Part One: Early Animation: Forefathers, Godfathers and Wizards
Timeline: 1911-1914
As I said in the introduction, I don't really consider all animation to be cartoons, and my intention is to keep away from movie animation, but in order to properly position the history of television cartoons it would appear to me necessary, even vital, to look back to how they originally came to be. After all, television cartoons were not invented on telly, but began life in the only way people could see them, which was on the silver screen. Often used as a “short” to prepare people for the main movie, they became very popular and although it was Walt Disney who first really took the reins, as we shall see shortly, and made the cartoon a separate and important event rather than just a backup for a film, he was not the first to animate drawings. That honour goes to a man by the name of Winsor McCay, and he had three important animations out before Uncle Walt was even thinking about that mouse.
Little Nemo or
Winsor McCay: The Famous Cartoonist of the NY Herald and his Moving Comics (1911)
As a way of introducing what would basically be the first ever cartoon, Winsor McCay, who as you can see from the above subtitle worked as a cartoonist for the
New York Herald, and in fact worked under William Randolph Hearst, the supposed inspiration and model for the protagonist in Orson Welles's classic movie
Citizen Kane decided to shoot much of the movie in live action, setting up the story whereby he bets a group of laughing colleagues that he can animate drawings. Although the film is over eleven minutes long, the actual animation sequence lasts barely four, and is nothing more than a flip-book like we all used to use and make as children (didn't we?) but it's easy to scoff at this now. When you think though that this was just after really the turn of the twentieth century, and that actual movies were yet in their infancy, it's quite an amazing feat. Deaf to the laughter of his peers, McCay promises to produce four thousand drawings by the next month, and by showing the drawings through a Vitagraph camera he does exactly what he boasted he would, animating the drawings and making them move.
It's truly remarkable. This is 1911, remember, when there were no editing, special or indeed
any effects, and yet this film really fools you into thinking, not only that the characters on the paper move, but that they do so seamlessly. And they don't just move up and down or left to right: there's a whole story being played out here, even allowing Nemo himself to “draw” a princess for himself, present her with a seat in a dragon's mouth which then bears the two of them away. And because he has drawn all the pictures with coloured ink, this is, in a very real sense, not only the first animated film, but the first
colour animated film! At least twenty years before movies had colour. Amazing. Just totally amazing.
(You can skip to about 8:45 for the animation)
I know you'll look at it and say it's crude by today's standards, and I guess it is, but remember this is one hundred years old! And it's almost completely flawless in its motion. Even the early silent movies jerked and missed frames; this is totally seamless. My hat would be off to this guy, if I wore a hat.
Not satisfied with that, he went on to produce another “animated movie” the next year, this one being totally silent (no music) and in black and white but just as impressive.
How a Mosquito Operates is another classic of early animation by this man, who can surely be called nothing short of a genius?
But his
piece de resistance would come with
Gertie the Dinosaur, produced in 1914, and the last of his animations before Hearst put his foot down and ordered him to concentrate on his day job, drawing cartoons for the newspaper. How a man like Hearst could fail to see the potential in McCay is just staggering.
Gertie is even better than the other two films, with McCay actually integrating himself somehow into the animation, in such a way as to make it look like he climbs on the dinosaur's back and it takes him for a ride! Unbelievable!
Even more stunning: this man who had basically invented a whole new system of animation – virtually, in fact, invented animation itself – refused to hoard his secret or protect his methods. “Any idiot that wants to make a couple thousand drawings for a few hundred feet of film is welcome to join the club”, he said, and never patented his idea. His last major work was the first record of the sinking of the
Lusitania in 1915 by the German Navy. It's an amazing piece of work, again, this time requiring no less than 25,000 drawings, and really comes to life on the screen. It's of course not a cartoon, but a serious animation, again positioning McCay at the very top of his field, a field with few if any others in it at his time.
McCay declared himself – probably deservedly – as the “Originator and inventor of animated cartoons”, but during a meeting with other animators he deplored the way these men were turning his “art” into a “trade”. He died in 1934 as a result of a cerebral embolism. It would not at all, I believe, be hyperbole to call this man the father of cartoons, and he certainly set the ball rolling, a ball others would pick up and run with over the next few years.