Beginning of Animated Cartoons

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 192, 10 May 1940, Page 6

Beginning of Animated Cartoons

“Snow White” Not First Feature

r pHE animated cartoon is now acknowledged as an art form. In ~ New York it is taken sufficiently seriously for ti Walt Disney to hang in one of the art galleries, and recently the Museum of Modern Art there presented a “short history of the animated cartoon” in the form of a picture show. Drawings were used to simulate moving pictures long before photography became practicable. The history started witli a magic-lantern animation of 1879, covered the “primitives” before 1928 (everything before Mickey Mouse was classed as a “primitive”), and ended with “Mother Goose Goes to Hollywood,” a 1937 product of Walt Disney.

A TRUE history of animation, how- ** ever, would have to take in considerably more territory, remarks Frank Nugent in the “New York Times,” beginning with an acknowledgment of indebtedness to Peter Mark Roget, the Frenchman who, in 1826, discovered the theory of "persistence of vision” —the fact that eyes retain an image of a picture after the picture has gone—which is the basic principle of all movies. It would have to refer to Plateau’s Phenakistoscope and Horner’s Daedalum. or Wheel of the Devil, and to the Zoetrope, or Wheel of Life—all variations of the same principle—with a sequence of pictures mounted on a cylinder, set in motion and scanned through a slit in the frame or through a peephole. It Was on April 23, 1567, that William Lincoln took the Wheel of Life to America.

Although there were several animated lantern-slide devices during the next 30-odd years and although Melies employed a form of animation in his "Trip to the Moon” and other early fantasies, it was not until 1006 that the first animated cartoon on film appeared. This was “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces,” made by J. Stuart Blackton for Vitagraph, a one-reeler, compounded of about 3000 . drawings and featuring such novelties as a man rolling his eyes and blowing smoke at his sweetheart and a dog jumping over a hoop. Emil Cohl. the French cartoon pioneer, was only a year behind Blackton. The museum had the second of his cartoons in its programme, a crudely, almost childishly scratched cartoon —white lines against a black background—of a gendarme, a thug and a pair of householders. Winsor McCay, creator of several popular comic strips, entered the field in 1911 with “Little Nemo,” a onereeler of 4000 drawings; followed it with a shorter cartoon, “How a Mosquito Bites,” and topped both with “Gertie, a Trained Dinosaur,” a durable classic which the museum showed. Mr. McCay went on a vaudeville tour with his cartoons, which were a bit on the cute side —“Come out, Gertie, and make a pretty bow” is a typical subtitle—and was emboldened to make a feature-length dramatic cartoon, “The Sinking of the Lusitania,” which was released as a war propaganda picture on August 15, 1918. It was made up of 25,000 drawings “on gelatin” and represented 22 months’ work, Mr.“McCay said. (So it appears Mr. Disney’s “Snow White” was not the first feature-length cartoon after all.) The headache of early cartoon making was 'the circumstance that each drawing had to be entire, repeating both character and background. John R. Bray, another of the pioneers, thought of placiug a transparent background over the character drawing. Earl Hurd went him one better by patenting the device, now in general use, of drawing the moving character on a transparent medium and placing that before an opaque background. Bray and Hurd combined in 1917, but before that—on June 12, 1913—Bray’s cartoon, “The Artist’s Dream,” with a llea-troubled dachshund as its central character, had won great popular success and is credited now with rescuing the cartoon from Its low estate and dignifying it as an established branch of the screen.

The field became crowded after that. Sydney Smith with his “Old Doc Yak,” Wallace Carlson of “Dreamy Dubb,” Paul Terry’s ‘‘Farmer Al Falfa,” Leslie Fenton’s “Hodge Podge,’’ and Max Fleischer’s “Out of the Inkwell’’ series were popular long before Mickey Mouse was born. Gregory La Cava did the medium a favour by ordering his staff artists ou the International Features Syndicate to increase the drawings from 2000 to 3500 per reel,

making ror smoother line, reducing the stiff, angular movements of the characters. He ruled out the “bubble”— the little cloud effect containing a subtitle that would float up from a character’s mouth when he said something. Mutt and Jeff (on the Museum programme), the Katzenjammer Kids, Tad’s Indood Sports, Happy Hooligan and Bringing Up Father made their animated cartoon appearance. All this was the prelude to a lanky young fellow called Walt Disney, who started in St. Louis and Kansas City with “Laugh-O-Grams” (which weren’t really funny), went to Hollywood and made a few others (some so bad he wouldn’t let them out),and finally invented Mickey Minnie, Pluto, Donald Duck, the Silly Symphonies, Dopey and Jiminy Cricket; and, parenthetically, put the animated cartoon on au art basis. Short cartoons take from 12,000 to 15,000 drawings apiece now instead of their former 2000 or 3000; feature cartoons may require as many as 250.000 (“Snow White” did) to “The Sinking of the Lusitania’s” 25,000. They are in colour now, with scores by Tscliaikovsky and recordings by Stokowski.