Neapolitan

When you get to Mickey Mouse, please let it be known that it was actually Ub Iwerk that was the one who originated the character.

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Trollheart

Yes I'm just reading that the the moment. He wasn't Disney's first creation though, again to my surprise. Stay tuned...

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Neapolitan

Read? Who has time to read, let alone find time to read and write copious amounts of journals. Do yourself a favour and just watch the documentary "The Hand Behind The Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story "

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Trollheart

Timeline: 1924-1927

If there's anybody here who does not recognise this face, or at least knows the name Walt Disney, as my good friend Batty would say, fucking kill yourself. You don't deserve to live. Almost single-handedly (yes yes, Neapolitan: I'm getting to him, don't worry!) changing the face of animation forever, Walt Disney originally worked with his brother Roy as an animator for Winkler Pictures and later distributor Universal Studios, who could see the trend in cartoons developing with the popularity of Felix the Cat and other copies. The Disneys had tried selling some of their own animation but it had not been a successful or profitable enough venture, forcing them to work for the abovementioned. When disputes arose over pay, they left and formed The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studios, soon renamed to Walt Disney Studios.

Another of my fallacies exposed. Before I began this journal I firmly believed that the first ever animated cartoon was Steamboat Willie, but even that didn't come for another nine years after Felix and five after Disney's first proper animated feature, The Alice Comedies. Combining live-action and animation in a way that would go on to become something of a theme with Disney, and in a different way to that pioneered by Winsor McCay, the original pilot, as it were, was never released but did signal the beginning of the series in 1924, a series which ran for a staggering fifty-seven episodes, surely unprecedented way back then. Even now, that would be considered a good run, especially for something totally new. Alice (played by three different actresses during the series' run from 1924 to 1927, would have adventures with her cat Julius (who, as you can see, looks suspiciously similar to our Felix, though apparently this was intentional, presumably to “cash in” on the little cat's mass appeal), and no doubt the idea of mixing a live human actress with moving drawings certainly caught the attention.

Though Alice's Wonderland was never officially released, through the magic of YouTube you can sample it here. You can already see McCay's idea of using the medium of cartoons to allow fantastic things like bodies stretching to impossible lengths and contorting to impossible shapes, as the two cats on the table dance, and of course Sullivan continued and improved on this with Felix, allowing him almost limitless possibilities. The idea is stretched further here, as Julius, on the drawing board, tries to poke a real cat with his cartoon sword. The real cat, of course, sees and hears nothing and is unmoved, but it's very clever, especially when Julius scratches his head, wondering why his little sword is having no effect on the newcomer. The boxing match between the two cats also features what I believe to be the first use of that “cloud of fists and legs”, you know the sort of thing, when cartoon characters are fighting and it's just a whirling vortex out of which you can see heads, hands, feet?

Quite long at just over twelve minutes, as I say this gave birth to the long-running series which did not get going until a year later, and here are some examples of those.



The Alice Comedies ran until 1927, when Walt Disney responded to Universal Studios' eagerness to “get in on the cartoon game” and created the little guy below.


No, it's not an early sketch of that mouse, though I have to admit the similarities are quite stunning. This was the very first proper animated character created by Disney to have his own series, (as in, without any live-action actor or scenes) and he was called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Doesn't really look like a rabbit, you say? Take it up with Walt. Oh wait, you can't. So suck it.

Oswald (created as a rabbit due to a glut of cartoon cats in the wake of the success of Felix), like his famous descendant, survives to this day. Originally hitting the screens in 1927, just as The Alice Comedies came to an end, he went one step further than Felix or Julius, as Walt Disney wanted to create a character with his own distinct personality. I always felt Felix was a free-spirited individual who danced to his own drum, but people a whole lot more knowledgeable than me contend that Oswald was the first true anthropomorphic character who wasn't there just to “hang gags on”, so what do I know? At any rate, Oswald was not a hit right off, and had to be redesigned for his second outing, Trolley Troubles. As an aside, it's interesting how the idea of alliteration had pervaded even the earliest animation, with Felix's first short (as Master Tom) being titled Feline Follies and his next Musical Mews, a tradition that would go on to become a characteristic and mainstay of cartoons for decades to come. I wonder if it makes something more attractive, hearing two words that begin with the same letter? Or funnier? Or was there even a reason? At any rate, it became the standard for a long time.

Immediately the piece begins you can see that Disney is looking to Sullivan for inspiration, as it reads almost like a Felix cartoon, with elements of the fantastic and the absurd in abundance. Polishing the trolley with a cloth, Oswald then throws it behind him and it becomes his bobtail, the wheels of the trolley do that sort of running-in-place motion that would become the standard for characters as they prepared to run (attended by a round of bongo drums or some sort of percussion), almost as if they're winding up to let go, and a literally impossible number of passengers are taken on, given the trolley's tiny dimensions. But this is, or would be, cartoons, and you didn't have to explain anything. Everything was possible if you could think of it or imagine it, and no logic was required. Making people laugh, being clever and innovative was all that was needed to make a cartoon successful. As the trolley runs over wider and narrower tracks it becomes correspondingly wider or narrower to accommodate them, stretching and then scrunching inwards; a cow on the line which refuses to move is gone under by the trolley, which uses it as a kind of tunnel . For once in the film, logic and science are used; as the track climbs steeply upwards, Oswald finds he cannot control its ascent and the trolley begins to slide back down, and when he encounters a goat who butts him, Oswald uses this by harnessing the goat via a pole to him and goading him to butt him. Of course, once they reach the summit and plunge down the other side rollercoasterlike, the thing is out of control and flings passengers out left, right and centre as it careens along.

Into a series of tunnels the trolley hurtles (handy for the animator, as several frames are totally black as the train enters the darkness!) and Oswald pulls off his foot and kisses it (geddit? Lucky rabbit's foot?) as he prays to be delivered. In the end, the out of control trolley screams off the side of the mountain and into a lake, and Oswald punts away to safety on a raft. I assume all his erstwhile passengers have either been thrown clear prior to the train leaving the tracks or have drowned, but in what would become typical cartoon fashion, nobody asks the question: after all, they're just line drawings, aren't they?

Becoming unhappy with his lot at Universal Studios in 1928 Walt Disney decided to leave, allowing Universal to keep Oswald but designing a new character over whom he would retain control as he set up his own studios. But although he would create the first true animated film with synchronised sound, there is one other we have to look at before we trace the evolution of the character who would completely redefine and transform the world of animation.

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Trollheart

Later famous for Betty Boop and Popeye, Max Fleischer had a different approach to animation compared to the likes of Walt Disney or even Winsor McCay, in that his technique tended to be less refined and more jerky, and his cartoons were not merely to entertain but often tackled adult issues and were on the whole darker and more mature than anything that was around at the time, or would be for some considerable time. His perhaps most famous early animation, preceding Disney's by two full years, was My Old Kentucky Home, released in 1926 and featuring a cartoon dog blowing a trumpet and encouraging the viewer to sing the words to the old nineteenth-century song. Although crude, even by the standards Disney would set down from the off (cruder even than Oswald or, in some ways, Felix) , this animation was important as it was the first to successfully synchronise audio to the animation, so that when the dog says”Follow the bouncing ball and join in everyone,” you can follow the shape of his mouth as the words are spoken.

Fleischer had pioneered the concept of “follow the bouncing ball” which would become a staple in animation, jumping in time with the music from word to word in a prehistoric version of karaoke. Of course, as an animation this one is boring (although I can only get an excerpt from it, and don't know if there was more than there is here, a mere fifty seconds) but it did establish an important precedent.


Paul Terry (who would go on to produce Terrytoons, one of the most less successful cartoon studios of the twentieth century, even though it did produce memorable characters such as Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse and Deputy Dawg) also brought an animation with sound to the screen a mere month before Disney stole the limelight with their cartoon. Terry's was called Dinner Time and featured what looks to be a crow (some sort of bird anyway) seeking his dinner. After unsuccessfully trying to catch a worm, he is then almost eaten by a cat as he stands on telephone wires and the cat leans out of the window of a building, trying to reel him in. Eventually the cat does catch him, but the bird flies off, taking the cat with him. The cat lets go, and clings on to the wires, but the bird returns and cuts them with his beak. As the cat falls we see ghostly images of each of his nine lives leaving him. He hits the ground, then climbs back up the nine lives, using them as stairs, to get back in the window from which he fell out.

Next we follow the adventures of a small dog, who stops at a lake and with a bone in his mouth sees his reflection holding a bone. In the improbable logic of the world of cartoons, the dog jumps into the lake, takes the reflection's bone and now has two! And so it goes on. You can see in the crude drawings the ancestors of later Popeye, and the paper used is curiously yellow, though that could be age. Still, none of the other, older cartoons looked faded. Anyway, the clip here will give you an idea, but I have to say, I don't see anything in the way of sound synchronisation, other than sound effects and the odd voice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the cartoon did not endear itself to audiences, and a month later everything changed, forever.

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Note: I've decided to change the way I approach this history. Originally, I had intended concentrating on television cartoons and just mentioning in passing its progenitors in the cinema. It's now become clear to me that there is too much of a wealth of detail and quality there for me to ignore it all, or most of it, so for now I will continue the history of cinema animation, up until I hit the advent of television, after which I will then concentrate solely on that. For now though, we've reached that point after which nothing, on television or in the cinema, would ever be the same.
Timeline: 1928-1939

Disney's first true creation, and his most famous and enduring, Mickey Mouse was originally created as a replacement for Disney's previous character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who had been co-opted by Universal Studios and kept by them when Disney left, furious at being asked to take a pay cut and being told he had no rights over the character he had designed. Turning to his friend Ub Iwerks, he asked him to draw some preliminary sketches for a new character, and after several failed attempts Mortimer Mouse was born. Disney's wife, however, disliking the name, convinced him to change it to Mickey. The first outing for the new Disney character was 1928's Plane Crazy, beginning yet another tradition in animation, where puns would be used in titles (plain crazy/plane crazy) which also competently described the subject of the cartoon. This feature however was not screened in its original silent format, but reissued later with sound.

It features, perhaps interestingly given the character who would become Disney's second most famous and popular, a duck, in the very first few seconds, and indeed from the annoyed and irritated way the duck chases a worm, you can see the very embryonic idea for Donald. Reading a book entitled “How to fly”, Mickey decides to climb aboard an aeroplane and (for some reason to the strains of “Hail to the Chief”!) attempting to emulate his hero “Lindy” (Charles Lindbergh, the first man ever to complete a transatlantic flight) but has no luck, the plane crashing before it can even get off the ground. Undeterred, and again stretching – literally – the ever-flexible physics of cartoons, he makes a plane out of a car and climbs aboard. The feature also introduces his longtime girlfriend, Minnie, who hands him a horseshoe for good luck. They get airborne but Mickey is thrown out of the plane, leaving Minnie sitting in the back, unable to control it as it chases him. Hilarity ensues. A cow gets pulled into the story, and literally dragged along for the ride, and finally Mickey makes it back into the plane, reunited with his girlfriend.

The use of perspective here is nothing short of amazing, and another thing Disney would pioneer, the anthropomorphisation of inanimate objects – here, as the plane flies towards a high steeple, it concertinas down, like a person ducking - is introduced. On regaining access to the plane however Mickey is not greeted with open arms by Minnie, who is annoyed at him (presumably for being so reckless and leaving her in a rather frightening position) and as they argue she falls out of the plane, but is able to use her bloomers as a parachute. Mickey is not so lucky, crashing and bouncing off several branches of a tree, the final insult being that the lucky horseshoe Minnie gave him hits him on the head, and when he throws it away angrily comes back, boomerang-like, to knock him out.

I can't really speculate on why nobody picked this up at the time. It was way ahead of its time, far better than anything that had come before. It really was out on its own. Perhaps the somewhat boorish attitude of Mickey towards Minnie put distributors off, feeling they might be seen to be endorsing or condoning such attributes? Well, probably more likely nobody wanted to give an unknown a chance, but that all changed a few months later.

If only through parody, just about everyone is going to have seen some version of this original cartoon, and it begins with a paddle steamer on a river, with the action quickly cutting to a closeup shot of Mickey at the helm. He whistles the tune that is playing, and once more Disney's anthropomorphisation of inanimate objects shows itself, as the three whistles on the boat all have mouths and seem to sing out as they let off steam. Indeed, only two in fact, while the third remains silent until kicked by the second, and then it whistles. Again a feature that would become typical of Disney, the whistles are arranged in order of descending height, so that you get the definite feeling that the smaller one is the baby, and so a family of inanimate objects is already implanted in your mind, a family with actual personalities. This I believe was unique; I haven't seen evidence of this sort of thing in any of the previous animations, not even Plane Crazy. Suddenly a large creature (whom we could perhaps take to be Mickey's boss, Pete, and who surely was the template for Popeye's nemesis Brutus/Bluto) comes in and starts hassling Mickey, making it clear that either Mickey should not be piloting the boat, or that he, Pete, is now in charge. Mickey is sent on his way.

Out on the deck, he is laughed at by a parrot and throws a bucket at it in irritation. When the steamer arrives at the jetty it does not reverse in, but simply lifts up its stern, as it it were made of rubber, and plants itself down beside the quay to load up the animals waiting there. As they leave, Minnie appears, having missed the boat, but Mickey winches her aboard. During the confusion though a goat eats her sheet music and her violin, but Mickey discovers that he can use the goat as a barrel organ, by turning its tail. An impromptu band is set up and a musical number ensues, including the classic proverbial swinging of a cat, which Mickey, again perhaps setting the template for later shows like Tom and Jerry and Sylvester, turns the tables on by reversing the traditional roles ascribed to both animals.

Annoyed at this frivilous waste of time, Pete grabs him and throws him in the bilges, setting him to peeling potatoes (an old army punishment, known, I think, as KP, though don't ask me why: Kitchen Patrol? Kitchen Punishment?) and the parrot who was laughing at him before returns, but Mickey, annoyed, throws a potato at him and knocks the bird out the porthole, laughing as he does so.

So what is the big deal about Steamboat Willie? I think the answer lies in one word: synchronisation. Everything is this cartoon is perfectly matched, from the voices speaking the mostly unintelligible words to the music, and the reactions of the various items in the short. Everything, well how I can put this other than to say, everything bounces? It's like the whole screen is constantly in motion. I know Family Guy and Futurama have parodied this Disney style, but it's quite accurate parody. Everything, from the ship almost dancing along the river to the whistles to the musical instruments and the animals, everything seems to be constantly – constantly – in motion. Even when Mickey sits on the floor at the end and laughs, things around him are moving.

And not just moving: moving in time, moving in concert, moving in – yes you guessed it – synchronisation. It's not so much like drawings animated and given a soundtrack as a finely tuned machine with every working part performing in perfect and absolute accord. Really incredible. The level of detail, the clever use of animals as musical instruments, the, well the animation of just about everything onscreen, it all works so well and it's really hard to watch it without feeling your head bob or your toes tap. No wonder it was such a huge hit.

I think it's also important that, like Plane Crazy – and indeed, Trolley Troubles – before it, the protagonist is not given a happy ending. In Plane Crazy Mickey's plane crashes, in Trolley Troubles the same happens to Oswald and he is left to drift to shore, and here Mickey's put-together orchestra is soon put a stop to and he is sentenced to peel spuds. So he doesn't win, and yet at the end of this, unlike the previous cartoon, he is laughing, mostly at the plight of the parrot, true, but possibly also at the absurdity of it all, with almost a sly wink to the audience, as if to say “Isn't this crazy?” It was, and it is, but damn if it's not funny too, and that's probably what set this apart from the failed Plane Crazy. In this one, Mickey doesn't exhibit any – shall we say, nasty traits – indeed, he helps Minnie when she misses the steamer, and he's very much more lovable, so of course audiences took to him.

It wouldn't be long before he would be the most loved and famous cartoon character in history, kickstarting a multi-billion global empire for the man who had created him.

And Ub Iwerks.

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UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA
Of course, this is not just going to be the history of American animation, and while the USA was the forerunner and leader for a very long time in animation – both on film and later TV – there were others working in the field, and we will of course be examining their work. However, at this stage I can only find a small handful of animations produced outside of America (if you can trust Wikipedia) so I'm going to talk about them now, before I refer back to Disney.
Timeline: 1917-1937

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

Oh, I also found this:

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

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

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



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

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

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

It's kind of hard to get a feel for what's going on, given that you're basically looking at shadows, and the fact that the text is, of course, as you would expect, all in German doesn't help either. There's no speech, just music as a background, though I do note one figure (a genie perhaps, as Aladdin is mentioned?) does manage to look quite scary, so that's quite a feat in and of itself. Nevertheless, I find myself unwilling to sit through the whole thing, but you can if you want, as I have dropped the video in here. You can also read the full story, including the plot, here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ad..._Prince_Achmed


Although Wiki has this under the Nazi banner – presumably because they were in power when it was created – I can find hardly any information about it, never mind anything to suggest it was part of Nazi propaganda, so I'm keeping it under the general German flag, and not under the Swastika, as I will be categorising later actual Nazi propaganda films. This was released in 1937 and is called The Seven Ravens (Die siebe Raben) but other that that, and the fact that it was a stop-motion animation, based on the fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, I got nothing.


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

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

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

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



Not to be outdone, those crazy Russians were also at it. Well, technically they were Soviets back then, as Russia was part of the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the world's biggest bastion of Communism. Small wonder then that when Alexander Ptushko and his team of animators reimagined the classic story Gulliver's Travels they would put a Communist twist on it. I've no intention of going into the skewed politics of it all – where capitalism was, typically, seen as the evil enemy and glorious mother Russia the hero etc etc – but if you want to sit through over an hour of it, here you go.

What is important is that it was the first animation to make extensive use of puppetry, before even Ladislas Starevich above, coming out in 1935, two years before Le Roman de Renard although apparently only begun two years after the French film. I guess that's what happens when you can call on the might of the Kremlin to provide your musicians and your technology. Maybe. Anyway it made it first, and so has gone down in history as the first full-length puppet animation.


Although there is no surviving copy of The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le Avventure di Pinocchio), because it was never completed, it deserves a mention not only because it would also have beaten Snow White had it been released, but it takes as its subject matter another fairy tale that Walt Disney would make famous, the puppet who longs to be a real boy, Pinocchio. Production issues bedevilled the project, which had a budget (surely undreamed-of at the time) of one million (and that's Pounds, not Lira!) and it was abandoned. All I can offer you are some stills from its Wiki page, the only frames that survived this ill-fated attempt to be the first Italian feature-length animation.



The only other example of early Italian animation seems to have been based on the Three Musketeers, (for whatever reason it was called The Four Musketeers ([i[I quattro moschettieri[/i])though sadly, again, this has not survived or is at least not known to be available. Interesting though, as it was another puppet animation and apparently used over eight thousand actual puppets! Talk about pulling a lot of strings to get things done! Sorry...

That more or less covers it for non-American full-length animated movies before 1940. Most of the forties was of course dominated by America, mostly Disney's works, but there were a few who worked outside of the US. However, given that after the release of Snow White there wasn't too much interest in non-American animation, I'll stop this section here for now, and then pick it up later, when we've paid proper tribute to Walt and his team.

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From 1929 to 1939 Disney ventured into the era of the emerging technology known as “Technicolor”, which allowed him to move beyond the boundaries of black and white cartoons and into the vibrant, bright and more realistic world of colour. Technicolor, a process of saturating film with colour to make it look more real, actually had its genesis way back in 1916, but only became really popular and widely-used from about 1922, becoming the standard for Hollywood studios for about thirty years. It was used in such classic live-action movies as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, and of course by Disney as soon as he was able to integrate it into his animation process.

This resulted in some of the first colour cartoons, a series of seventy-five mostly unconnected shorts that if anything would be mirrored mostly by the likes of Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies in the 50s and 60s, all going under the umbrella of "Silly Symphonies" (more alliteration, you see?). These shorts were not only important due to being the first actual colour cartoons as we came to know them, but also for introducing, in The Wise Little Hen, a certain duck, who performed a sailor's hornpipe and danced his way into audience's hearts, later becoming the second favourite Disney character, rivalling (sometimes literally; they had several face-offs) Mickey Mouse himself.


Donald Duck (Created 1934)

I've always preferred Donald personally. Unlike Mickey, he's not a goody two-shoes (or in his case, I guess, two-feet!) and he tends to get into, and cause, the kind of trouble you expect from a cartoon character. He's the disruptive influence, the one who disagrees with most things, the sulker, the complainer, the one who loses his rag most. And yet he's an amazingly sympathetic character. I think it's because he has flaws, and doesn't try to hide them, that we (or at least I) love him so much. His iconic voice, provided by actor Clarence Nash (1934-1985) and later Tony Anselmo, says everything about his personality. He talks like someone with a kazoo in their mouth, and when he loses his temper it's hilarious to watch, not just his voice but also the way he dances in rage.

For whatever reason, Donald was conceived as wearing a sailor's suit, though to my knowledge he has never been to sea nor served in the navy. Donald was introduced to Mickey in "Orphan's Benefit" (1934) in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to sing Mary Had a Little Lamb and Little Boy Blue, but is heckled by the orphans and flies into what would become one of his characteristic fits of rage. Donald Duck had arrived! A few years later he was starring in his own film series, premiering with Don Donald, which, despite its title, was not a gritty expose of Donald's time with the Sicilian Mafia, but instead portrayed him as a Mexican duck, who tries to win his lady love, Donna Duck, soon to be recast as Daisy Duck. Although the movie was tagged as “Mickey Mouse presents...” it was clear this was a star in the making, and Donald would go on to star in over fifty short and feature-length movies, as well as become a mascot for the armed forces during World War II, and eventually making the leap to the new medium of television. In 1938, only four years after he had been introduced and one since his second appearance on film, Donald was rated more popular with audiences than Mickey.


Destined to change the face of film animation forever, and despite the few other, mostly unknown to the general public, movies that predate it, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is – mostly deservedly – accepted as being the first full-length feature animation. Certainly, it was the first to use colour and sound, and unsurprisingly it became a massive hit. With an original budget of just under one and a half million dollars (surely the biggest budget for an animation at that period?) it has so far made back over four hundred times that figure. The movie was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Musical and snagged Disney his first Oscar. It was also the beginning of a, shall we say, more gentle or friendly interpretation of fairy tales and other stories, emphasising the good things about them and encouraging children who went to see the movies to sing along with the many songs that would be written specially for them. This was no retelling of the Brothers Grimm's fairy story, but what would later become known as the Disneyfication of the tale.

With its own specially-written soundtrack – and not just music, but actual songs too, that the characters sung, such as Heigh Ho, Some day my Prince will come and Whistle While You Work – this movie made further history by being the first to have its own soundtrack. Such a thing had not been even considered before. The further anthropomorphisation of animals took a huge leap forward here, where even birds sang and performed human-like tasks (I can't recall, as I was apparently so scared by the Wicked Witch that I had to be taken out of the cinema – hey! Give me a break! I was thirty-four at the time! I mean, like, five. Yeah, five – but I think they tied up Snow White's hair with ribbons?) and forest creatures helping Snow White and the dwarves. Creatures and animals were beginning to be seen, at least in cartoons, as people and not just animals, a trend that would continue, with Disney, Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes among others, all personalising their animal characters.

For the time, the animation was superb, ground-breaking. It was said (though can't be confirmed) that many of the audience, watching the characters for the first time, forgot they were watching an animation. The early days of struggling to match up voice and mouth movements were long gone now, almost in a quantum leap of improvement; what relationship does Snow White bear to Steamboat Willie, released less than ten years previous? The animation was completely fluid, everything perfectly synchronised, including the music, and the overall effect was just stunning. As a child, seeing the movie I could not of course appreciate this (also, as I mentioned above, I had to be removed from the cinema before the end: what a wimp!) but looking back on it now I can see how staggeringly real it looks, especially compared to the efforts of the others we just looked at outside of the USA. A true masterpiece, and deserves its place in cinematic and animation history.

Disney took serious liberties and artistic licence with the original story. The Grimm Brothers did not ascribe personalities or even names to their dwarves, yet here each one is named according to his character traits or disposition – Sneezy, Sleepy, Happy etc – or his perceived role, as in Dopey and Doc. In fact, Doc is the one of only two of the Seven Dwarves whose name does not end with a “y”, and the only one whose name is not an adjective. In the tale, three attempts are made by the wicked Queen on Snow White's life, but Disney only used the final – ultimately, essentially successful – one, with the poisoned apple, and the queen's death is handled differently too. Nonetheless, you have to admire and respect the man, who mortaged his house to finance the movie, a chance I'm sure he, and the world, ended up being glad he took.

As this was the first recognised full-length animated film, and it was nominated for (but did not win) an Academy Award, I guess it's safe to infer from that that it was the first animated movie to do so, and therefore has yet another place in history. It was also later added to the Library of Congress, a singular honour. Not bad for a movie many in Hollywood had sneeringly described as “Disney's folly”!

But there was a rival for his crown, and though he never quite made it as big as ol' Walt, Max Fleischer would at least make history himself by creating the first full-length animation outside of Disney, two years later.

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I think it's incumbent upon me to pause here for a moment and talk a little about not only the movies and their creators, and characters, but also the techniques which have been used in animation down the decades. As already mentioned, the first, original film animation – by Winsor McCay, back just after the turn of the century – was a simple idea based on the flicker book, whereby a series of drawings was rapidly filmed and one by one built up a moving picture. For something like this, thousands of hand-made drawings were required, and though this suited early methods it was obvious this was not going to be the standard. Who has time to draw thousands upon thousands of drawings? How many drawings would have been needed to animate something like even Steamboat Willie, never mind Snow White? This technique was vastly simplified and improved with the introduction of cel animation, which allowed the tracing of outlines onto sheets of cellulose acetate, which could then be coloured, to cut out that tedious hand-colouring required previously.

Rotoscoping, still in use today (it was used to make the lightsabers in Star Wars seem to glow) involves the tracing and removal of images called mattes – essentially silhouettes – to be used in another frame, in another scene, perhaps on a different background. Many animators frowned on this process though, as it was time-consuming and, in the early years, not particularly accurate or precise. There's also stop-motion animation, in which real objects – often puppets – are moved each frame and rephotographed to give the illusion of movement. Early stop-motion animation was not the fluid operation we see today, and could be quite choppy. Of course, virtually all of today's animation is created on computers, but we're not concerned with that here.

I hope that's made things as clear as mud for you. I'm a little confused personally about the different animation processes, which seem very complicated, but perhaps that will give you a basic idea. Anyway, on we go.


In direct response to the unexpected and overwhelming success of and popularity of Snow White, Paramount Studios were eager to hit back, and commissioned Max Fleischer, who we met previously, he having invented the “follow the bouncing ball” animation that was used on My Old Kentucky Home, and who would later go on to create favourites like Betty Boop and Popeye, to create their own full-length feature. For his subject, Fleischer looked to the works of Jonathan Swift, creating his own take on the famous classic Gulliver's Travels, released in 1939. Like its famous antecedent, this movie liberally interpreted Swift's satirical work, making it more of a love story and of course adding specially-written songs, a precedent that Snow White had begun and which would continue throughout not only Disney but most animated movies, even up to today.

An interesting point I note as the movie begins: this seems to have been the first animated movie with music where the singing was not necessarily performed by the actor who played the part. In Snow White, Adriana Caseloti played the title role and also sung all the songs Snow White had to sing, but here, at least in the case of the male role of Prince David, one actor acts and another sings. I don't know whether it was that Jack Mercer couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, wasn't allowed to sing by his union, or didn't want to sing, but his songs were performed by Lanny Ross, who was a singer.

The animation is very good, though you would still at this point give it to Disney for vibrancy and colour, and the fact that the first half-hour or so of the movie takes place at night and in the dark makes it a little hard to really rate the animation, but once you can see it in daylight it's very decent indeed. Fleischer also took on the Disney model of adding humour and comedy to the story, imbuing the movie with a pretty good incidental soundtrack apart from the actual songs. Still, even in the light, things like Gulliver's face (pictured below) show a certain sense of indefinition, and it almost looks like he's carved from stone and painted or something. Also, don't the Liliputians look suspiciously like Disney's dwarfs? Fleischer still had a way to go to catch up with his rival.

Nonetheless, given that he was only allowed an eighteen-month window from start of production to finish, I think he did very well, and the movie was a hit. Not surprisingly, really, as surely cinema-goers at this point had had their appetites well and truly whetted by Snow White and were eagerly awaiting a new animated movie. Disney would not produce another one until 1940, when he would again take the world by storm, but Paramount were savvy enough to have Gulliver's Travels hit just before Christmas 1939, and so were pretty much assured of a receptive audience.

Fleischer didn't really attempt another full-length animation for some years, running into trouble with Paramount and then the outbreak of the Second World War, but as I already mentioned, he is famous mostly for Betty Boop, Popeye and later Superman, and in due course, before we move away from film animation, we will be doing a more in-depth feature on him.

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Timeline: 1940-1941

We're back with Uncle Walt, who, fresh from his groundbreaking success with the world's first full-length animated feature, based on a fairy tale by the Grimm Brothers, decided to look again to children's tales for his next outing, this time to Italian storyteller Carlo Collodi, and his most famous story, The Adventures of Pinocchio. Having read the book while in production with Snow White, Disney loved it and immediately declared it would be the third movie they would work on, Bambi at the time being the second he intended to unleash on the public. But problems realistically animating animals in Bambi led to it being delayed, and so dropping all but the puppet's name for the title, Pinocchio was pushed to the forefront.

The original story does not make the title character as sympathetic as Disney's film did. In the story, he kills the cricket who would become Jiminy, his conscience, and is later attended by its ghost. He is very precocious, as you would expect, but quite unlikeable, and the story is, as these things invariably were before the likes of Disney got their hands on them, quite dark. This would of course never do for an American cartoon film audience, and so many aspects of the story were changed, such as the introduction of the genial Jiminy Cricket, a more endearing aspect being given to the puppet and the role of the blue fairy, who features only slightly in the original story, being upgraded to a companion of the puppet. Obviously, many songs were also written for it, as would become the norm for Disney cartoons.

In addition, due to the unexpected but very welcome success of his first feature, Disney wanted to have known celebrities voice his characters, and so Pinocchio became the first animated movie to have stars do the voices. Names which of course at this point in time mean nothing to us but who were big stars in their day were recruited: Frankie Darro, Walter Catlett, Evelyn Venable and the creator of the first ever million-selling record, “Ukelele Ike”, Cliff Edwards, were all signed up, while the voice of Pinocchio himself, due to Disney's insistence on it being a child who voiced him, went to Dickie Jones, only twelve years old but already having worked with legendary director Frank Capra (not not Franz Kafka!), though sadly the voice that would become synonymous with later cartoons (including that of Bugs Bunny), Mel Blanc, was deleted out of the movie after it was decided that his character would be a mute.

Pinocchio became the first animated feature to utilise proper effects animation, such as the sparkles from the blue fairy's wand, and the incredible underwater scenes, which were highly praised. Despite however winning two Academy Awards (the first animated movie to achieve this feat) it was not the huge box office success Disney had expected and hoped it would be, recouping less than half of its budget by 1947. Some of this was due to the onset of World War II, which left people with more important things to do than watch movies, and less money too, but though Walt was reported to have been very depressed about the initial box office returns, it of course picked up steam and to date has made over forty times its budget, earning a place in the National Film Registry and when the American Film Institute compiled their top ten best films ever in 2008, Pinocchio came second in the animation genre, beaten only by its predecessor. It is now considered one of Disney's best films.

In comparison to many of Disney's later films, which could mostly be labelled under the terms “twee”, “cloying” or “sentimental”, Pinocchio is a genuine morality tale, and though there are songs that we remember from it – mostly “When you wish upon a star” - which make it fit into what would later become unofficially known as the “Disneyfication” idea, it tends not to rely too much on jokes and clever lines, instead espousing the need for honesty, friendship and a strong work ethic. If Pinocchio wants to become a real boy, he has to work for it, and accept all the baggage that comes with that.

I couldn't say for certain, not being sufficiently knowledgeable about early Hollywood films, but as far as animated movies go, this would seem to be the one that started off a trend which would mostly continue through Disney – and other animated – movies, that of the hero and the sidekick. There's a very clear relationship established between Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket, and whether it was Baloo and Mowgli in The Jungle Book or Charlie Brown and Snoopy, from this point on a huge percentage of animated movies would feature this dynamic. For animated films at least, Walt Disney had scored yet another first.

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