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”.