Category Archives: pioneers of animation

Wait ’til you get a view of sweet Betty.

Posted on by under animated shorts, animation, classic cartoons, pioneers of animation

In 1918, Max Fleischer, the innovative mind behind early Walt Disney Studios rival Fleischer Studios, began producing a series of silent cartoon shorts called Out of the Inkwell. Much like earlier efforts by animation pioneers such as Winsor McCay, many entries in this series combined live-action with animation, showing Fleischer drawing the figures that would then come to “life” on the screen (as demonstrated in the 1921 short “Modeling“).

The Inkwell shorts featured two notable recurring characters: Koko the Clown, who was first animated in 1915 as Fleischer developed his revolutionary rotoscope (a device which allowed animators to trace over live-action scenes in order to recreate them in a relatively lifelike manner), and Fitz the dog, introduced as Koko’s sidekick in 1923. When Koko’s popularity waned by the end of the 1920s, the character was temporarily retired, and Fitz was re-envisioned as a leading man (so to speak) and renamed “Bimbo.” Bimbo became the first recurring character for the new sound-synchronized Talkartoons series, which replaced the silent Inkwell shorts in 1929.

After two successful solo cartoons, Bimbo was given a girlfriend in 1930′s Dizzy Dishes. But little did anyone realize that this new character, an anthropomorphic, stocking-wearing chanteuse/poodle who came to be known as Betty Boop, would become a groundbreaking cartoon character in her own right within months.

Thought not officially christened “Betty Boop” until the 1932 short Stopping the Show, the character, a quintessential flapper type, was popular almost from the start. She retained her canine features–low-hanging, floppy ears, a dog-like button nose, and a jaw structure that suggested a muzzle–until 1932, when she was redesigned to be more overtly human. This ultimately signaled the death knell for Bimbo; though Betty maintained a romantic relationship with Bimbo for a short while, he was ditched in 1933, as it was considered unseemly for a human girl to be in love with a dog (a year later, Betty was given a pet puppy named Pudgy, ostensibly to replace Bimbo as her sidekick).

The Betty Boop cartoons–at least, the ones produced before the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934–are not intended for children. There is a darkness to many of the earlier Boop shorts, which reference controversial themes such as rape (1932′s Chess-Nuts), sexual harassment (1933′s Betty Boop’s Big Boss), and even ephebophilia (after all, Betty’s supposedly only sixteen years old!). Tied into these darker themes is an inescapable, pervasive sexuality, marked by innuendo and risqué imagery. This is not to say that these early shorts are not enjoyable; quite the opposite, in fact, and they seem incredibly tame by today’s standards (as one might expect). But the scenarios in which Betty finds herself can be quite disturbing, and the innuendo is sometimes overly heavy-handed.

Whatever problems arise in Betty’s animated life, the girl just can’t help it: to co-opt Jessica Rabbit’s famous catchphrase, she’s not bad–she’s just drawn that way. As Grim Natwick, the animator who crafted the original design of Betty Boop under the auspices of Fleischer, once said, “Although she was never vulgar or obscene, Betty was a suggestion you could spell in three letters: s-e-x.” Indeed, every aspect of the character is designed to entice, from her Kewpie-doll features (inspired by actresses Helen Kane and Clara Bow) to her short, low-cut dresses and garters. And yet there is an innocence to Betty that is encapsulated in her breathy, squeaky, baby-talk voice, brought to life most memorably by voice-over artist Mae Questel (who also provided the voice for Fleischer’s other popular leading lady, Popeye’s paramour Olive Oyl). This makes for a character who is a potent combination of girl and woman, protecting her chastity from wolves and scoundrels while punctuating every song with an alluring wink and a shake of the hips.

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And now, four pre-Code Boop classics with which every self-professed fan of classic animation should be familiar …

 

Boop-Oop-A-Doop (1932)

Like Chess-Nuts, this short employs rape as a central conceit. Betty is the star of the circus, trying to avoid the advances of the smarmy ringmaster who’s determined to take her “boop-oop-a-doop away.” Can Koko’s interference save her from this awful fate? (Spoiler alert: it can, and he does.)

 

Minnie the Moocher (1932)

This one is notable for the vocal and musical contributions of the great Cab Calloway; in fact, the short opens with a great live-action shot of Calloway sliding sinuously across the screen in front of his orchestra as the music swells. There’s not much to the story–Betty doesn’t want to eat her dinner, so she runs away from her “mean” parents (with Bimbo by her side) and soon encounters Calloway’s jazzy ghost and his frightening friends–but it’s nonetheless a visual and musical treat.

 

Snow White (1933)

Betty’s outing as the Fairest of Them All predates Disney’s take on the story by almost four years. Again featuring the vocal stylings of Calloway, this skewed fairy tale is delightful from start to finish. Notably, the entire cartoon was crafted from start to finish by a single animator, Fleischer stalwart Roland Crandall, over the course of six months. Snow White is considered one of the greatest animated shorts ever produced, coming in at #19 on the 1994 list of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time (and the aforementioned Minnie the Moocher is right behind it, at number 20 … as is another 1931 Bimbo-Betty short, Bimbo’s Initiation, at number 37).

 

Betty in Blunderland (1934)

This was one of the last Betty Boop cartoons to be produced and released before the strict enforcement of the Production Code would take effect in July 1934. As a lifelong, inveterate Alice in Wonderland fan, I’d be remiss not to mention this funny little take on Lewis Carroll’s twisted tale.

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For the most part, the shorts produced after 1934 lack bite and verve. The humor is watered down, Betty is covered up, and the naughty appeal of the previous cartoons is lost in a haze of family-friendly blandness. When the series concluded production in 1939, Betty was largely forgotten for a time until the shorts began airing on television in the 1950s. But she has found new life over the years through widespread (some would say “over-saturated”) merchandising, and she even made a brief cameo in 1988′s Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Most of the pre-Code Betty Boop shorts have not found their way to DVD yet, but some of her later, tamer appearances–the ones that have lapsed into the public domain–have been released as part of a number of mass-market, old-school cartoon compilations (though the quality of the transfers is typically lacking). Hopefully, the day will come soon when Betty Boop’s quirky and hilarious filmography will get the DVD/Blu-ray treatment it deserves, so new generations can continue to enjoy her antics!

 

This post is our contribution to the Short Animation blogathon currently being hosted by Pussy Goes Grrr. Make sure to check out all of the animated (get it?) entries that have been posted throughout the week!

Pioneers of Animation: Ub Iwerks (The Later Years)

Posted on by under classic cartoons, classic disney, pioneers of animation, saturday morning cartoons

After leaving Disney Brothers, Ub Iwerks’ own self-named animation venture, the Iwerks Studio, opened in 1930. Backed by Celebrity Pictures, with a distribution deal from major studio MGM, Iwerks was in an enviable position right out of the gate, making more money than he had ever made working with Walt Disney. He hired a group of fresh animators to work with him (a group that briefly included a young Chuck Jones). His first creation under his own banner was an anthropomorphic musical frog named Flip, who debuted in the six-minute short Fiddlesticks.

Fiddlesticks is noteworthy for being the first synchronized-sound two-strip Technicolor cartoon (it’s interesting to note that, when the three-strip color process was perfected a couple of years later, Disney produced the first cartoon in that mode, 1932′s Flowers and Trees–which would go on to win the first Academy Award for Animated Short Subject). Fiddlesticks also appears to feature a thumb to the nose of Disney, as one of Flip’s animal co-stars is a violin-playing mouse who strongly resembles the early concept sketches of Mickey Mouse.

After the success of Fiddlesticks, most of Flip’s future adventures were shot in black-and-white as opposed to the costly, time-consuming Technicolor process. And over time, at the behest of MGM, Flip’s design changed from amphibious to a more obviously human-like characterization, all in an effort to challenge the notably more human-like qualities of Mickey Mouse and crew. In all, Flip the Frog cavorted his way through just over three dozen shorts in the period between 1930 and 1933. When the public (and MGM) grew tired of the character, Iwerks retired Flip and debuted a new creation, Willie Whopper.

As his name implies, young Willie is a big fat liar, spinning tall tales for anyone who will listen. In his first appearance, 1933′s The Air Race, Willie tells his schoolyard chums the story of “the time I won the National Air Race.” The short even features a brief animated cameo by aviatrix Amelia Earhart, who crowns Willie the winner at the end. However, The Air Race was never released in public because MGM did not care for the final version. The story was reworked as Spite Flight, which would become the second Willie Whopper short distributed to theaters.

As with his predecessor, Flip, Willie Whopper went through several design changes over the course of the production of the shorts. Whereas in The Air Race Willie is a relatively thin young boy, in later cartoons he is drawn as much more rotund. Still, the changes did not result in longevity for Willie Whopper: while the character enjoyed a brief moment of popularity, ultimately only fourteen shorts were produced between 1933 and 1934.

Iwerks’ next endeavor was a series of shorts called ComiColor Cartoons, which his studio produced between 1933 and 1936. The ComiColor series ultimately represented the best of the Iwerks Studio’s output in the 1930s. The shorts were based on fairy tales and classic stories from literature ranging from Jack and the Beanstalk (the first ComiColor produced in 1933) to Don Quixote to the controversial Little Black Sambo cartoon (which was eventually banned). One particular short, 1935′s Balloon Land, gained a new audience in the 1980s after being featured on the popular children’s show Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

The ComiColor series was created using the Cinecolor process. Throughout most of the 1930s, Walt Disney held an exclusive contract with Technicolor, and no other studio could use that (infinitely better) process to make their own cartoon shorts. Cinecolor was the next best option, and was widely utilized by the lower-budget Hollywood studios. Many of the shorts were filmed by Iwerks himself using a multi-plane camera he had built from random parts of an old Chevrolet. The use of this camera allowed Iwerks to implement a sort of three-dimensional effect in some of the ComiColor cartoons–an impressive technique for the time (and one that would soon be replicated by Disney for the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).

As innovative as some of the ComiColor shorts were, they marked the end of the Iwerks Studio. After MGM declined to continue distributing Iwerks’ products in 1934, distribution of the shorts fell to Celebrity Pictures. The arrangement would only last until 1936, and Iwerks was forced to close the studio that bore his name. For the next couple of years, Iwerks was a sort of freelance animator, producing several Looney Tunes shorts at Warner Bros. and working briefly for Columbia Pictures’ animation division.

It’s doubtful that the loss of the studio was particularly heartbreaking for Iwerks. Despite the initial success of the Iwerks Studio, the animator was never particularly happy in his new venture. By the end of the decade, he had to acknowledge to himself that his interests lay not in crafting new characters and stories, but in experimentation with the technology of the time, trying new, heretofore unseen tricks with the camera to better enhance the illusion at play. In 1940, Iwerks once again joined the Disney studio, albeit in a new capacity: as a special effects wizard.

Iwerks was more than up to the challenge. Within the first decade of his return to Disney, he invented a multi-head optical printer, a device which allowed for the realistic-looking combination of live-action and animation in 1940s package films such as The Three Caballeros and Song of the South. Never satisfied, Iwerks continued to tinker with his printer, improving its capabilities exponentially (and eventually winning the first of two technical Academy Awards for his efforts). Iwerks also conceived the idea of color traveling matte composite photography, the technology that made possible such sophisticated live-action/animation scenes as the penguin dance in 1964′s Mary Poppins.

Another innovation used in Mary Poppins that Iwerks helped to develop was the use of yellowscreen technology, in which actors were filmed in front of a white screen while being lit with sodium vapor lights. This process allowed for matte shots to be inserted into live-action shots, permitting live-action elements and animated scenes to blend together almost seamlessly. When Iwerks worked on the production of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in 1963, he used the yellowscreen technology to compose the shots of the attacking birds (for his efforts, Iwerks was nominated once more for the Oscar for Special Effects, though he ultimately lost to Cleopatra, for some reason unbeknownst to yours truly).

Iwerks also took the existing technology of xerography and adapted it to the field of animation. He tinkered with a Xerox camera and eventually was able to design a device that would transfer animators’ drawings directly onto the animation cels as opposed to having each one individually hand-inked. This process was first used for the production of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and it reportedly saved the Disney studios quite a bit of money that would have been spent trying to animate all of those multi-spotted dogs!

Not all of Iwerks’ time was spent working on films, however. In the 1960s, he joined what would later become the Disney Imagineering department, working on Disney theme park attractions such as “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “It’s a Small World.”

From animator to studio head to technical wizard, Ub Iwerks had a long, productive, and innovative career. By the time he passed away in 1971, at the age of seventy, he had secured his position as one of the true pioneers of modern animation. In recent years, his contributions have become even more well-known, and his role in elevating the House of Mouse to its storied heights has been recognized by the Disney company itself, which inducted Iwerks into its “Legends” hall of fame in 1989. Ub’s son, Don Iwerks, followed in his footsteps as a technical wizard in his own right, working for Disney for more than thirty-five years (and becoming a Legend himself in 2009).

The young innovators, Disney and Iwerks

Even though Walt and Ub’s friendship never recovered from Ub’s move towards independence in 1930, the two men truly comprised a partnership that was made in cinematic heaven. Each respected the other for what he could do, and each allowed the other to aspire to greatness. Though Iwerks was content to remain in the background in his later years, leaving the showmanship to Disney, his contributions were nonetheless vitally important to the development of the Walt Disney Company as a force to be reckoned with.

Pioneers of Animation: Ub Iwerks (The Early Years)

Posted on by under classic disney, pioneers of animation, saturday morning cartoons

Strange to think that a dinosaur eventually gave birth to a talking mouse … but that is essentially what happened when two young animators named Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks met in 1919.

Disney is, of course, a legendary name in the history of animation, having arguably done more for the field than any other figure in the history of film. But Iwerks’ contributions to the very foundations of the Walt Disney Company are not as well-known. Iwerks was, for many years, Walt’s closest friend and confidant, and he was instrumental to the creation of Disney’s most beloved character.

Disney and Iwerks met when both were teenagers, working for an art studio in Kansas City, Iwerks’ hometown. The two young men had been greatly impressed by Winsor McCay’s groundbreaking 1914 animated short, Gertie the Dinosaur, and in 1920 formed their own short-lived company, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. When that failed, first Disney and then Iwerks took up work at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where the aspiring animators began to study the process of film animation.

Two years later, Disney formed the Laugh-O-Gram Studio and signed a contract to produce six short animated fairy tales. Iwerks was hired to assist on the animation, but soon went back to the ad company, as Disney barely had enough money to keep the studio open, let alone pay his animators (on that note, Laugh-O-Gram employed several animators who would later find their own measure of fame, including Rudy Ising and Hugh Harman, eventual founders of both Warner Bros. and MGM’s animation divisions, and Looney Tunes stalwart Friz Freleng). Still, Iwerks continued to work on the Laugh-O-Gram shorts, often for little or no pay.

Laugh-O-Gram only lasted for a little over a year before Disney was forced to file for bankruptcy. The company had produced ten short films (all of which have since fallen into the public domain). The first of these, Little Red Riding Hood (1922), was lost for decades and only rediscovered and restored in 1998.

The only credited name on Red Riding Hood is Disney’s own, though Iwerks was the chief animator for this and other Laugh-O-Gram productions.

When Laugh-O-Gram failed, Disney decided to try his luck in California, leaving Iwerks behind in Kansas City. But in 1924, Disney offered Iwerks a position in his new company, Disney Brothers Productions. Disney gave Iwerks 20% ownership of the new company, and the two embarked on the creation of a series of short films inspired by Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice in Wonderland.

These “Alice comedies” had gotten their start at Laugh-O-Gram, where in 1923, the first short, Alice’s Wonderland, had been produced. The Alice shorts were notable for featuring live-action combined with animation, much in the same vein as Gertie the Dinosaur. In 57 shorts, Alice, initially played by young Virginia Davis (and later played by Margie Gay, Lois Hardwick, and a young Dawn O’Day–who would eventually rechristen herself Anne Shirley), interacted with the animated creatures on screen in various adventures.

Disney directed the shorts, while Iwerks took charge of the animation. The Alice comedies were popular, and the pair continued to produce them through 1927. By then, the conceit had grown tired, and Disney and Iwerks had moved on to the creation of new character: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who made his premiere in the 1927 short Trolley Troubles.

The first two dozen Oswald shorts were, by and large, animated by Iwerks, with contributions from other animators like Harman and Freleng (who, like Iwerks, had been brought to California by Disney after the failure of Laugh-O-Gram). Sadly, many of those initial Oswald cartoons have been lost over time, and the original versions of many of the existing shorts are missing.

Oswald presented Disney with his first true animated success. Whatever joy Disney felt at this, however, was soon tempered by the realization that his contract with the distributor of the cartoons, Universal, dictated that the studio now owned the rights to the Oswald character. When Disney asked for a budget increase for the Oswald shorts, he was told that he would instead have to accept a drastic pay cut himself, and was further informed that most of his animators had signed with Universal, something Disney saw as a horrible betrayal. In the end, Universal went on to produce several dozen Oswald shorts under the auspices of Walter Lantz (who would go on to create Woody the Woodpecker in 1940). Disney and Iwerks lost control of their creation, and found themselves without an animated star for Disney Brothers Studio.

In the wake of the Oswald fiasco, Disney was determined to protect his future characters. He turned to Iwerks to create a new face for the Disney company. Iwerks was inspired by some sketches of mice that fellow animator Harman had jotted on a photograph of Disney in 1925 (Walt had had a pet mouse in Kansas City of which he was particularly fond). Iwerks modified the original Oswald design (so as to avoid any accusations of copyright infringement) and created a simplistic, rounded body design for the new mouse character, featuring the iconic rounded ears that even today remain an instantly recognizable symbol of the Walt Disney Company. Walt originally intended to name the new character “Mortimer Mouse,” but his wife Lillian thought “Mortimer” to be too pretentious a name, and the new creation was instead christened “Mickey” (incidentally, the name “Mortimer” would reappear about a decade later, used as the name for Mickey’s rival for Minnie Mouse’s affection).

Iwerks served as the main animator for the first two years of Mickey’s existence, a daunting job that was made no easier by the shared sense of perfectionism between Iwerks and Disney. While Walt composed the stories for the Mickey shorts, Iwerks was almost solely responsible for the animation, which required his producing an average of seven hundred drawings every day before each short could be completed. With this unheard-of level of production, the first Mickey cartoon was completed in a mere three weeks.

That first cartoon, the 1928 silent short Plane Crazy, did not manage to attract a distributor, much to Disney’s disappointment. A second silent short, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, also failed to attract notice from studios. But the third time was the charm: in November 1928, Disney secured a distribution deal with Celebrity Productions, and Steamboat Willie was released to almost instant acclaim.

Steamboat Willie is often credited as the first sound cartoon, but this is not exactly true: several sound cartoons had been released by Fleischer Studios earlier in the decade under the Song Car-Tunes title (these shorts are notable for the innovation of a “bouncing ball” to help audiences keep track of the melody). But the sound on these shorts was not fully synchronized to the action onscreen. To avoid this problem in his own cartoons, Disney utilized a click track, which helped the studio musicians maintain exact timing during recording. Because of this, Willie is widely considered to be the first commercially successful animated short to feature precisely synchronized sound. After its warm reception, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho were both synchronized to sound and released on their own, again to much praise.

While Mickey became a huge hit, the friendship between Disney and Iwerks began to disintegrate under Disney’s growing demands. Iwerks believed that he was not receiving all of the credit he should have gotten as Disney’s proverbial right-hand man, and he chafed at Disney’s notoriously temperamental attitude. Disney, for his part, was frustrated by his distribution deal with Pat Powers, the owner of Celebrity Pictures, who was not paying Disney everything he was owed through the deal. Walt took out his frustration on his animators, and Iwerks bore the brunt of his displeasure. Angry and tired of the fractious working relationship, Iwerks signed a deal with Powers to leave Disney Brothers Studios and found an animation company under his own name.

It was the end of an era. Walt was infuriated at Iwerks’ perceived betrayal. Their friendship–and the prolific partnership that had given the world one of its most beloved animated creations–was over … at least for the time being.

Next week: the continuation of Ub Iwerks’ contributions to the history of animation.

Pioneers of Animation: Winsor McCay

Posted on by under classic cartoons, pioneers of animation, saturday morning cartoons

Like many early figures in the slowly-emerging field of animated film, Winsor McCay initially developed his artistic talent as a comic strip artist and vaudevillian. Born in Canada and educated in the United States, McCay got his start in entertainment doing “chalk talks” on the vaudeville circuit. Much like J. Stuart Blackton, a groundbreaking figure in early animation in his own right, McCay drew figures on a chalkboard and altered them during his performance. His act, “The Seven Ages of Man,” depicted the gradual aging of two sketched faces, and was not wholly dissimilar from Blackton’s own “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (which is considered by many scholars to be the first truly “animated” short film).

But even before he gained fame on the vaudeville circuit alongside such notable names as Harry Houdini and W.C. Fields, McCay had already established himself as a skilled writer and illustrator of comic strips. In 1903, McCay created his first strip while working for the Cincinnati Enquirer, called A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle. It ran for forty-three weeks that year, and by the time the final installment was published in November, McCay had accepted a job at the New York Herald as a staff cartoonist.

While at the Herald, McCay created a number of strips, of which two became his most successful: Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (which ran from 1904 through 1911) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (which ran from 1905 through 1914). The former was a more adult comic strip–and was actually published in the Herald-owned Evening Telegram–and depicted a series of characters whose love for rich foods like the titular Welsh rarebit right before bedtime caused an unending series of nightmares.

While Rarebit Fiend was more popular among readers, Little Nemo would ultimately be the most groundbreaking strip McCay ever produced. Depicting the dream adventures of an imaginative young boy, Nemo was boldly drawn in a surrealistic style befitting the dreamlike subject matter. The strips are beautifully detailed, and though they take up a full newspaper page, no space is wasted, and the narrative flows smoothly from panel to panel. The Nemo strips are sometimes crazy and bizarre, but always entertaining and wonderfully inventive. Nemo was published by the Herald until 1911; that year, in a bid for more creative and personal freedom, McCay jumped to William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, where the strip continued (under the name In the Land of Wonderful Dreams so as to avoid legal entanglements with the Herald) until 1914.

"The Walking Bed," 1908

In 1911, Blackton and McCay teamed up to produce a short film based on Little Nemo, titled Winsor McCay: The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (nowadays, it’s generally just referred to as Little Nemo). The film depicts McCay revealing his intentions to animate his comic strip to his “artist friends,” who then ridicule him for the notion. The short takes us through the process of creating and filming the animated segment from conception to completion. And in the end, we’re treated to one of the earliest examples of the future riches that animation would shower upon the world.

[If you're the impatient type, in the clip posted below, the animated segment begins around 7:25 and pops into color around 8:12.]

What is most impressive about Nemo is that the animation portion was almost entirely done by McCay alone. He personally drew over 4000 individual ink-and-paper drawings, crafting and timing the “animated” movements by stopwatch. The only thing McCay did not do by himself was the coloring of the frames; the cartoonist hired an outside artist to tint every single frame by hand.

There’s no narrative quality to the Nemo animation, and the surrealistic nature of the Nemo comic strips translates well into animated form. The short is a series of vignettes, an exhibition of character movement and humor as Nemo takes two of the strip’s supporting characters, Flip and The Imp, through a series of comical paces. Nemo then sketches the figure of the Princess (daughter of King Morpheus of Slumberland), who comes to “life” and rides away with Nemo on a throne inside the mouth of a dragon. The entire segment is delightful and whimsical, though its abbreviated running time only serves to whet the audience’s appetite for more.

McCay delivered “more” in 1914 with the creation of the short film Gertie the Dinosaur. Gertie is considered by many scholars to be the first instance of an animated character showing true elements of individualized personality. Gertie is, by turns, playful, mischievous, recalcitrant, repentant, and utterly adorable (the way she scratches her head with her tail is endearingly cute). As in Nemo, there’s no real sense of narration. McCay appears briefly at the beginning of the film to introduce Gertie before stepping off-screen and running the dinosaur through a series of tricks via title cards. The animator then reappears at the end, closing the cartoon by taking a ride on “Gertie’s” back.

The creation of Gertie was just as painstaking as the earlier process with Nemo. McCay ultimately sketched nearly 10,000 drawings of Gertie, and he hired another artist to sketch all of the backgrounds, which were unusually finely detailed. The drawings were done on rice paper, which was then mounted to cardboard for the process of animating the sequences. McCay crafted a revolutionary method for ensuring a smooth transition between different frames, the precursor to “keyframe” animation (which allowed for relatively seamless movement in traditionally hand-drawn animated features).

McCay would go on to make several more animated short features, including one depicting (in a documentary-type form) the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania. But his animated output was ultimately limited at the demand of his employer. McCay came to regret his move from the Herald to the American. He reluctantly turned his focus back to drawing editorial cartoons at the behest of Hearst, but his heart was not in the work. Hearst, for his part, exerted his influence to try to prevent theater owners from booking McCay’s showings of animated films like Gertie–he felt that the artist’s “childish” cartooning work detracted from the more important business of crafting political cartoons, particularly during the height of World War I. As a result, in 1924, McCay declined renewing his contract with Hearst and returned to the Herald, where he restarted the Little Nemo strip, but it only lasted for a couple of years.

In his later years, McCay grew resentful of what he viewed as the commercialization of animation. In 1927, when a group of young animators decided to host a dinner in his honor, McCay delivered a speech in which he stated, ”Animation should be an art, that is how I conceived it … but as I see what you fellows have done with it is making it into a trade … not an art, but a trade.” McCay died in 1934, and his work was nearly forgotten for more than a decade until 1947, when his films were discovered in storage and properly restored and preserved for posterity.

Still, despite his misgivings about the future direction of the animated feature, Winsor McCay’s legacy as the venerable “Father of Animation” (a title he sometimes shares with Blackton, depending upon the historian telling the tale) lives on. The annual Annie Awards, which celebrate the year’s best achievements in the field of animation, named its lifetime achievement award after McCay. Over the years, that prize has been awarded to some of the biggest names in modern animation, most of whom (one could argue) were directly influenced by McCay’s work: Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Mel Blanc, Ub Iwerks, Bob Clampett, Mary Blair, Hayao Miyazaki, Don Bluth, John Lasseter, Tim Burton, Brad Bird, Matt Groening, and Walt Disney, among many more. In 1994, Gertie was voted the sixth greatest cartoon of all time in a peer-reviewed survey of 1000 professionals in the field; it was the oldest cartoon to appear on the list. McCay’s comic strip work is still highly influential, and vestiges of the Nemo style can still be seen in the Sunday morning funny pages.

© Universal Press Syndicate

Bill Waterson, the creator of my favorite comic strip of all time, Calvin and Hobbes (still miss it!), was particularly influenced by Nemo. The beautifully-crafted half-page Sunday Calvin strips, particularly from the latter half of the comic’s run, are reminiscent of McCay’s glorious full-page Nemo adventures.

Without McCay’s talent and belief in the still-new medium of animated film, who knows how the history of animation would ultimately have been written? Winsor McCay’s importance in the development of animation as both art and entertainment is undeniable. With the help of an overly precocious young boy and an adorably obedient pen-and-ink dinosaur, one man set the stage for animation’s evolution from parlor trick to beloved cinematic and artistic medium.

Pioneers of Animation: Mary Blair

Posted on by under animation, classic disney, pioneers of animation, saturday morning cartoons

Yesterday’s Google doodle honored the 100th birthday of Disney artist Mary Blair, and you know I couldn’t let that go by without a mention. So this week’s Saturday Morning Cartoons entry is dedicated to the beautiful, bold, and brilliant work of a true pioneer in the art of animation.

Blair showed her talent for art from a very young age. She was an alumna of the Chouinard Art Institute, and went to work for Disney rival Ub Iwerks’ cartoon studio (whose shorts were largely released by MGM) in 1933, alongside her husband, Lee Blair. The Blairs eventually ended up working for Disney, and Mary cut her teeth working on an ultimately unreleased extra segment of the 1940 musical Fantasia and contributing to the production of Dumbo (1941).

Throughout the 1940s, she worked on the series of Disney package films that were created to save money when the animation studio was essentially forced to shut down production during World War II. Blair traveled to South America with other animators as a part of FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy, which resulted in the production of the first two package films: Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Cabelleros (1944). Both Blairs appear in the flesh (along with Walt and fellow animators Norman Ferguson–the creator of Pluto–and Frank Thomas–one of the legendary “Nine Old Men”)  during the live-action segments that are interspersed between the animation of Amigos.  Blair ultimately served as one of the art supervisors for both of these films, and many of the South American landscapes present in these films are based on watercolors that she painted while on that trip (an example of the concept art she created in South America is posted above).

Though she worked on other package films, shorts, and live-action/animation combo films like Song of the South (1946) throughout the decade, Blair’s greatest contribution to the Disney canon arguably came with her work as the color stylist and concept artist for the studio’s first three forays back into the world of feature-length animation: Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953). Her somewhat Modernist artistic style is all over these films, and so influential that homages to it continue to pop up in animated features even today.

The two most popular terms used to describe Blair’s work seem to be “childlike” and “innocent.” And while these qualities are abundant, there is also a casual elegance to the forms that she designs. The color combinations Blair uses are deceptively simple, yet beautifully blended to create candy-coated worlds of visual splendor. This is particularly evident in Alice, where the story itself, with all its illogical genius, needs the burst of eye-popping, resplendent color to fully convey the nuances of author Lewis Carroll’s wonderful world. Blair’s freedom with bold swaths of color enhances the surrealism of the film while adding an endearing touch of whimsy that makes the film so very appealing.

Blair’s work went beyond her storied work for the House of Mouse–she also was responsible for numerous advertising campaigns throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and she was also, fittingly, a children’s book illustrator. In that capacity, Blair illustrated several stories in the popular Little Golden Books series, including I Can Fly (1951) and the Golden Book of Little Verses (1953).

Though Blair left the Disney studios after production on Peter Pan was completed, Walt (who had long demonstrated that he was one of Blair’s biggest fans) asked her to design the “It’s a Small World” pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. The attraction was later installed at Disneyland in California and replicated at other Disney parks around the world (some of her concept art for the ride is posted above).  Blair also created murals for the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland and the Contemporary Resort at Disney World in Florida.

Mary Blair passed away in 1978, but her influence on the history of animation is undeniable. Blair was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word. Not only did she do remarkable things with color and design, but she paved the way for female animators to be taken seriously in the field (though, admittedly, the number of female animators is sadly still disproportionate to their male counterparts even today). In recognition of her contributions, Blair was named a Disney Legend in 1991. Her work continues to be studied and admired for its beauty, charm, and sheer inventiveness. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Blair didn’t just design cartoons–she helped elevate animation into an art form.

Pioneers of Animation: J. Stuart Blackton

Posted on by under animated shorts, animation, pioneers of animation, saturday morning cartoons

For the next few weeks, we’re going to dedicate our semi-weekly “Saturday Morning Cartoons” feature to the men who set the stage for the art of animation in American film-making–the largely forgotten pioneers whose innovative work eventually inspired and facilitated the creation of Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and scores of other classic cartoon figures.

The roots of animation run almost as deeply as the roots of film itself. It began in the waning days of the nineteenth century as fledgling filmmakers began experimenting with the new medium of “moving pictures,” playing with the possibilities of bringing inanimate objects to life. Many of these early animators began their careers, appropriately enough, as artists, before finding themselves in the world of movie-making.

J. Stuart Blackton was one such figure. The British-born Blackton first began his show business career as a vaudevillian “lightning sketch artist” (a type of speed sketching/performance art in which an illustrator draws a series of “lightning-quick” sketches and manipulates them in various ways while telling a related story to an audience). After his act failed, Blackton began working for Joseph Pulitzer’s popular, sensationalist New York Evening World newspaper as a journalist and staff artist.

After one life-changing assignment–meeting and interviewing noted inventor Thomas Edison in 1896–Blackton purchased a Vitascope (Edison’s groundbreaking film projector) and began showing Edison-produced films. In 1897, in the wake of his new-found success, Blackton (along with fellow filmmaker Albert E. Smith) founded the American Vitagraph Company, one of the most successful early film studios, and began producing his own pictures. Not content with merely filming short, live-action sequences, Blackton soon started exploring the possibilities of a crude form of stop-motion animation (a method pioneered by the influential French filmmaker Georges Méliès). A year later, Blackton and Smith created what is now widely recognized as the first stop-motion animated short–1898′s The Humpty Dumpty Circus, in which a toy carnival was brought to flickering life using the technique. Sadly, Circus has since been lost, but thankfully, other early Blackton and Smith collaborations remain.

A surviving example of their early experimentation with stop-motion is The Enchanted Drawing. In it, Blackton is seen in front of a large easel, sketching a man’s face. He then draws a bottle of wine and a glass, “magically” plucks them from the paper, and pours himself a drink. The drawn face morphs into an expression of surprise, then pleasure as Blackton “feeds” the sketched man from the bottle. Blackton adds a hat to the man’s head, then plucks it from the paper, and does the same to the man’s cigar (much to the sketch’s discontent). The short skit ends with Blackton returning all of the removed objects to the paper. Though the film is dated from 1900, the Library of Congress indicates that Drawing was likely three or four years old by the time it was finally released, which means that, in actuality, this short may predate The Humpty Dumpty Circus.

[As an aside, it's worth noting that this film was copyrighted not by Vitagraph, but by Edison's film company. Blackton and Smith, trying to avoid being sued by Edison--who, as the owner of multiple motion picture patents at the turn of the century, spent a great deal of time, money, and lawyers protecting his investments--sold several of their creations to Edison, giving the inventor sole distribution rights over those films. In order to stay viable, Vitagraph eventually joined Edison's Motion Picture Patent Company (MPPC) in 1908. The MPPC was a trust comprised of ten American film companies, giving Edison a veritable stranglehold on the industry. Interestingly, the MPPC was partly responsible for the growth of Hollywood as the premier movie-making destination in the United States, as rival filmmakers essentially fled the New York and New Jersey areas to escape from Edison's litigious reach.]

In 1906, Blackton created Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, which is credited by many scholars as the first truly “animated” film. The film shows several “chalk” drawings (actually simulated largely through the use of cutout animation) coming to life after Blackton’s hand “sketches” and manipulates them on the screen. Some elements of stop-motion, stick puppetry, and live-action were also used to bring the drawings to life.

By the end of the decade, as the demands of running a motion picture studio grew, Blackton eventually lost interest in his animation experiments and moved away from film-making altogether in order to handle the day-to-day business of managing Vitagraph. Ironically enough, though, his company’s name would eventually become synonymous with a powerhouse of animation. Vitagraph was sold to Warner Bros. in 1925, where its name was changed to Vitaphone. However, for a short period from 1960-1964, Warner issued a series of their popular Looney Tunes shorts as “Vitagraph releases” in order to utilize the old name and thus protect their ownership of it.

Blackton’s influence on the emerging genre of animation is undeniable. Yes, his animated vignettes are little more than exhibitions of movie trickery. There is no attempt to tell a story; these short films were instead intended to wow the audience with the “magic” of the silver screen. Cartoons as we now know them–that is, animation marked by characterization and narrative–would not begin to emerge until several years after Blackton put down the camera for the last time. Still, these primitive shorts demonstrated the tantalizing possibilities of film and ultimately provided much inspiration for further advancements in the blossoming field of animation. As curious, new filmmakers stepped up to the drawing board, they drew upon some of the techniques used by Blackton and his contemporaries and improved upon them, constructing the foundation for modern animation in the process.