as it were, and they are

Ofuji Noboro (1900-1961)

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

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

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

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

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


Masaoko Kenzo (1898-1988)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there's others like

Seo Mitsuyo (1911-2010)

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

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

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

It's not too easy to make out the animation, as the film suffers from that sort of flickering effect that many of the old monochrome movies did, but even here you can see, though it's nothing on Disney or Fleishcer, this Japanese animation is streets ahead of the Chinese one. Of course, by now there's a gap of four years between the two, but still, the difference in quality is quite startling. I guess given the involvement of the Navy (and thus, the government) resources would not be as slim as perhaps was the case in the Wan brothers' effort. The audio quality is much better too, especially the music, which comes through clearly, whereas in the Chinese one it's very tinny and weak.

I will just add though that the Momotaro spoken of in the title is a figure from Japanese mythology, a hero god who was used extensively by the Japanese military during their propaganda for the war. I will also mention, again, that given this is now 1944, the disparity between the quality of, let's say American animation at this period and what the Japanese studios were doing was still very evident.

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

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

[Trollheart]

Part Two: The Golden Age of Animation

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

Giants of the Golden Age: Drawing the Future of Animation

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

Leon Schlesinger (1884 - 1949)

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

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

But before those characters could claim their place on the silver screen, and push Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck off, Warners had to have them created, and for this they hired Leon Schlesinger, initially to help promote their music, having just acquired Brunswick Records. Schlesinger hired two ex-Disney animators, Rudolph Ising and Hugh Harman, and their first production was the decidedly-racist-looking Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid.

Bosko obviously owes some of his look to Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit, on whom the two had worked for Disney, as previously featured, and also to Disney's Alice's Adventures as well as Fleishcher's Out of the Inkwell. Using a combination of live-action and animated drawing, Ising is shown bereft of ideas until he creates the character of Bosko, who then shows him what he can do. Look, this is 1929 so you would have to forgive them for what we would today decry as utterly abominable racism, but even so: the character talks in very much a black man's voice, calls Ising "boss" and is essentially put through his paces by his "massa". Not only that, he, Bosko, also imitates in a very unflattering manner a Chinese character. It's quite disturbing, but as I say, it was a different time.

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

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

Schlesinger was so impressed with Bosko that he hired the pair, and they went on to create the first ever cartoon for Warners, which would star Bosko (the original was never shown in cinemas) in his first adventure, Sinkin' in the Bathtub (1930). Longer than the original appearance of Bosko by a good three minutes, the short features more of the non-logic of cartoons, as the shower sprays water into the bathtub but the water level remains the same, and even the water which leaks out in drops over the side just vanishes. Nothing gets flooded. Bokso then starts playing the water as it comes out of the shower head in four straight lines, like a harp, then hops out of the tub, which itself begins to dance around with a toilet roll. No seriously. Other weird, cartoony things happen during the short, like Bosko redirecting the flow out the window and it becoming like a slide he can ride to the outside, his car sometimes driving and sometimes walking, and a goat who eats his flowers performing impossible contortions.

To presumably cater to the female audience members, Bosko is given a girlfriend, Honey, so strongly modelled on Minnie Mouse that Walt must have considered suing. I mean, she even has the big spotted ribbon in her hair! The animation follows the Disney model again when, unimpressed by Bosko's rendition of "Tip-toe Through the Tulips" she pours water into his horn (ooer!) and he starts blowing bubbles from it, the music soundtrack turning smoothly to "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles", which she seems to appreciate more. Honey then uses the bubbles to dance on and eventually float to the ground. I must say, it's surprising how that got by the censor, as she sways and gyrates and her knickers fall down to her ankles. I mean, there's nothing there, just black flesh, but still, for the thirties I would have thought quite suggestive. Still, Betty Boop was on the horizon, so I guess in terms of the new decade, maybe not so risque?

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

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

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

However, intentionally racist or not, it didn't matter, as mostly it was "white folks" who went to - or were allowed into - cinemas, and their needs and requirements must always be first and foremost attended to and catered to, so Bosko went on to great success, though he did undergo something of a revamp, perhaps oddly being made more clearly black, so you know, shrug. Warner would not reap the success of the character though, as after an argument over budget restrictions Ising and Harman quit and took the copyright to Bosko with them, moving to MGM Studios, where they produced the rest of their cartoons until being fired from there in 1938. Left with no characters and no animators, Schlesinger hired Earl Duvall, who created Buddy, the only character Schlesinger had for his now-vacant cartoon spots.

There's no question in my mind that this guy bears a startling resemblance to a certain donut-holding statue in Springfield, and Lard Lad must have been based on him. Buddy would take again the idea of a small boy and use it to flesh out the character, giving him the sort of adventures Bosko would have on "the other side", i.e., at MGM. Unfortunately, whether it was down to the animators or the scriptwriters (I don't know if the work was shared or if the cartoonists also wrote the cartoons, though I suspect the latter) the stories were dull and lifeless, nothing like Bosko's crazy, logic-defying world, and they did poorly. They were, after all, as Bosko had been, supposed to be merely vehicles to sell sheet music and phonograph recordings of the music in the Brunswick stable, so Buddy's cartoons concentrated more on the hard sell of the music and dispensed with the zany antics. As a result, he was never popular and though the second of the Looney Tunes characters, he is not remembered today and his last cartoon was screened in 1935, two years before Disney would change the game totally with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

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

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