Vintage Cinema presents
Animated Films
Animated Films or cartoons are ones in which
individual drawings, paintings, or illustrations are photographed frame by
frame (stop-frame cinematography). Usually, each frame differs slightly from
the one preceding it, giving the illusion of movement when frames are projected
in rapid succession at 24 frames per second. The earliest cinema animation was
composed of frame-by-frame, hand-drawn images. When combined with movement, the
illustrator's two-dimensional static art came alive and created pure and imaginative
cinematic images - animals and other inanimate objects could become evil
villains or heroes.
Animations are not a strictly-defined genre
category, but rather a film technique, although they often contain genre-like
elements. Animation, fairy tales, and stop-motion films often appeal to
children, but it would marginalize animations to view them only as
"children's entertainment." Animated films are often directed to, or
appeal most to children, but easily can be enjoyed by all.
One of the most common modern usages of the
phrase "cartoon" refers to animated television, movies, and short
films. Although the term can be applied to any animated presentation, it is
most often used in reference to programs for children, featuring
anthropomorphized animals, superheroes, the adventures of child protagonists,
and other similar themes.
Fantasmagorie - A Fantasy
(1908) by Émile Cohl
Early History
The theory of the animated cartoon preceded the
invention of the cinema by half a century. Early experimenters, working to
create conversation pieces for Victorian parlours or new sensations for the
touring magic-lantern shows, which were a popular form of entertainment,
discovered the principle of persistence of vision. If drawings of the stages of
an action were shown in fast succession, the human eye would perceive them as a
continuous movement. One of the first commercially successful devices, invented
by the Belgian Joseph Plateau in 1832, was the phenakistoscope, a spinning
cardboard disk that created the illusion of movement when viewed in a mirror.
In 1834 William George Horner invented the zoetrope, a rotating drum lined by a
band of pictures that could be changed. The Frenchman Émile Reynaud in 1876
adapted the principle into a form that could be projected before a theatrical
audience. Reynaud became not only animation’s first entrepreneur but, with his
gorgeously hand-painted ribbons of celluloid conveyed by a system of mirrors to
a theatre screen, the first artist to give personality and warmth to his
animated characters.
With the invention of sprocket-driven film
stock, animation was poised for a great leap forward. Although “firsts” of any
kind are never easy to establish, the first film-based animator appears to be
J. Stuart Blackton, whose Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906 launched a
successful series of animated films for New York’s pioneering Vitagraph
Company. Later that year, Blackton also experimented with the stop-motion
technique—in which objects are photographed, then repositioned and photographed
again—for his short film Haunted Hotel.
In France, Émile Cohl was developing a form of
animation similar to Blackton’s, though Cohl used relatively crude stick
figures rather than Blackton’s ambitious newspaper-style cartoons.
Fantasmagorie is a 1908 French animated film by Émile Cohl. It is one of the
earliest examples of traditional (hand-drawn) animation, and considered by film
historians to be the first animated cartoon.Coinciding with the rise in
popularity of the Sunday comic sections of the new tabloid newspapers, the
nascent animation industry recruited the talents of many of the best-known
artists, including Rube Goldberg, Bud Fisher (creator of Mutt and Jeff) and
George Herriman (creator of Krazy Kat), but most soon tired of the fatiguing
animation process and left the actual production work to others.
The one great exception among these early
illustrators-turned-animators was Winsor McCay, whose elegant, surreal Little
Nemo in Slumberland and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend remain pinnacles of
comic-strip art. Winsor McCay, considered "the father of the animated
cartoon. McCay created a hand-coloured short film of Little Nemo for use during
his vaudeville act in 1911, but it was Gertie the Dinosaur, created for McCay’s
1914 tour, that transformed the art. This cartoon was the first to feature a
character developed specifically for animation, and showed the true potential
of the medium. McCay’s superb draftsmanship, fluid sense of movement, and great
feeling for character gave viewers an animated creature who seemed to have a
personality, a presence, and a life of her own. The first cartoon star had been
born. McCay made several other extraordinary films, including a re-creation of
The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), but it was left to Pat Sullivan to extend
McCay’s discoveries. An Australian-born cartoonist who opened a studio in New
York City, Sullivan recognized the great talent of a young animator named Otto
Messmer, one of whose casually invented characters—a wily black cat named
Felix—was made into the star of a series of immensely popular one-reelers.
Designed by Messmer for maximum flexibility and facial expressiveness, the
round-headed, big-eyed Felix quickly became the standard model for cartoon
characters: a rubber ball on legs who required a minimum of effort to draw and
could be kept in constant motion.
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)
by Winsor McCay
Walt Disney
This lesson did not go unremarked by the young
Walt Disney, then working at his Laugh-O-gram Films studio in Kansas City,
Missouri. His first major character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was a
straightforward appropriation of Felix; when he lost the rights to the
character in a dispute with his distributor, Disney simply modified Oswald’s
ears and produced Mickey Mouse.
Far more revolutionary was Disney’s decision to
create a cartoon with the novelty of synchronized sound. Steamboat Willie
(1928), Mickey’s third film, took the country by storm. A missing
element—sound—had been added to animation, making the illusion of life that
much more complete, that much more magical. Later, Disney would add carefully
synchronized music (The Skeleton Dance, 1929), three-strip Technicolor (Flowers
and Trees, 1932), and the illusion of depth with his multiplane camera (The Old
Mill, 1937). With each step, Disney seemed to come closer to a perfect
naturalism, a painterly realism that suggested academic paintings of the 19th
century. Disney’s resident technical wizard was Ub Iwerks, a childhood friend
who followed Disney to Hollywood and was instrumental in the creation of the
multiplane camera and the synchronization techniques that made the Mickey Mouse
cartoons and the Silly Symphonies series seem so robust and fully dimensional.
For Disney, the final step was, of course, Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Although not the first animated feature, it
was the first to use up-to-the-minute techniques and the first to receive a
wide, Hollywood-style release. Instead of amusing his audience with talking
mice and singing cows, Disney was determined to give them as profound a
dramatic experience as the medium would allow; he reached into his own troubled
childhood to interpret this rich fable of parental abandonment, sibling
rivalry, and the onrush of adult passion.
With his increasing insistence on photographic
realism in films such as Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and
Bambi (1942), Disney perversely seemed to be trying to put himself out of
business by imitating life too well. That was not the temptation followed by
Disney’s chief rivals in the 1930s, all of whom came to specialize in their own
kind of stylized mayhem.
The Fleischer Brothers
Max and Dave Fleischer had become successful New
York animators while Disney was still living in Kansas City, Missouri. The
Fleischers invented the rotoscoping process, still in use today, in which a
strip of live-action footage can be traced and redrawn as a cartoon. The
Fleischers exploited this technique in their pioneering series Out of the
Inkwell (1919–29). It was this series, with its lively interaction between
human and drawn figures, that Disney struggled to imitate with his early Alice
cartoons.
But if Disney was Mother Goose and Norman
Rockwell, the Fleischers (Max produced, Dave directed) were stride piano and
red whiskey. Their extremely urban, overcrowded, sexually suggestive, and
frequently nightmarish work—featuring the curvaceous torch singer Betty Boop
and her two oddly infantile colleagues, Bimbo the Dog and Koko the Clown—charts
a twisty route through the American subconscious of the 1920s and ’30s, before
collapsing into Disneyesque cuteness with the features Gulliver’s Travels
(1939) and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941; also released as Hoppity Goes to Town).
The studio’s mainstay remained the relatively impersonal Popeye series, based
on the comic strip created by Elzie Segar. The spinach-loving sailor was
introduced as a supporting player in the Betty Boop cartoon Popeye the Sailor
(1933) and quickly ascended to stardom, surviving through 105 episodes until
the 1942 short Baby Wants a Bottleship, when the Fleischer studio collapsed and
rights to the character passed to Famous Studios.
Warner Bros. “Termite Terrace”
Less edgy than the Fleischers but every bit as
anarchic were the animations produced by the Warner Bros. cartoon studio, known
to its residents as “Termite Terrace.” The studio was founded by three Disney
veterans, Rudolph Ising, Hugh Harmon, and Friz Freleng, but didn’t discover its
identity until Tex Avery, fleeing the Walter Lantz studio at Universal, joined
the team as a director. Avery was young and irreverent, and he quickly
recognized the talent of staff artists such as Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and
Bob Cannon. Together they brought a new kind of speed and snappiness to the
Warners product, beginning with Gold Diggers of ’49 (1936). With the addition
of director Frank Tashlin, musical director Carl W. Stalling, and voice interpreter
Mel Blanc, the team was in place to create a new kind of cartoon character:
cynical, wisecracking, and often violent, who, refined through a series of
cartoons, finally emerged as Bugs Bunny in Tex Avery’s A Wild Hare (1940).
Other characters, some invented and some reinterpreted, arrived, including
Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety and Sylvester, Pepe LePew, Foghorn Leghorn, Road
Runner, and Wile E. Coyote. Avery left Warner Brothers and in 1942 joined
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s moribund animation unit, where, if anything, his work
became even wilder in films such as Red Hot Riding Hood (1943) and Bad Luck
Blackie (1949).
In the 1950s, United Productions of America
(UPA), a studio formed by ex-Disney animators, created a simple, less
theatrical approach to animation. Instead of natural colors and detailed
background, the UPA animators used bold colors, abstract renditions of clouds
and trees, and limited movement. As more cartoons were produced exclusively for
television, other animators adopted the time and money saving techniques of the
UPA animators, though many lost UPA's aesthetics in the process. Two of the
most popular and longest running cartoon shows are The Flintstones, which
premiered in 1960, and The Simpsons, which premiered in 1989.
Hanna-Barbera Cartoons
Hanna-Barbera Cartoons Inc., founded by the
animation team of Joseph Barbera and William Hanna in 1957, rose to prominence
as the first successful producers of cartoons for television. They are perhaps
best known for developing a formula for inexpensively-made cartoons, which
relied on characterization and topical, verbal humor, rather than fully
animated action, as had been common among cartoons produced for theatrical
release. By the mid-1960s the company had achieved a string of successes
including producing the first animated series to appear on prime-time
television, The Flintstones. Their success in the 1960s led to a formula of
mass production in the 1970s.
In 1959 Huckleberry Hound, product of
Hanna-Barbera Cartoons Inc., became the first animated television production to
win an Emmy Award for children's programming. According to Joseph Barbera, the
Emmy represented something more to the animation team than had the seven Oscars
won by Tom and Jerry in that Hanna and Barbera were now the producers of their
works and collected the awards as pioneers in a new medium. In 1960
Hanna-Barbera launched the first half-hour cartoon show to air during
primetime. The concept was to put an animated, half-hour situation comedy
series in the same time slot normally occupied by live action shows. Popular
sit-com writers were hired to draft the scripts in conjunction with writers,
such as Barbera himself, who understood how to make cartoons work. The
Flintstones was to become the company's greatest success, having a six-year run
followed by many more years in syndication. The "modern stone-age
family" remained the most enduring image of Hanna and Barbera's
partnership, eclipsing even that of Tom and Jerry.
Computer Animation Technology
A victim of rising production costs,
full-figure, feature-length animation appeared to be dying off until two
developments gave it an unexpected boost in the 1980s. The first was the Disney
company’s discovery that the moribund movie musical could be revived and made palatable
to contemporary audiences by adapting it to cartoon form (The Little Mermaid,
1989); the second was the development of computer animation technology, which
greatly reduced expenses while providing for new forms of expression. Although
most contemporary animated films use computer techniques to a greater or lesser
degree, the finest, purest achievements in the genre are the work of John
Lasseter, whose Pixar Animation Studios productions have evolved from
experimental shorts, such as Luxor, Jr. (1986), to lush features, such as Toy
Story (1995; the first entirely computer-animated feature-length film), A Bug’s
Life (1998), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), WALL-E (2008), and Up
(2009). Computer techniques are commonly incorporated into traditional line
animations, giving films such as Disney’s Mulan (1998) and Dreamworks’s The
Road to El Dorado (2000) a visual sweep and dimensionality that would otherwise
require countless hours of manual labour.
Animation In Europe
In Europe animation had meanwhile taken a
strikingly different direction. Eschewing animated line drawings, filmmakers
experimented with widely different techniques: in Russia and later in France,
Wladyslaw Starewicz (also billed as Ladislas Starevitch), a Polish art student and
amateur entomologist, created stop-motion animation with bugs and dolls; among
his most celebrated films are The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), in which a
camera-wielding grasshopper uses the tools of his trade to humiliate his
unfaithful wife, and the feature-length The Tale of the Fox (1930), based on
German folktales as retold by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A Russian working in
France, Alexandre Alexeïeff, developed the pinscreen, a board perforated by
some 500,000 pins that could be raised or lowered, which created patterns of
light and shadow that gave the effect of an animated steel engraving. It took
Alexeïeff two years to create A Night on Bald Mountain (1933), which used the
music of Modest Mussorgsky; in 1963 Nikolay Gogol was the source of his most
widely celebrated film, the dark fable The Nose. Inspired by the shadow puppet
theatre of Thailand, Germany’s Lotte Reiniger employed animated silhouettes to
create elaborately detailed scenes derived from folktales and children’s books.
Her The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) may have been the first animated
feature; it required more than two years of patient work and earned her the
nickname “The Mistress of Shadows,” as bestowed on her by Jean Renoir. Her
other works include Dr. Dolittle and His Animals (1928) and shorts based on
musical themes by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Papageno, 1935; adapted from The
Magic Flute), Gaetano Donizetti (L’elisir d’amore, 1939; “The Elixir of Love”),
and Igor Stravinsky (Dream Circus, 1939; adapted from Pulcinella). In the 1950s
Reiniger moved to England, where she continued to produce films until her
retirement in the ’70s.
Another German-born animator, Oskar Fischinger,
took his work in a radically different direction. Abandoning the fairy tales
and comic strips that had inspired most of his predecessors, Fischinger took
his inspiration from the abstract art that dominated the 1920s. At first he
worked with wax figures animated by stop motion, but his most significant films
are the symphonies of shapes and sounds he called “coloured rhythms,” created
from shifting colour fields and patterns matched to music by classical composers.
He became fascinated by colour photography and collaborated on a process called
Gasparcolor, which, as utilized in his 1935 film Composition in Blue, won a
prize at that year’s Venice Film Festival. The following year, he immigrated to
Hollywood, where he worked on special effects for a number of films and was the
initial designer of the Toccata and Fugue sequence in Walt Disney’s Fantasia
(1940). The Disney artists modified his designs, however, and he asked that his
name be removed from the finished film. Through the 1940s and ’50s he balanced
his work between experimental films such as Motion Painting No. 1 (1947) and
commercials, and he retired from animation in 1961 to devote himself to
painting.
Fischinger’s films made a deep impression on the
Scottish design student Norman McLaren, who began experimenting with cameraless
films—with designs drawn directly on celluloid—as early as 1933 (Seven Till
Five). A restless and brilliant researcher, he went to work for John Grierson
at the celebrated General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit in London and followed
Grierson to Canada in 1941, shortly after the founding of the National Film
Board. Supported by government grants, he was able to play out his most radical
creative impulses, using watercolours, crayons, and paper cutouts to bring
abstract designs to flowing life. Attracted by the possibilities of stop-motion
animation, he was able to turn inanimate objects into actors (A Chairy Tale,
1957) and actors into inanimate objects (Neighbours, 1952), a technique he
called “pixellation.”
The international success of McLaren’s work (he
won an Oscar for Neighbours) opened the possibilities for more personal forms
of animation in America. John Hubley, an animator who worked for Disney studios
on Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia, left the Disney organization in 1941
and joined the independent animation company United Productions of America in
1945. Working in a radically simplified style, without the depth effects and
shading of the Disney cartoons, Hubley created the nearsighted character Mister
Magoo for the 1949 short Ragtime Bear. He and his wife, Faith, formed their own
studio, Storyboard Productions, in 1955, and they collaborated on a series of
increasingly poetic narrative films. They won Oscars for Moonbird (1959) and
The Hole (1962). The Hubleys also created a much-admired series of short films
based on the jazz improvisations of Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, and Benny
Carter.
The evolution of animation in Eastern Europe was
impeded by World War II, but several countries—in particular Poland, Hungary,
and Romania—became world leaders in the field by the 1960s. Włodzimierz Haupe
and Halina Bielinska were among the first important Polish animators; their
Janosik (1954) was Poland’s first animated film, and their Changing of the
Guard (1956) employed the stop-action gimmick of animated matchboxes. The
collaborative efforts of Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk foresaw the bleak
themes and absurdist trends of the Polish school of the 1960s; such films as
Był sobie raz… (1957; Once Upon a Time…), Nagrodzone uczucie (1957; Love
Rewarded), and Dom (1958; The House) are surreal, pessimistic, plotless, and
characterized by a barrage of disturbing images. Borowczyk and Lenica, each of
whom went on to a successful solo career, helped launch an industry that
produced as many as 120 animated films per year by the early ’60s. Animators
such as Miroslaw Kijowicz, Daniel Szczechura, and Stefan Schabenbeck were among
the leaders in Polish animation during the second half of the 20th century.
Nontraditional Forms
Eastern Europe also became the centre of puppet
animation, largely because of the sweetly engaging, folkloric work of Jiří
Trnka. Based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, Trnka’s The Emperor’s
Nightingale became an international success when it was fitted with narration
by Boris Karloff and released in 1948. His subsequent work included ambitious
adaptations of The Good Soldier Schweik (1954) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1959).
Born in Hungary, George Pal worked as an
animator in Berlin, Prague, Paris, and the Netherlands before immigrating to
the United States in 1939. There he contracted with Paramount Pictures to
produce the Puppetoons series, perhaps the most popular and accomplished puppet
animations to be created in the United States. A dedicated craftsman, Pal would
produce up to 9,000 model figures for films such as Tulips Shall Grow, his 1942
anti-Nazi allegory. Pal abandoned animation for feature film production in
1947, though in films such as The War of the Worlds (1953) he continued to
incorporate elaborate animated special-effects sequences.
Animators in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere took
the puppet technique down far darker streets. Jan Švankmajer, for example, came
to animation from the experimental theatre movement of Prague. His work
combines human figures and stop-motion animation to create disturbingly carnal
meditations on sexuality and mortality, such as the short Dimensions of
Dialogue (1982) and the features Alice (1988), Faust (1994), and Conspirators
of Pleasure (1996). Švankmajer’s most dedicated disciples are the Quay
brothers, Stephen and Timothy, identical twins born in Philadelphia who moved
to London to create a series of meticulous puppet animations steeped in the
atmosphere and ironic fatalism of Eastern Europe. Their Street of Crocodiles
(1986), obliquely based on the stories of Bruno Schulz, is a parable of obscure
import in which a puppet is freed of his strings but remains enslaved by
bizarre sexual impulses.
Nick Park, the creator of the Wallace and Gromit
series, is the optimist’s answer to the Quay brothers—a stop-motion animator
who creates endearing characters and cozy environments that celebrate the
security and complacency of provincial English life. He and his colleagues at
the British firm Aardman Animations, including founders Peter Lord and Dave
Sproxton, have taken the traditionally child-oriented format of clay animation
to new heights of sophistication and expressiveness.
More-traditional forms of line animation have continued
to be produced in Europe by filmmakers such as France’s Paul Grimault (The King
and the Bird, begun in 1948 and released in 1980), Italy’s Bruno Bozzetto
(whose 1976 Allegro Non Troppo broadly parodied Fantasia), and Great Britain’s
John Halas and Joy Batchelor (Animal Farm, 1955) and Richard Williams (Raggedy
Ann and Andy, 1977). George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine (1968) made creative use
of the visual motifs of the psychedelic era, luring young adults back to a
medium that had largely been relegated to children.
