UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA (Part II)
Timeline: Approx 1930 - 1945
So what was happening while Walt Disney, Max Fleischer and their contemporaries in the USA were working their magic? Well, quite a little actually. In Britain, where animators were restricted mostly to writing advertisements, a few ideas were thrown about. Anson Dyer tried to animate the adventures of Sam Small, a soldier who was always getting into trouble (perhaps a precursor to such later favourites as The Sad Sack and Beetle Bailey?) and whose deeds had been described by comedian Stanley Holloway in stage monologues, but his ideas didn't really fit with the drawled, slow vocal style of Holloway and his first attempt,
Sam and His Musket (1935) was a failure. You have to give him some credit for ambition though: a full four years before Walt Disney would produce the world's first full-colour animation feature, Dyer was using colour in his failed venture. His next attempt, 1937's
The King with the Terrible Temper fared better, but I can find no footage of either. Meanwhile, a cartoonist working for the
Daily Express newspaper tried to animate one of his characters, a horse called Steve, but was unequal to the task.
Britain may not have had much in the way of indigenous animators, but for whatever reason it became a focal point for many foreign ones, among them Lotte Reiniger, of whom we have already heard, Hector Hoppin, John Lye and John Halas, the last of whom would become famous for his Halas and Bachelor cartoon studios. It was, however, the influence, however backdoor, of Disney that kickstarted British animation, when David Hand, who had worked on and directed both
Bambi and the iconic
Snow White joined the newly-formed GB Animation and produced the short-lived series
Animaland. Unfortunately, though able to animate, Hand was no genius at giving characters personality, so that the squirrels who starred in his series were wooden and uninteresting, and he returned, despondent, to America in 1949.
In fairness, this is what I read, but looking now at one (entitled
The Cuckoo (1948)) I don't agree at all. Yes, the narrator is very English and it's treated more as a nature documentary in the way a lot of later live-action Disney films would copy, but these birds have character. I also note this may be the first time that feet-running-in-a-circle to indicate a character about to run (you know the one, accompanied by someone banging coconuts or something) had been used, at least outside of the USA. Then again, I suspect Hand would just have brought that in his “bag of tricks” to be used 'cross the water. Nevertheless, I don't consider this cartoon bad. You can watch it yourself below.
Another who tried and failed was George Moreno, an American who had studied under Max and Dave Fleischer. His series,
Bubble and Squeak, about a London taxi driver and his anthropomorphic taxi, though it only lasted five episodes, is possibly the first example of an inanimate object being given a personality – his taxi is born as a little tiny car as he waits anxiously outside the delivery room, and has a happy face and does that concertina-movement that would again become some popular later on, and that had been somewhat pioneered already by Disney in both
Plane Crazy and earlier when Oswald the Lucky Rabbit had his
Trolley Troubles. An interesting aside here, not important but hell, I'll mention it anyway cos I'm that anal: as his mates celebrate the birth of Mister Bubble's taxi in the pub, they all sing
For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, but the American final line in this song is different to the British one. We sing “And so say all of us” and you guys sing “Which nobody can deny.” Now, for reasons I can't work out – surely he could have just asked an English person how they sing it? - he obviously didn't want to use the Americanised version but didn't know how the English one went, so made up a new line: “A jolly good fellow is he.” Odd.
Anyway, the cartoon looks to have been well made if the colour is slightly washed out and the drawing sketchier and more two-dimensional than Disney, and the humour is well handled. In one scene (the same singing scene in the pub) a huge taxi driver with a dangerous-looking eyepatch sings one of the lines in a high falsetto! Unexpected, and the kind of thing cartoons would do so well for decades. You can definitely see the influence the Fleischers had on Moreno; his characters are more exaggerated, move more almost to music, swaying, seeming to dance most of the time as opposed to Disney's often more realistic movement, and the proportions are pretty exaggerated too. Nevertheless it's a good cartoon with a clever idea and it's a pity it didn't catch on.
Len Lye (1901-1980)
Len Lye was born in Australia and spent time in beautiful Samoa (“I couldn't do much work there: it was too wonderful for a young person”) and eventually found himself in England, where with the help of grants from the London Film Society he made some animated films, among them
Brith of a Robot, which is basically a puppet animation, and
Rainbow Dance, which mixes a sort of cut-out silhouette of a human figure with animated sparkles, lights, colours and of course rainbows. Given that this is 1936 we're talking about it's impressive enough, but again light-years behind the USA. Even his 1939
Swinging the Lambeth Walk is a poor relation (a very poor one, almost bankrupt) and shows Lye's focus to be more on creating effects to music rather than true character animation. What would seem to have been his last proper animation before he returned to being a kinetic sculptor in 1949,
Free Radicals, was clever but really only from a sense of curiosity as to what could be done with single white lines on a black background to music. It's hardly what you'd call a cartoon in any sense.
1935 saw the first of the proper animations based on the Disney system come out of France, with Mimma Indelli's
La decuverte de a'Amerique (The Discovery of America), but she only had one other film produced in the forties before changing her mind and deciding instead to study art. Andre Rigal was another who worked in the field of animation but I can't find any of his material online, however it is known that he produced some short films while France was under German occupation during the Second World War, mostly about the hero, Cap'taine Sabord, and a Russian emigrant, Bogdan Zoubowitch produced
Histoire sans Paroles (Songs without words), clay figure animation was tried by Jean Painleve for
Barne-Bleu (Blackbeard) in 1938, but few of these are available to me so I can't comment on them. I'm not even sure if this is Zoubowitch's cartoon below, as that phrase brings up rather a lot of results, some of which are obviously incorrect, but this one looks about right, so you know, maybe it's it.
Paul Grimault (1905-1994)
What appears to have been the first proper colour animation to come out of France, other than Mme Indelli's effort, which I was unable to track down and so can't critique, comes from Paul Grimault, with the imaginative
Les Passengers de la Grand Ourse (1941) and seems to feature the rather fantastical idea of a ship being lifted up by a great many balloons in order to fly. The book I'm reading describes Grimault's use of colour as “sobre” and I think I would have to agree. It's mostly shades of almost sepia, with blacks and whites, but it's not monochrome: it is definitely colour, but almost washed-out colour, not as vibrant as the likes of Disney or Flesicher. The cartoon also works with the idea of the sidekick started by Fleischer, and interestingly both uses a child as the main protagonist (something which I don't think had been done before, though I could be wrong as I'm a little cartooned out, researchwise) and gives him an animal, a pet dog, as his sidekick. The dog becomes more than a pet, becomes a trusted companion and one that will both get into trouble and help get its master out of trouble, something that would develop into a running theme in many cartoons. In one scene (again, I believe this is the first time but don't drag me to court if I'm wrong – I have no money anyway) Grimault seems also to invent what we would come to see as a typical cartoon trope, though it's probably taken from real-life comedy movies, where two people back away until they bump into each other, turn around and realise they have met up. The dog here, too, certainly looks like an early base for later, better-known cartoons dogs such as Droopy, Snoopy and even to an extent everyone's favourite ghost-chasing hound, Scooby-Doo.
Actually, it's not quite balloons that help the
Grand Ourse (Great Bear) to fly; it's more a kind of an almost gyroscopic arrangement. The balloons turn clockwise around their centre, small ones on the outside and one huge one in the middle. Quite clever; almost presaging the helicopter/autogyro idea. I have no idea what the crewman they meet is meant to be though: he's long and sort of flexible with a wide midsection and almost stick-thin legs and arms, wide bulbous feet, Mickey Mouse-style white gloves and a clown's face, with what appear to be headphones or earmuffs on his head. Something that perhaps Disney based the Cards on in
Alice in Wonderland some time later, perhaps? He also never opens his eyes, so you don't see them, just his closed lashes, making him look either sleepy or benign, even when he chases the pair.
There is no speech in the cartoon, only music, though the dog barks, and it's well made, though I believe the limitations Grimault put on his drawings – the constant and in my extremely humble and uninformed opinon, overuse, of browns, yellows, terracottas, lessens its impact and makes it a little boring on the eye. The animation's pretty first-class though, apart from that, especially the scene near the end where a vulture pursues the boy. The dog is definitely the hero, saving the boy, and again beginning a precedent in which heroic animals would save their (often dim-witted) human owners.
Anthony Gross (1905-1984)
But while many foreign animators were making their way to England, some of the traffic went the other way. Anthony Gross was an Englishman who practiced his art in Paris, helped and financed by Hector Hoppin. Their
Joi de Vivre (1934) is really more typically French in style than English, with rather realistic-looking statuesque girls running, dancing and almost flying, including an impressive section where they walk along telephone wires. Though their dresses billow up and their long legs are exposed, nothing else is, not even underwear, in what might be surprising for one of the most sexually permissive societies of the twentieth century (though bear in mind, of course, that it was being drawn by a comparatively repressed Englishman!) and it's all done, as Kenny Everett used to say, in the best possible taste. It's also all done in black and white.
There's clever usage of the location. As it's a power plant they're close to (hence all the wires and transformers) when one of the girls' shoes flies off and a boy finds it, the word on the door he opens to discover the shoe, and then set off after the girls to return it, is DANGER. While this obviously is meant to warn of high voltage, you have to wonder if there wasn't a double meaning for the girls: danger in meeting boys? The two girls – though depicted as quite adult, maybe in their late teens or even early twenties – seem the spirit of innocence and carefree fun, dancing with each other as if they have not a care in the world, and as noted, there is no reference to any sexual undertone: no flash of knickers, no stocking tops, nothing titillating at all. So are these two girls, the soul of purity, about to be corrupted by the rough male presence entering their little world? They, of course, run off, thinking he is after them when all he wants to do is return the shoe, and there follow some very intricate and clever (and quite beautiful) sequences involving butterflies, wind and flowers. There's also great use of perspective here, where at one point the girls seem to have shrunk to the size of a bee, yet we see as they come closer it's just that they are, or were, far away.
You also have to wonder if famous British animator Gerald Scarfe (remember his work on Pink Floyd's “Another brick in the wall” video?) got some of his inspiration from Gross? Certainly, the way the boy walks is very reminiscent of the way the hammers walk in that video. Further on in the video, the girls strip off to take a dip in a pool, but again, there's more suggested than shown; very little in the way of actual nudity and more a basic idea of shape. In the typical disregard for logic and physics that would soon become endemic to cartoons, the boy simply rides his bike across the river to go in pursuit of the now once again clothed girls, who very cleverly use their billowing skirts to make them look like flowers, and so escape his attentions for the moment.
Eventually though he catches them, explaining that all he wants to do is return the girl's shoe, and having taken refuge in a signal box, the three then spend a frantic time choreographing the paths of various trains, a lot of clever superimposition of the trains over the hectic trio before the boy fits the shoe to the girl's foot and all three fly off into the clouds on his bike, fifty years before Spielberg thought of the idea, and again you wonder ...
There's certainly an element of Cinderella in this short, with the girl losing her shoe and being pursued by the boy, but it's mainly quite innocent and perhaps an object lesson to women that men are not always after the one thing. Well, not in cartoons anyway! Gross's most famous film was actually produced in London, as he was invited back there after producer/director and founder of London Films, Alexander Korda had seen the movie, so technically it's not a French effort but let's keep it here anyway.
The Fox Hunt, shot in colour, is supposedly wonderful but unfortunately efforts to locate it have proven fruitless. Once again, Hitler ruined a good animator as WWII prevented Gross from working on his own material, as he was given the role of official war artist and saw action in Egypt, Syria, India and Burma among others, and though he tried to pick up his career after 1945, was only able to create a short from the original intended feature of Jules Verne's
Around the World in 80 Days, which he had been working on before war was declared. He retired from animation and like Mimma Indelli, chose a career in art instead, becoming a painter. He died in 1974.
Berthold Bartosch (1893-1968)
Born in the Czech Republic, (then part of Austia-Hungary and later Czechoslovakia), Bartosch moved to Berlin and met Lotte Reiniger, with whom he worked on the already discussed
Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed and later moved to Paris, where he was approached by author Frans Masereel with the idea of turning one of his books into an animated film. When he got down to it though, Bartosch found that the wood engravings made by Masereel did not respond well to animating, and he had to actually invent a whole new way of filming them, including using plates of glass with soap on them, to provide a murky, surreal effect. On the face of it a political film,
L'Idea (1931) is in fact a triumph of the human spirit over the forces of evil and coercion, it says here. But it's not my cup of tea. It's very dark, the constant shimmer makes it hard to work out what's going on much of the time, it's all in black and white and this thing Bartosch did with soap doesn't work for me, but then, what do I know? Much of the time it reminds me of a prehistoric ancestor to the work of Terry Gilliam on
Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Failing health would dog Bartosch after the end of World War II, in which his native country would all but disappear, and though he worked on an anti-war film/poem just prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the film was all but destroyed in the war, and he leaves us with these words of wisdom: “It must be simple. It is difficult to be simple, but it is necessary.”
Alexandre Alexieff (1901-1982)
Originally of Russian descent, Alexieff moved to Paris in 1921 where he met his future wife, Claire Parker, and invented the idea of the
pinscreen, creating his first animated movie,
Une nuit sur la mont chauve (1932), based on the same Mussorgsky classical piece Disney would use to end his 1940
Fantasia, “A night on Bald Mountain”. It's another affair of light and dark (though that actually suits the subject matter in this case) and you can see the almost primitive morphing effects the use of the pinscreen allowed Alexieff to achieve. It's impressive, but you can't help but notice the massive gulf between what was happening in Europe and over in the US. I mean, at this point Disney had already completed Oswald's adventures and moved on to Mickey Mouse, and each of these (even Oswald) are vastly superior to the majority of the work I've seen so far from Europe, which had a long way to go to catch up.
Disappointed at the amount of films he was told he would have to produce in order to make a proper living at animation, Alexieff and his wife decided to go into advertising instead, and produced some apparently very good animations there, but sadly again I can't find any examples. During the war, the couple fled to America, returning to Paris at its end, however they don't seem to come back into the animation story again until the fifties, and as I'm currently limiting this timeline to 1945 or thereabouts, I'll leave them here for now. I may come back to them later.