Funtasmagoria: Trollheart's History of Animation

[Trollheart]

UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA

Of course, this is not just going to be the history of American animation, and while the USA was the forerunner and leader for a very long time in animation – both on film and later TV – there were others working in the field, and we will of course be examining their work. From Germany to Russia, Italy to France, and England to, well, Ireland, animators were slowly bringing their fevered dreams alive on the big screen - and not always to the good, as we will see when we get into the animation during World War II, where it will surprise nobody that cartoons began to be used as propaganda by both sides.

But for now, here's what was happening outside the borders of the US of A.
Timeline: 1917-1937

Argentina is not the sort of place you immediately think of when you think of animation, but believe it or not, that's where the recognised very first animated feature film is supposed to have originated. Lost to the mists of time now, sadly, it was called The Apostle (El Apostolo) and though you might think it from the title (as did I) it is not in fact a religious film chronicling the lives of Jesus's disciples in the Bible. Rather, it is a satirical film lampooning the President of Argentina, who ascends into Heaven (I'm not sure if he dies) and uses the thunderbolts there to cleanse Buenos Aires of its corruption. As a result, the entire city burns. It might be ironic to reflect that the only copy of this important and historic film was lost to a fire in the studios of Quirino Cristiani, who directed it, and who is seen as one of the original fathers of animation. Nothing survives of the film, but there was a documentary called Quirino Cristiani: The Mystery of the First Animated Movies, which attempted to recreate the film. All I can get of that though is this one-minute clip. It's interesting to note that Cristiani is hailed as one of “the men who foreran Disney”, which not only acknowledges Walt's position as the first true animator, but claims that Cristiani and his people were doing this almost a decade before Mickey Mouse came to the big screen. Amazingly, this feature film was over seventy minutes long, which, if it wasn't already accepted as being the first feature animation, would certainly give it the honour of being the longest.

Oh, I also found this:

Whether any irony was intended or not, Cristiani's next feature, released the following year, was titled Without a Trace (Sin Dejar Rostros). This too was a political film, based around the exploits of Baron von Luxburg, a German commander who tried to blame the Allies (known as the Entente) in World War One for the sinking of an Argentinian ship which he himself had arranged, and thereby draw Argentina into the First World War on the side of the Germans. Unfortunately for von Luxburg, there were survivors and they all clearly identified the attacker as a German ship.

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

Cristiani's only other major work was Peludópolis, another political satire, but events conspired against him, with the ousting of the President halfway through, the arrival of the Great Depression and the death of the former President, all resulting in his withdrawing the film from circulation. This, too, vanished in the fire that consumed the film laboratories, though I read now this did not happen until the fifties, which kind of negates the possibility of any irony in the title of his second movie. With the rise of Disney and the eventual domination of Mickey Mouse, Cristiani gave up animation and he died in 1984.

Although, as we'll see later, with Hitler in power the Nazi propaganda machine was not above using grossly caricatured cartoons to defame its enemies and promote its ideals, I can only find one animation that was created by a German prior to the rise of the Nazi party.

Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) was, in traditional German manner, a fairytale, though the subject of the animation looks to the Arabian Nights for its substance (unsurprising, given the name of the eponymous prince!) and was created by Lotte Reiniger. She was a pioneering animator whose work went on to be recognised even by Disney himself, who used her camera techniques to animate part of his famous Fantasia sequence, and indeed her influence extends even to today, with the Harry Potter franchise utilising her mode of animation.

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

It's kind of hard to get a feel for what's going on, given that you're basically looking at shadows, and the fact that the text is, of course, as you would expect, all in German doesn't help either. There's no speech, just music as a background, though I do note one figure (a genie perhaps, as Aladdin is mentioned?) does manage to look quite scary, so that's quite a feat in and of itself. Nevertheless, I find myself unwilling to sit through the whole thing, but you can if you want, as I have dropped the video in here. You can also read the full story, including the plot, here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Prince_Achmed
Note: Lasso Media, who own the copyright, removed the original video so this is I think a programme showing how the movie was made. Best I can do I'm afraid. Seriously, who worries about a copyright almost a hundred years old???

Although Wiki has this under the Nazi banner – presumably because they were in power when it was created – I can find hardly any information about it, never mind anything to suggest it was part of Nazi propaganda, so I'm keeping it under the general German flag, and not under the Swastika, as I will be categorising later actual Nazi propaganda films. This 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.

Based on Goethe's tales of the cunning fox, Le Roman de Renard (The Tale of the Fox) was French animator Ladislas Starevich's first full-length animated feature, and though completely unknown outside of France at the time, beat Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the spot of first full-length animated film by eight months. Unlike Snow White though, Renard made use of puppet animation, and unlike our German friend, Starevich's tale is played for laughs, with the ever-cunning Renard convincing the hangman to loosen his rope, right at the opening of the cartoon, as it is, quote, too tight. The animation is really quite spectacular, even if it is puppets and not drawings. Take a look.

Luckily, this one has English subtitles, so the wit of the fox is not lost on us non-Francophiles. I have to admit though, I find myself wondering if this is somehow retouched or redone in some way, as it seems years ahead of its time. Decades, even. If this is typical of what the French were putting out in 1926, how did they not become a force in animation much earlier? Just staggering, and shows that the Americans weren't the only ones who could bring a story to life on a screen. Amazing.

 

[Trollheart]

Yeah, sorry: my brain just returned from the cleaners, and now I can think straight. Idiot. Of course that wasn't the original: look at the quality of the animation. Nobody, not even Disney, was doing that so early. That's obviously a remake. I can only get a few small clips of the original, but guess what? It's in black and white. I really must remember to ring that guy about buying the Brooklyn Bridge: sounded like a good deal!

(At least watching the “new” version does, as I say, allow you to follow the story if you don't speak French). The film was completed in 1930 but problems adding a sound track led to its release being delayed till 1937, but still pre-empting Disney's full-length film.

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.

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.

Although there is no surviving copy of The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le Avventure di Pinocchio), because it was never completed, it deserves a mention not only because it would also have beaten Snow White had it been released, 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.

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[I quattro moschettieri[/i])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]

UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA (Part II)
Timeline: Approx 1930 - 1948

So what was happening while Walt Disney, Max Fleischer and their contemporaries in the USA were working their magic? Well, quite a little actually. 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, 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 Birth 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. Or not.

 

[Trollheart]

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 use 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. 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 opinion, 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.

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, 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 Austia-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]

For my initial look at the animation from Germany I want to try to break the article up into two sections: the first will be actual German animation while the second will be Nazi propaganda and films and shorts produced under the Hitler regime. While these are of course also German, I believe the dividing line needs to be made, as many of the animators and directors (not all, but many) were forced to bow down to the Nazi party and work for their glory only, resulting 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.

From the early days, on really into the Second World War, the only avenue open to any German animator was to make shorts for advertising, or experimental ones which would struggle to find both funding and an audience. The very first animated film produced in Germany however appeared before the man who would try to conquer the world had even enlisted in the German Army to fight World War One. Friedrich Konrad Guido Seeber created this clever little stop-motion three-minute film in 1910 with just matches, and though it seems a little simple today, it was probably ground-breaking back then. I mean, we're talking over a hundred years ago now.

He came to the notice of Paul Wegener, who in 1915 spoke of the kind of advances in animated film techniques that Walt Disney would pioneer more than twenty years later. In a lecture in Berlin he said “I think that film as art should be based – as in the case of music – on tones, on rhythm. In these changeable planes, events unroll which are partly identified with natural pattern, yet partly beyond real lines and forms.” It would be another twenty-five years before a young American would put this into practice with his innovative Fantasia, and Wegener's vision would be seen to be correct. Amazingly enough, a young Lotte Reiniger was in the audience, and Wegener's speech had a powerful effect upon her, as we shall see.

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.

We've already spoken of Lotte Reiniger and her Prinzen Achmed, and she was indeed believed to be one of the prime movers in German animation, but even the format she used for that movie was largely thanks to another man, who would avoid the horrors of Nazi Germany by taking American patronage. 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 Oskar 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.

 

[Trollheart]

Lotte Reiniger

Perhaps Germany's greatest animator, we have already come across Reiniger as she produced the first feature-length animated film almost ten years before Disney's game-changer, but she also created a lot of shorter animations. Her first real effort was in 1918, when she animated wooden rats for the film "Der Rattenfänger von Hameln" (The Pied Piper of Hamelin) which brought her to the attention of, and obtained for her enrolment in, the Institute for Cultural Research, where she would meet artists such as Bertolt Brecht and Berthold Bartosch, already mentioned, and the man she would marry and work with, Carl Koch. She quickly began to make herself known in the world of animation, her first proper film, "Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens" (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart) actually selling out in the USA in 1919, and found herself working with the previously-mentioned Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttman, who with some others became the heart of German animators.

When she was approached to film Prinzen Achmed she faced stiff opposition: up till then, animation were basically cartoons, meant to make people laugh, and short usually too. This would be an entirely different proposition, and everyone she approached in her country turned away horrified from the very idea, damning the project to failure before it had even started. But once she secured financing and the film premiered in Paris, it became a huge hit, and is now considered one of the most important of the early animated films, a true triumph. Reiniger also pioneered the very first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera, or its ancestor at any rate, and she went on to make many animated features, including "Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere"(Doctor Dolittle*and his Animals), 1928.

Like her contemporary, Fischinger, Reiniger found the situation in Germany as the Nazis rose to power too untenable, and she fled the country, but unlike him she was unable to go to America, not having been invited there, and in fact no country would give her and her husband permanent sanctuary, necessitating their moving from country to country as temporary visas ran out, over a period of more than ten years, which in fact led up almost to the end of World War II, but for a year or more she had to work under Hitler's rule and make propaganda films for his party. Eventually she would make it to London, but not for another five years.

Meanwhile, 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 International 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.

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: A History of Trickfilm in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 by Rolf Giesen and J.P. Storm but not even referred to in my main reference for this journal, Animation: A World History by Giannalberto Bendazzi , 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. (Could there be sharper irony than to have a place dedicated to what is ostensibly fun sitting side by side with a death factory of human misery and extermination?) 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. Probably had little choice as the war wore on.

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.

 

[Trollheart]

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.

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.

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 obsession 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 the 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 Animation: A World History 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 Fleischer 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]

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.

 

[pogopossum]

I spend too much time at the computer.
Your wealth of information and detail is such that I will be looking at it for some time.
Giving thumbs up is almost arbitrary as all of he above posts deserve it or more.
Thank you. The rest of my life does not necessarily do so, but I will now get back to it.
But again, a heart felt thank you.

 

[Trollheart]

Thanks pogo. It's great to know someone is reading and enjoying what I write. Wait till you see my history of the Second World War! Working on that at the moment...

 

[Trollheart]

Stars and Strips Forever: Early American Animation

We’ve already noted, as most people know anyway, that many of the characters we have come to know and love began their lives in newspaper cartoon strips - Popeye, Berry Boop, Felix etc. Not all of course but some, and many of the men who would go on to become the biggest names in film animation began their careers working for newspapers as cartoonists. Here I want to look at some of the early pioneers of the art working in America at the time.

Raoul Barré (1874-1932)

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

One of his first animations was The Animated Grouch Chasers (1915) which mixes live action with cartoons as a woman reads a book (the aforementioned Grouch Chasers) and the characters comes to life as she reads. You can see from this the first tropes of animation being laid down, even long before Disney. Speech balloons are used - in conjunction with the display cards utilised by silent movies - and when the sailor sneezes, dotted lines indicate the action, then when the elephant (bearing more than a passing resemblance to Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur!) cries, the stylised tears drop from its eyes.

In the second cartoon, the illusion of flight is handled pretty well when the small child goes up with the kite (note a very distressingly monkeylike black kid on the ground - well, this was 1915 I guess!) and when a crow annoys him, the motion of its wings is impressive, as is the shower of feathers when the kid kicks out at the bird. Again very racist when the black kid watches the crow falling, licks his lips and says “Here comes ma dinner!” Jim Crow, huh?

In 1916, Barré, with his partner Charles Bowers, successfully animated the comic strip Mutt and Jeff and went on to licence the series, producing over 300 episodes. The animation in this is far superior, only a year on. It’s quite remarkable. Whether Barré had only perfected his system after 1915 or not I don’t know, but the difference is amazing. Again, before Disney, cartoons are using those alliterative titles, the video shown below called Domestic Difficulties. Mutt’s progress down the drainpipe as he escapes from the house - though clearly the same scene drawn several times, as he’s on the fourth floor - is fluid and graceful, without a jerk or a blip to be seen. The motion too of the entire scene, which spins when they’re drunk, is effective. More effects, presumably taken from the cartoon strip, where musical notes coming out of their mouths indicate singing, and when Mutt falls down stars jump out from his backside to show the impact. Then there’s a bump that rises on Jeff’s head when Mutt’s wife hits him with the rolling pin.

However when Bowers unexpectedly quit Barré, always a sensitive artist, and feeling let down and betrayed, had a nervous breakdown and left the business. His only further contribution was to animate Felix the Cat in 1929. He died three years later.

John Randolph Bray (1878-1978)

It wouldn’t be fair or accurate to say Bray turned animation into a profit-making business, but he certainly was one of the first who, having set up his own studio, retired from the actual process of animation and took on cartoonists to do the job for him. Focused heavily on making money and making the studio pay for itself, he hooked up with Charles Pathe (who would soon come to be a household name as Pathe News reported all the latest from the front during the wars) to create advertising and later promotional films for World War I. His first animation, 1917’s The Artist’s Dream, echoes that of other animators in America and elsewhere, such as Roy Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series and Disney’s later Alice adventures, where a drawing on a board takes on a life of its own and causes havoc.

This time it’s a dog (a dachshund) which hears the derogatory remarks of an editor to his artist and determines to prove him wrong. The dog spies sausages atop a cupboard (using, again, the dotted lines to indicate sight and indeed drops from the mouth to represent salivating) and opening the drawers of the cupboard it uses them as steps to reach the sausages. When the artist comes back the dog quickly jumps into a corner, lying down and pretending to sleep. Bray sees the empty sausage dish, can’t understand it, probably concludes he forgot to draw them and does so again; after his departure the dog robs them again. Eventually the dog gets so fat that he bursts, and the whole thing is shown to be a dream the artist was having.

The interesting thing about this cartoon is that Bray experimented with printing the background scenes instead of hand-drawing them each time, which obviously cut the time needed to create the cartoon and led to greater efficiency in the industry and thus made it more cost-effective. His studios operated on the basis of competition, commission and the need for constant production, keeping them at the forefront of the industry. He registered three important patents: the printing of background scenes, the usage of grey shading in drawings and the use of scenery printed on transparent celluloid to be applied over the drawings to be animated. These patents allowed him to establish a monopoly over other companies, and when Earl Hurd filed for a similar, but better, patent for what became known as cel - a process whereby the actual characters were drawn directly onto transparent celluloid and then applied over painted background scenes - he partnered up with him in the Bray-Hurd Patent Co.

Bray’s two main characters were the jingoistic Colonel Heeza Liar (something of a play on the rather exaggerated claims of Baron Munchausen) who sometimes lampooned President Theodore Roosevelt, and Bobby Bumps, one of the first characters in American animation to have a sidekick, a dog, something many other animators would copy, like Grimault in Les Passengers de la Grand L’Ourse.

The Colonel would get into many scrapes, and in the 1915 version above, Colonel Heeza Liar at the Bat, you can see maybe not the first, but the first instance I’ve seen of the usage of a question mark above the head to indicate puzzlement or an inquiry. A side-note of interest: using those cards again, this is the first time I’ve seen the words rhyme, like a little poem, to add perhaps a sense of fun to the cartoon. Again, in the typical trend of ignoring the laws of physics cartoons would embrace, the Colonel jumps over a wall at least three times his height with no visible assistance whatever, simply more or less runs up and over it. It’s also the first time, I think, I’ve seen a cartoon character break the fourth wall, as the Colonel turns and laughs and winks at the camera, as it were, so that he’s sharing the joke with us.

I must say, the Colonel bears more than a passing resemblance to later Mr. Magoo. Here, too, the beginnings of those “fight-clouds”, where arms and legs and various body parts whirl around while puffs of smoke and stars etc fly out of the middle. In contrast to the Colonel Heeza Liar cartoons, Hurd’s Bobby Bumps starts out being drawn by the animator’s hand, the artist giving instructions to the boy, such as “hat off” so he can colour in his hair, and the boy talking back to the animator, reminding him that he has forgotten to draw the dog’s tail. He’s a sort of a Billy Bunter figure, rotund and cheery, with a strangely Asian looking face. Hmm. This could very well be the first usage of this (and I have to keep qualifying these guesses, as I’m not exactly looking through every animation of the period to see if I’m right, but in terms of what I’ve seen so far I appear to be correct) but I see the thought balloon appear above Bobby’s head and in it a winged bag of money takes flight. This would be used more and more, not only in thought bubbles but in reality, to signify the loss of something as cartoons progressed.

 

[Trollheart]

The action of the chef is quite impressive, as he tosses eggs up, around, down his back, along his arms. Chef looks a bit devilish though if you ask me. Good humour in the cartoon too, as a customer asks for a piece of raisin pie, pointing, and the server grins that ain’t raisin, it’s custard, hits the pie and all the flies spiral up into the air from where they were resting on it. The customer appropriately falls over in horror. Hurd, it seems, either learned from Bray or just did the same thing, but the dog here winks at the camera too, letting us in on the joke as he eats the eggs Bobby has been cooking. Clever, too, when the dog meets a cat who calls him a cur, and he says “I’m gonna make her eat those words,” and promptly takes the speech balloon, folds it up and forces it down the cat’s throat! The artist, though, has had enough and pulls the dog away, another form of fourth wall destruction.

The plates, as Bobby staggers around with a tall stack of them, wobble and weave and wave as he walks, and when he’s trying to escape from the vengeful chef after breaking the plates, Bobby is helped by the artist, who draws a ladder he can run up, and then rubs out the bottom half so that the chef can’t also use it. He then hands Bobby a bottle of ink which he pours over the chef, blotting him out completely.

Henry “Hy” Mayer (1868-1953)

A German who came to the US and took up animation around 1913. He specialised in “lightning sketches”, of which I can find no examples so can only assume they concerned cartoons where the artist quickly drew the subject live, as it were. He also created the series Such is Life, released between 1920 and 1926, a series which mixed live action in exotic locations with animation - there was Such is Life in Italy, Such is Life at the Zoo etc, but again, no examples available. Ah well, I have to say it, don’t I? Such is life! Mayer also found fame in being the man to discover Otto Messner, who would, as we will see shortly, go on to claim to be the creator of a certain somewhat popular black-and-white cartoon cat.

This is the only video I could find of his work, and shows not only what a great and talented artist he was, but how he could make a simple thing like a triangle into so many different objects and people. Stunning.

Willis O’Brien (1886-1962)

A world innovator and inventor in the field of what would become known as claymation, O’Brien discovered how to manipulate clay figures and later used India rubber, which allowed him to insert a metal skeleton for his figures, making them more flexible and posable. His first feature was The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy released in 1916. The movie so impressed Edison that he invited O’Brien to come to New York to work for him. It’s not at all surprising that he was blown away. When you look at the movie, for a moment it seems like these are real people they’re so lifelike. No Morphs here! The humour in the piece is engaging: “Won’t you come into the dining room? I should offer you tea, but tea has not yet been discovered.” Nice.

There’s quite a matriarchal feel to the story too: the girl tells the Duke and his friends if they want to eat they’ll have to go out and hunt. I like the idea of the juxtaposition of a class system that has no place in the Stone Age at all - the Duke, his lady, and the manners of an eighteenth century noble family all contrasts wonderfully with the bleak, sparse setting and the rudimentary clothing. I don’t know how long it took to animate this, but it’s pretty flawless in terms of movement. There’s no jerking, no sudden cuts, everything runs smoothly and it’s almost a prehistoric Ray Harryhausen kind of thing. Well, okay: there are a few jumps, like when Wild Willie - the “Missing Link” in the title - attacks and tries to bronco-ride a dinosaur, but they’re few and far between.

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

Back to the Max (Flesicher, that is)

I know we dealt with Fleischer in two other entries, most notably the creation or at least adaptation for the screen of Betty Boop and Popeye, but it seems there's more to the guy (and his brother) than I went into originally, so perhaps a deeper look is required. Yes. Yes it is. And here it is.

Now, I’m not saying this was at all the reason for their famous rivalry, but Max and his brother were Jews and Walt was, well, not. Could be food for thought. Or not. At any rate, Max invented the rotoscope in 1915, a device which allowed a live-action sequence to be transmitted to drawings frame by frame, and so impressed John Randolph Bray that he took he and his brother Dave on in 1917. That same year Max invented the series Out of the Inkwell, which would feature Koko the clown emerging from an inkwell at the start of every episode, and playing tricks on him. This followed the basic standard of the time: cartoons were either initiated by someone reading a story and the characters coming alive, or by someone drawing them and they achieving their own life. We’ve seen this with Bray himself, and with Earl Hurd. Disney would later do the same, as would other animators. It would be some time before there would cease to be a need, or excuse, or reason for the cartoon character to be there, when, to paraphrase the band Anathema, they would just be there because they were there.

In 1921 the two Fleischers left Bray and established their own studio, which would rival Disney’s and be the second greatest in the world until close to the end of the Second World War, breeding, as we have already seen, such timeless favourites as Popeye, Betty Boop and Superman. Eventually Max was bought out by Paramount, and while obviously there had been friction between the brothers and the megacorporation, it seems a little unfair that the eventual reason Paramount gave for demanding Max’s resignation was the failure of his last movie, Mr. Bug Goes To Town, which only had to be pulled due to the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, two days after the film had been previewed. Max worked for other animators but spent much of his latter years, in poor health, battling to regain copyright of his work. He died at age 89 on September 25 1972, recognised posthumously as “the dean of animated cartoons”.

 

[Trollheart]

Cat Burglar?

Before we move on, it's time for me to redress the error I made in the article on Felix the Cat a few pages back. I should have read more, but there you go. I noted in that entry that it’s generally accepted that Pat Sullivan was the creator of the feisty feline, but that’s only partway true. Up until the 1960s it was accepted, but after Sullivan’s death in 1933 when his estate took the copyright which Sullivan, as head of the studio had claimed, questions began to emerge as it was an animator called Otto Messmer who had originally drawn Felix, though whether he created the character or not, well the jury is still out on that. Messmer was a very quiet and unassuming man, a total contrast to Sullivan’s brash, bullying entrepreneurial spirit, not a man to cross. So at least while his boss was alive Messmer made nothing of the fact that “his” creation bore Sullivan’s name as a credit, and indeed Sullivan told many, sometimes conflicting, stories of the inspiration for the cat. Messmer, on the other hand, seems to have the weight of opinion on his side, at least in terms of fellow animators.

For Sullivan, the Case for the Defence:

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

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

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

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

For Messner, the Case for the Prosecution:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I doubt the crazy little black-and-white cat would care who created him, and he's outlived both of them.

 

[Trollheart]

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

Over the English Channel, the film craze had already been underway of course, with Reynauld and the Lumiere brothers, but nobody had really made the leap into true animation. It was in fact another Frenchman, decoding the ideas and methods of an Englishman, who would perhaps unlock the door that led to one of the world’s first true animated films.

Émile Cohl (1857-1938)
Cohl was intrigued by the process used to animate the dinner things in James Blackton’s The Haunted Hotel, and set about working it out for himself. Once he had, he used that process to produce his own animated feature, which debuted in 1909. Fantasmagorie featured a clown who interacts with various other people and objects. The motion is fluid, and when a woman sits in front of him with a large hat with many feathers, blocking his view, he delights in taking the feathers from her hat one by one and disposing of them. But the film is very stream-of-consciousness, as figures become other figures, objects metamorphose and really there’s no real sense or logic to the thing, unlike just about every other animated feature prior to its creation. At one point, the animator (Cohl) seems to actually reach into the drawing and pick up the character.

This was totally different to anything that had gone before. Up to now, any animated feature, no matter how weird, had a strange sense of logic running through it. Paul’s car flew in The ? Motorist, yes, but it still followed some basic rules of logic, driving around the rings of Saturn, using the clouds as if they were hills. Despite the need to suspend disbelief, this and other animations still kept their feet, metaphorically speaking, rooted on the ground. Weird and unexpected things happen, yes, but you understand what is going on. In Fantasmagorie, as the title implies, everything is a fantasy and nothing is, or needs to be, explained.

This is perhaps the first template for the true cartoon, where things just happened, and no laws of physics applied. A wall could fall on a character, squashing him flat, but he would be up and running about in the next scene. People could fall from heights and leave with nothing more than perhaps concertinaed up legs (which would be straightened out next time) and characters could be shown dying, but still remain alive. In cartoons, everything would go, nothing would be too nonsensical or fantastic or unbelievable. Everything was possible, everything was doable, and there was no such word as can’t.

Three years later, Cohl animated The Newlyweds, a comic strip that had appeared in New York World , which I believe makes him the first to bring characters who had appeared in a newspaper strip to life, as it were, through the medium of animation. Only one example of this long-running series has survived time’s passage. You can see it below, but be warned: even restored, it’s still pretty poor quality.

It’s believed that later animator Winsor McCay took some influences and perhaps even paid homage to Cohl in his films, particularly Little Nemo, created a year later in 1910. Another ground-breaking film by Cohl introduced colour (I can’t confirm if this was the first time or not that colour was used in an animated film - other than coloured paper, which was of course in use long before this - but I haven’t read of any other instances of it) to allow him to animate coloured blank canvasses in the four-minute live-action film The Neo-Impressionistic Painter, where a prospective client is duped into thinking that blank slates are works of art, his imagination filling in the details which Cohl draws and animates.

 

[Trollheart]

George Méliès (1861-1938)

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

One of his earliest films used the effect of multiple exposure to allow him play seven characters at once in the 1900 short, One Man Band, while The Vanishing Lady, even earlier (1896) shows him making a woman disappear, come back as a skeleton and finally as herself. All of these effects of course are more trick film techniques, and perhaps are not, or should not be considered true animation, but it’s hard to discover where the line between effects and animations lies, and so I’ve made a sort of arbitrary decision to include examples of anyone who used any sort of effect in their work that either made the film more than it could be with normal camera work, or that mimicked or perhaps even later inspired animation techniques, such as Cohl’s The Haunted Hotel.

Méliès also seems to be the first (probably not the only but certainly the first) film maker I can see who made a satirical religious film, in his The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1898) in which a monk worshipping at the foot of the cross is plagued by women who appear out of nowhere and attempt to seduce him, one actually taking the place of Christ on the cross. Surely controversial for the time, and in Catholic France, surely very courageous.

Without question though, his most famous and enduring film is the aforementioned A Trip to the Moon (1902) which has been generally accepted as the world’s first science fiction film. I think everyone recognises the famous shot of the moon, a face looking none too pleased as the rocket carrying the space pioneers lands in its eye.

 

[Trollheart]

Puppet Masters

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

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 Dreams 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 IV)


Now before anyone (not looking at anyone in particular, Batty!) 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”.

I’ll probably go into this in more detail in another feature on Fleischer later - seems there’s quite a bit I missed out about him - but just looking at this cartoon it’s pretty incredible for the time. Fleischer begins by drawing a face, then each new shape is drawn, and then placed on top of the previous one by him, till a clown’s head begins to emerge, after which the clown draws the other pieces of his body towards him till he’s entire. After this he has a conversation with Fleishcer in which he mocks his drawing skill. This must surely mark the first time that a character talked back to its creator (even Gertie the Dinosaur just looked at Winsor McCay) and even argued with him, so very ground-breaking. This obviously tickled the Chinese, who began having a go themselves.

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 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 cane 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. In reference to his own movie, I realise I have seen this before, and remember now I mentioned it in a brief look at animation around the world at this period, though here we’re obviously going into that a lot deeper. I do recall though that I had some thoughts on the movie, so I’ll refrain from adding more here. The movie you can watch below.

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 a very large gap. 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.