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Trollheart

Picking this back up again two years later, what better way to continue than to go, um, backwards? See, it seems to me that I got a little caught up in what we’ll call the start of the Disney era, and thereafter based all my research on animation outside of the USA on that period. But hell, you can go a long way back outside the borders of the United States to find people in Europe who were working on animation - at least, of a kind; crude, obviously, but still important - and who really should be looked into.

So I want to continue the “UnAmerican Animation” feature but take a look back to before the 1930s. Well before, in fact, and run through what countries in the UK and Europe (and even, I see, Ireland!) were doing in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Nothing groundbreaking, I guess, but it seems there was a fair deal of animation development and experimentation going on even then.

UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA (Part III)
Well, obviously you’re going to get a few people claiming to be the father of animation, including Uncle Walt and his rival Max Fleishcher, though in reality people like Paul Grimault and Lotte Reinenger are probably better candidates. Seems you can even go all the way back to the ancients, who painted “moving scenes” on jars and things, that are accepted as being animation in their own right. But I’m not concerned with such prehistoric examples, and in the course of my research since leaving this on hiatus in 2017 I've found it hard to come up with a definitive answer as to who is responsible for the birth of animation. Therefore I present these examples of men who can possibly be called

The Godfathers of Animation

Charles-Émile Reynaud (1844-1918)

With an engineer for a father and an artist for a mother, Reynaud was perfectly placed to become one of the first animators, improving upon the zoetrope, a device that spun and showed painted figures which appeared to move as the watcher viewed them through slits cut in the cylinder, with his praxinoscope, which improved the design by replacing the simple slits with mirrors, making the images as they passed by more fluid and less distorted that those seen through the zoetrope. Originally sold as a very successful toy, Reynaud began to think about using it as a projector, by having a large screen in front of the praxinoscope, onto which he could project his “moving” figures. In essence, it seems this was the first example, almost, of a movie projector. However Reynaud failed to patent it and a few short years later the Lumière brothers created and patented the first real movie camera, the cinematograph, and that was the end of his invention.

The théâtre optique

Literally, the optical theatre, this was the improved version of Reynaud’s praxinoscope, the one with the ability to project the figures onto a screen. Reynaud’s first performance was for some select friends, and was called “Un Bon Bock” (a good beer) and they were so impressed by it that he then set up the théâtre optique. However the popularity of his machine turned out to be something of a two-edged sword. Two of its main drawbacks were that it was very fragile, and could easily break if not handled and treated properly, and in addition the only way to operate it was by hand, which meant that when Reynaud secured a contract with the Grévin Museum in 1892 for daily performances of the machine, he had to be there personally to turn the thing. Not quite sure why he couldn’t have paid someone else to do it, but that’s what it says. Maybe the museum wanted him to be there personally in case anyone had any questions, or maybe they didn’t (or he didn’t) trust anyone else to work the apparatus. Maybe it was just in the contract that it had to be him.

Whatever the reason, the Grévin also demanded new films every year, while a clause in the contract (did he not read it before signing such a draconian document?) prevented him from selling any of his films outside of France. The grind of being tied into this contract, all his time taken up literally turning the handle of the praxinoscope and coming up with new material for it, allied to the as already alluded to invention of the cinematograph, which was to make his machine obsolete only a few years later, all led to Reynaud testily dumping his films into the Seine, where they were destroyed. Sadly, nothing exists today except this one clip I was able to track down. It does, however, make the jaw drop when you see the techniques used and remember this was at the tail-end of the nineteenth century!

Sure. you can see through the figure and it’s obvious he’s made of paper, but look how he moves! Or seems to, I should say. Look how the brightly-painted figure of the woman appears to emerge from a door to the right and walk onto the “stage”. When Pierrot enters, he comes through a door that just appears in the wall, but it’s believable as an entrance. And the figures genuinely seem to interact with each other. Remember, these are just static drawings being projected on a screen. When the door opens there’s a square of light on the floor too, as if a real door had opened, and when the first figure we saw goes behind a pillar, he disappears completely, in that sort of animation-doesn’t-obey-the-laws-of-physics thing I talked about in the section on "Plane Crazy" and also on Felix, both of whom were almost thirty-five years later. Now the reconstruction shown in the video was admittedly a hundred years later, but you have to assume that all they did was restored it, not upgraded or updated it in any way, in which case it’s a stunning achievement for the time.

I think Reynaud has a good claim to being named the actual father of animation, though history precludes him from this as he was not ultimately successful, and was largely forgotten as the cinematograph took over and the Lumière brothers passed instead into the history books. At the heart of the unhappy inventor’s failure was the reliance on temperamental machinery that was very delicate, but more, the one-man-band idea, the artisan who worked alone. While the Lumières made a business out of their new machine, had it easily mass-produced and were able to show people how to use it, Reynaud, a true remnant of the nineteenth century compared to the forward-looking, almost futurist Lumières, laboured on alone and refused to involve big business or investors, and like all the “little guys” in every developing industry, he was crushed by the wheels of advancing technology. He died after a short spell in a hospice in 1917.

Remarkably, and perhaps giving Reynauld the last word from beyond the grave, the Lumière brothers declared “the cinema is an invention without any future”, which probably ranks right up there alongside “Can’t act, can’t sing. Can dance a little” (Sinatra) and “too ugly to become famous” (The Rolling Stones) with the most ill-advised reverse predictions ever made. The Lumières instead marketed their invention as a tool for photography, not film, and so are not considered, despite making the first real strides in the field of animation, to be its forebears, despite being credited with having invented the technology.



Arthur Melbourne-Cooper (1874-1961)

From what I can make out, the next milestone on the road to animation comes from the UK, from a guy called Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, the son of a photographer who created what is generally accepted as “the world’s first stop-motion film”. It was commissioned by Bryant and May, one of the biggest manufacturers of matches at the time, in response to an appeal to help the soldiers in the Boer War, who were struggling from a shortage of matches. You might imagine, far from home and fighting surely disease and heatstroke as well as an implacable enemy that the last thing on the minds of the soldiers was smoking, but when has that ever stopped a company getting what it wanted?

Using what would become a well-used method of filming one frame, moving the model slightly, filming again, moving it again etc, Melbourne-Cooper was able to make it seem as if the matches were animated, as two sticks figure made of them spelled out the appeal on a black wall. This all took place in 1899.

Now, let’s be clear and honest here. The voiceover on this video proudly claims “The oldest existing animated film in the world is British.” But no, it isn’t. Because as we’ve seen from our piece on our friend Charles-Emile Reynaud, a version of his Pauvre Pierrot is still around, albeit in a restored form, and that predates “Matches Appeal” by a good seven years. But I suppose if Melbourne-Cooper’s one, being shot, obviously, in black and white, has survived without being restored or altered for over a hundred years, then maybe she has a point. Whatever the case, it’s an impressive little bit, both of animation and of advertising, pulling at the heart (and purse) strings of the viewer, both by dint of their patriotic fervour for “the boys abroad” and by the cuteness of the little stick figures. Well, I don’t think they’re cute but I bet many who watched that film did, and donated their guinea accordingly.

By 1908 Melbourne-Cooper had progressed in leaps and bounds (for the time) and had moved on to be able to shoot a live-action movie with stop-motion (or, as it was called at the time, frame-by-frame) animation in the fantasy short film “Dreams of Toyland”. In the movie, a woman takes her son to a toyshop, where a distinctly sinister-looking shopkeeper sells her some toys. In quite a clever move, one of the toys she buys, a large omnibus, has an advertisement on it proclaiming the title of the film. That’s all very well and good as far as it goes, but nothing terribly innovative. Yet.

It’s when the child goes to bed that things start to get interesting. Suddenly the scene zooms in, and we see the toys all arranged as if they’re in their own little city. People cross roads while horses and carts move along them and that big omnibus makes its slow way down the thoroughfare. One of the soft toys (think it might be a golliwog - wouldn’t be allowed these days!) - even drives the omnibus while other toys, including a white teddy bear, climb on board. However in helping I think a monkey on to the bus the bear overbalances and falls off the bus. Oh dear! But he’s not hurt (when ever is anyone in cartoons or animation, or when does it ever matter?) in fact he starts fighting with.. yes I’m sure that’s a golliwog. So you have a white bear fighting a toy notoriously recognised as a black person. Whether innocently or no, whether making a political/racial statement or just completely coincidentally, you have perhaps the first filmed occurrence of a race fight on screen!

Now it looks like the golliwog is stealing some drunk’s bag and running off, and then being tackled by a monkey. Are they fighting or dancing? If the former, there’s a very violent subtext to this film! Now a guy on stilts is joining in and - no, they’re all dancing now. Definitely dancing. And now they’ve been run over by the omnibus! Oh look! Here’s that troublesome white bear back, and he’s riding a train. And he’s, um, ramming a monkey in the arse with it. Now the monkey is on a horse chasing the bear and here comes the omnibus again and - it’s crashed into the bear, running him over and blowing up. Man, such violence and such a dark ending!

Amazing stuff, and if you’re totally into looking for subtexts like me, there’s racial violence, latent homosexual activity, just normal violence and road rage! Crazy. And all before World War I. Arthur Cooper-Melbourne was not just an animator, but made plenty of live-action films (as this one shows) and in fact opened two studios, one of which burned down, but that pesky war interrupted his schedule and though he made some animated advertisments for cinemas after the war, opening an ad agency, he retired in 1940 and died in 1961.


Walter Robert Booth (1869-1938) and Robert William Paul (1869-1943)

Interesting point above: these two men appear to have been born in the same year and died a mere five years apart, Paul slightly outlasting Booth. A cartoonist and conjurer, Booth teamed up with Paul, an inventor and showman, and together they produced a number of animated films, beginning with “Upside Down, or The Human Flies” in which Booth simply turned the camera upside-down to make it appear as if his subjects were on the ceiling. A simple trick, but back then it probably stumped audiences, and being a magician at heart, he probably played up to the idea that this was a form of magic.

It’s cleverly done, and let’s be honest: it’s actually more realistic and believable than Batman and Robin, some sixty years later, apparently walking up a wall! You know how this trick is done, yet in some ways you kind of forget that, and it looks very impressive. I’m not looking through the whole thing - it runs for over twelve minutes, and I’ve work to do - but I do see about halfway through a magician puts a woman in a sort of wardrobe and when he opens the door, first she’s gone, then she’s in a sort of Iron maiden thing, then she’s a skeleton, then she’s a man - very clever indeed. Ah, I see. Looking further I see whoever created this video has in fact joined that film and another called “The Haunted Curiosity Shop”, so that explains why it’s so long and why there was no mention of this cabinet trick in the piece about “The Human Flies”. Worth watching for both.

“Marley’s Ghost”, shown above, from 1901, was a Paul product, and though it’s essentially a movie, it does use clever early animation techniques, such as superimposing Marley’s ghostly face on Scrooge’s door, and also scenes from the miser’s childhood on a black curtain over his bed. Another of his, this time from five years later, shows a car driving up the wall of a building to escape a pursuing policeman, then fly across the sky, up into the clouds (along which it drives as if they were hills) and onto the moon (face and all) then on to Saturn, where it literally drives around the gas giant’s rings, falling off and plunging back to earth, where it smashes through the roof of the courthouse, from which it is pursued by the law until, caught, the driver has the car turn into a horse and cart, and the cops let it go. Whereupon, as it drives away, it turns back into a car.

Booth is probably best known, if at all, for his “scaremongering” animation trilogy, “The Airship Destroyer” (1909), “The Aerial Submarine” (1910) and “The Aerial Anarchists” (1911), the last of which predicted what might happen should terrorists gain control of aircraft, perhaps both a prophecy about the coming war and also a look almost a century into the future where the numbers 911 would take on a whole different, horrible and long-lasting meaning, and would in fact prove his “theory”.

The middle one is the only one I could track down, and again it’s more a film than a proper animation, but it does use clever techniques that would be used again and again in cartoons, such as the fake ocean seen through the portholes of the submarine by the captives as they travel beneath the water, complete with animated fish, the animation of a torpedo and an explosion as the sub torpedoes an ocean liner and a rather clever if crude flight as the sub leaves the sea and flies into the air. Interestingly too, it shows the development of photographic plates in the film, possibly (though I can’t confirm) the first time this process was captured on film.

I also remark on the fact here that the leader of the pirates, from what I can see, appears to be a woman. Considering this was 1910 and women’s suffrage was still a decade away, this is either a very bold move on Booth’s part, making a telling statement, or I guess could also be viewed as the belief that women on board ship are always bad luck. She must be the captain though, because as everyone else, including the hostages, scramble clear and run when the submarine crashes to earth, she folds her arms, remains in the hatchway and waits till the thing explodes, literally going down with her vessel.

Like many early animators and film-makers, Booth gave it all up in 1915 and got into the advertising business, where he invented a method called “Flashing Film Ads: unique colour effects in light and movement.” Paul had already moved on to other things by 1910, five years previous, but is remembered fondly by animators, and when you look at the work he put out that’s not at all surprising. But he had many irons in the fire, and neither cinematography nor animation were the ones he wanted to handle.

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Trollheart

James Stuart Blackton (1875-1941)

Another Englishman who can be truly said to be one of the godfathers of animation, Blackton produced most of his work in the USA, so may erroneously sometimes be considered an American animator, but he was born in Sheffield in England. He worked with Thomas Edison and set up the American Vitagraph Company, one of the first motion picture companies in America. Eventually the company was bought out by Warner Bros. Blackton produced some animated films that are recognised today as the finest examples of clever stop-motion film, including “The Enchanted Drawing” (1900) in which Blackton draws a picture of a fat man and then beside him a bottle and a glass. He then takes the glass and bottle from the canvas and drinks the beer, later also drawing a top hat on the man which he takes and wears. The expression of the drawing changes too. It’s really quite remarkable for the time.

His other major stop-motion films (not strictly animation but using it in some scenes) are “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (1906) and “The Haunted Hotel” (1907), both of which illustrate the technique well, especially the latter, which allows the creation of ghosts on the screen. “Humorous Phases” shows two faces, one man one woman, reacting to each other, They smile, wink, and when the man blows cigar smoke at the woman and obscures her completely (just before she makes a disapproving frown) Blackton erases them both and creates a new, full-figure sketch of man who bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain rotund director of suspense films! Good evening…

“Haunted Hotel” seems to show ghosts writhing in the smoke from the chimney as the short opens, then the house and a tree outside it both animate, the windows and doors of the former becoming a face. Inside the hotel, objects move, confusing and annoying the weary traveller, and then in an action which surely Disney must have robbed for Fantasia twenty years later, bread cuts itself and coffee pours itself out and then a sheet runs comes out of the milk jug and dances around. The animation is exceptionally smooth and seamless for the era we’re talking about here, and it’s no wonder all of these early films are now in the Library of Congress, preserved for future generations.



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 the abovementioned 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 happened, yes, but you understand what was 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 staightened 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.


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 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 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.

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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 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.

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”.

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Cat Burglar?

Before we move in, 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 wold 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.

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Part Two: The Golden Age of Animation

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

Giants of the Golden Age: Drawing the Future of Animation

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

Leon Schlesinger (1884 - 1949) was a movie producer who ran the gargantuan Warner Bros. studios, and truth to tell, the movie giant wasn’t really looking to get into the cartoon business as such. Cartoons didn’t sell. But they wanted to combat Disney’s monopoly on “shorts”. A “short” was a cartoon or cartoons that would run before a movie, essentially either “warming the audience up” for the main feature or, as was often the case, allowing latecomers not to miss the movie, as they could hear the sounds of the cartoon and knew the main film was next. I have fond memories myself of listening outside as my mother paid for the tickets and the booming roar of an anvil falling on Tom the cat, or the “Meep-meep!” of the Roadrunner, while the pounding frenetic music that accompanied these cartoons thundered out from behind the swinging cinema doors, and grabbing her coat in an effort to hurry her up, whining “Ma! We’re missing the cartoons!” For kids of my age (seven, eight maybe) often the cartoons were what we went to see more than the actual movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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