Information Sheet 2.

1-6
(History of Animation)

Learning Objectives:
After reading this INFORMATION SHEET, YOU MUST be able to:
1. To know the History of Animation

The theory of the animated cartoon preceded the invention of the

cinema by half a century. Early experimenters, working to create
conversation pieces for Victorian parlours or new sensations for the
touring magic-lantern shows, which were a popular form of
entertainment, discovered the principle of persistence of vision. If
drawings of the stages of an action were shown in fast succession,
the human eye would perceive them as a continuous movement. One of
the first commercially successful devices, invented by the Belgian Joseph
Plateau in 1832, was the phenakistoscope, a spinning cardboard disk
that created the illusion of movement when viewed in a mirror. In
1834 William George Horner invented the zoetrope, a rotating drum lined
by a band of pictures that could be changed. The Frenchman Émile
Reynaud in 1876 adapted the principle into a form that could be
projected before a theatrical audience. Reynaud became not only
animation’s first entrepreneur but, with his gorgeously hand-painted
ribbons of celluloid conveyed by a system of mirrors to a theatre screen,
the first artist to give personality and warmth to his animated characters.
 With the invention of sprocket-driven film stock, animation was
poised for a great leap forward. Although “firsts” of any kind are never
easy to establish, the first film-based animator appears to be J. Stuart
Blackton, whose Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906 launched a
successful series of animated films for New York’s pioneering Vitagraph
Company. Later that year, Blackton also experimented with the stop-
motion technique—in which objects are photographed, then repositioned
and photographed again—for his short film Haunted Hotel.
 In France, Émile Cohl was developing a form of animation similar
to Blackton’s, though Cohl used relatively crude stick figures rather than
Blackton’s ambitious newspaper-style cartoons. Coinciding with the rise
in popularity of the Sunday comic sections of the new tabloid
newspapers, the nascent animation industry recruited the talents of
many of the best-known artists, including Rube Goldberg, Bud
Fisher(creator of Mutt and Jeff) and George Herriman (creator of Krazy
Kat), but most soon tired of the fatiguing animation process and left the
actual production work to others.
The one great exception among these early illustrators-turned-animators
was Winsor McCay, whose elegant, surreal Little Nemo in
Slumberland and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend remain pinnacles of comic-
strip art. McCay created a hand-coloured short film of Little Nemo for use
during his vaudeville act in 1911, but it was Gertie the Dinosaur, created
for McCay’s 1914 tour, that transformed the art. McCay’s superb
draftsmanship, fluid sense of movement, and great feeling for character
gave viewers an animated creature who seemed to have a personality, a
presence, and a life of her own. The first cartoon star had been born.

McCay made several other extraordinary films, including a re-

creation of The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), but it was left to Pat
Sullivan to extend McCay’s discoveries. An Australian-born cartoonist
who opened a studio in New York City, Sullivan recognized the great
talent of a young animator named Otto Messmer, one of whose casually
invented characters—a wily black cat named Felix—was made into the
star of a series of immensely popular one-reelers. Designed by Messmer
for maximum flexibility and facial expressiveness, the round-headed, big-
eyed Felix quickly became the standard model for cartoon characters: a
rubber ball on legs who required a minimum of effort to draw and could
be kept in constant motion
This lesson did not go unremarked by the young Walt Disney, then
working at his Laugh-O-gram Films studio in Kansas City, Missouri. His
first major character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was a straightforward
appropriation of Felix; when he lost the rights to the character in a
dispute with his distributor, Disney simply modified Oswald’s ears and
produced Mickey Mouse.
Far more revolutionary was Disney’s decision to create a cartoon with the
novelty of synchronized sound. Steamboat Willie (1928), Mickey’s third
film, took the country by storm. A missing element—sound—had been
added to animation, making the illusion of life that much more complete,
that much more magical. Later, Disney would add carefully synchronized
music (The Skeleton Dance, 1929), three-strip Technicolor(Flowers and
Trees, 1932), and the illusion of depth with his multiplane camera (The
Old Mill, 1937). With each step, Disney seemed to come closer to a
perfect naturalism, a painterly realism that suggested academic
paintings of the 19th century. Disney’s resident technical wizard was Ub
Iwerks, a childhood friend who followed Disney to Hollywood and was
instrumental in the creation of the multiplane camera and the
synchronization techniques that made the Mickey Mouse cartoons and
the Silly Symphonies series seem so robust and fully dimensional.

For Disney, the final step was, of course, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (1937). Although not the first animated feature, it was the first to
use up-to-the-minute techniques and the first to receive a wide,
Hollywood-style release. Instead of amusing his audience with talking
mice and singing cows, Disney was determined to give them as profound
a dramatic experience as the medium would allow; he reached into his
own troubled childhood to interpret this rich fable of parental
abandonment, sibling rivalry, and the onrush of adult passion.

With his increasing insistence on photographic realism in films such

as Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942),
Disney perversely seemed to be trying to put himself out of business by
imitating life too well. That was not the temptation followed by Disney’s
chief rivals in the 1930s, all of whom came to specialize in their own kind
of stylized mayhem.

Max and Dave Fleischer had become successful New York animators
while Disney was still living in Kansas City, Missouri. The Fleischers
invented the rotoscoping process, still in use today, in which a strip of
 live-action footage can be traced and redrawn as a cartoon. The
Fleischers exploited this technique in their pioneering series Out of the
Inkwell (1919–29). It was this series, with its lively interaction between
human and drawn figures, that Disney struggled to imitate with his early
Alice cartoons.
But if Disney was Mother Goose and Norman Rockwell, the Fleischers
(Max produced, Dave directed) were stride piano and red whiskey. Their
extremely urban, overcrowded, sexually suggestive, and frequently
nightmarish work—featuring the curvaceous torch singer Betty Boopand
her two oddly infantile colleagues, Bimbo the Dog and Koko the Clown—
charts a twisty route through the American subconscious of the 1920s
and ’30s, before collapsing into Disneyesque cuteness with the
features Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941; also
released as Hoppity Goes to Town). The studio’s mainstay remained the
relatively impersonal Popeye series, based on the comic strip created
by Elzie Segar. The spinach-loving sailor was introduced as a supporting
player in the Betty Boop cartoon Popeye the Sailor (1933) and quickly
ascended to stardom, surviving through 105 episodes until the 1942
short Baby Wants a Bottleship, when the Fleischer studio collapsed and
rights to the character passed to Famous Studios.

Less edgy than the Fleischers but every bit as anarchic were the animations
produced by the Warner Bros. cartoon studio, known to its residents as
“Termite Terrace.” The studio was founded by three Disney veterans, Rudolph
Ising, Hugh Harmon, and Friz Freleng, but didn’t discover its identity until Tex
Avery, fleeing the Walter Lantz studio at Universal, joined the team as a
director. Avery was young and irreverent, and he quickly recognized the talent
of staff artists such as Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Bob Cannon. Together
they brought a new kind of speed and snappiness to the Warners product,
beginning with Gold Diggers of ’49 (1936). With the addition of director Frank
Tashlin, musical director Carl W. Stalling, and voice interpreter Mel Blanc, the
team was in place to create a new kind of cartoon character: cynical,
wisecracking, and often violent, who, refined through a series of cartoons,
finally emerged as Bugs Bunny in Tex Avery’s A Wild Hare (1940). Other
characters, some invented and some reinterpreted, arrived, including Daffy
Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety and Sylvester, Pepe LePew, Foghorn Leghorn, Road
Runner, and Wile E. Coyote. Avery left Warner Brothersand in 1942 joined
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s moribund animation unit, where, if anything, his work
became even wilder in films such as Red Hot Riding Hood (1943) and Bad Luck
Blackie (1949).