We have to give a shout-out to Charles Mintz, whose company Screen Gems produced the
Colour Rhapsody series from 1934 all the way up to 1949. Notably, other than Disney this seems to have been the first animation studio to be nominated for an Academy Award (though I guess it didn’t win, as it’s only shown as nominee), and throughout its run, though it would never win any, it was nominated for a further four. Very impressive. Our man Ub Iwerks was on their staff for a time, and in fact it was Mintz who, when working at Winkler Pictures (which he owned, after marrying its founder, Katherine Winkler) both greenlit the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and later stole all the animators working on the cartoon when Disney and Iwerks refused to cut costs, and started up his own studio. Perhaps in a move of poetic justice, Oswald was then taken by Universal and given to their in-house animator, Charles Lantz, but Mintz continued on without him and decided to concentrate on a sort of mash-up of Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse called Krazy Kat.
To properly check this little guy out we have to emulate Felix and push the timeline back momentarily, and as the clock hands spin in reverse around the dial and the little black-and-white feline strains against an imaginary line, forcing it backwards, we arrive in 1913, when most animators around the world are still struggling with how to make simple drawings move on paper. Not so George Herriman, for such was, initially, not his interest. His character, the aforementioned Krazy Kat, was perfectly happy living as a two-dimensional occupant of a newspaper strip, and would not see film animation for another twenty years.
In point of fact, he goes back further than that, three years in fact, to 1910, as Krazy Kat was a spin-off character (the first in comic strip history? A subject for a journal on comics, should anyone undertake one - oh look! I’m doing that!) from a previous strip,
The Dingbat Family. In a very offbeat treatment of the cat/mouse dynamic, Krazy was in fact in love with the mouse, Ignatz, though the feeling was most certainly not mutual, the mouse reciprocating by way of hurling bricks at the cat. I couldn’t say that’s the first instance of violence in a cartoon strip - it most certainly is not; see The Return of John Bull in my
Childhood Heroes: A Comic History journal - but it may be the first instance of one anthro inflicting violence on another. A lot of interesting stuff for me to dissect when the time comes for me to feature this in the other journal, but right now we’re concerned with the animated version of Krazy Kat, so we’ll leave all the philosophical stuff, the differently-sized and arranged panels, the odd landscapes and the frankly flowery dialogue for another time.
It must be pointed out that just as Disney had the protection (exclusive contract) of Technicolor for the three-strip colour cartoons, and as, in another journal, I explain Pan American Airlines were shielded by the US Government from competition in their formative years, Herriman had his own champion in the titanic figure of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (the figure, of course, on whom Charles Foster Kane is based in Welles’ iconic movie), who loved Krazy Kat so much that he rejected criticism of the strip, even though most seemed to believe it too highbrow and not slapstick enough, and even arranged for Krazy Kat’s first transition to the screen in a black-and-white silent in 1916. Actually, it’s the seventh, now that I check, but it’s the earliest I can get a video for.
Beaten to it only a year before by Raoul Barré with
The Animated Grouch Chasers, Herriman here uses circling stars when Krazy crashes his bike, plus lines of sight when he looks at something. Though in fairness, Barré’s effort was mostly live-action, and this is a full cartoon, if an early one, so maybe the process could be credited to Herriman. Oh well maybe not; seems he wasn’t involved in the film versions. Doesn’t say who was. A pity, as it does seem a pioneering effect that would be used until sound/speech came into more common use a decade or two later.
The cartoon isn’t much to write home about (you can see it above) - the light has that sort of bulb-about-to-blow feel of coming and going, the story is all but negligible, the relationship between Ignatz and Krazy is ignored (both seem good friends - also both appear male) and not a single brick is thrown, the hallmark of the newspaper strip. Nothing much happens either, but to be fair, the animation is fluid and doesn’t jerk or jump, and the speech balloons work well in the place of actual spoken dialogue so you can tell what’s going on: so much better and more personal, I feel, than cutting to a title card every time someone says something. For the time it’s pretty impressive really, and points the way towards the direction animation would take.
The first Krazy Kat short made by the John Randolph Bray studio (we learned about him before) came out in 1920, so let’s have a look and see if there is any major difference. Obviously, we’re still talking black and white here, and probably silent I would say, but four years on, has the animation improved, has the story become any more engaging?
Well I would say the music is worse, a lot more tinny sounding and quite warped (admittedly this is 1920 but still, the 1916 one sounded smooth and clear) and to be honest, the animation has not improved much. Now Bray is using those damned title cards, which annoys me, and Krazy looks less like a cat than he did in
Bugologist: more like a dog really. As an aside, I’ve always wondered where the myth began that mice eat cheese? They don’t, but the lie has been perpetrated down through animation and mice eating, or stealing, or wanting cheese has become a staple of cartoons. I will give Bray this much, that when Ignatz tries to stomp a huge wheel of cheese into his impossibly tiny bag, a face appears on it as if it’s grimacing. But again, meh, it’s nothing great overall.
The last Bray animation of Krazy Kat was only a year later, but I can’t comment on the soundtrack as some idiot has clearly added his own modern one. The animation overall is still what I would call poor. Yes, it’s 1921 but still, this is weak. Bray uses what would become a tried-and-tested method of time saving (and cost saving) by drawing a crowd but repeating the same figures several times to make it look like there are more there than there actually are. This would be done later with backgrounds too, especially houses and streets. Hmm. He seems to use the occasional speech balloon (square ones, well, rectangular ones) but mostly relies on title cards. Also, again, the relationship between the two is far friendlier than it should be; there's no sign of the conflict prevalent when one person is in love and the other is not. Again, no bricks. Usage of exclamation marks (points) and question marks too. Overall again I’d have to say a poor effort.
This is where Charles Mintz comes back into the picture, as he lost Oswald and pinned his animation future on Krazy Kat. However, frustratingly, I can find no early Winkler Pictures cartoons on YouTube, (not that many Krazy Kat at all really) and so the first time we see what Mintz’s animators were doing with him is as the timeline snaps back like an overstretched elastic band and Felix is cat-apulted (sorry) all the way to our present timeline, to 1932, where we find
Seeing Stars (1932).
Well by now the little guy has undergone a major makeover, which really can be called more a, what would we call it? Cloning? Basically he’s now very like Felix with a dash of Mickey, and essentially any originality he had, any identity has been thrown away in the desperate attempt by Mintz to be like the Disney character who was taking America by storm, and soon to do the same worldwide. He even dances, where before he did not. And there are some very Mickey-looking Ignatzes (well, mice anyway - I don’t know if Ignatz has even been retained at this stage) lifting - oh dear god help us! Another fu
cking piano! Don’t these cartoon characters know how to play anything else?
Stand by for the usual by-now-standard high jinks with the piano, and yes, there are the Marx Brothers emerging from it. Sigh. Didn’t Ub Iwerks already do this with Flip the Frog? More, I assume, famous Hollywood stars of the thirties being caricatured, though I don’t recognise any. Okay, I recognise Laurel and Hardy, and maybe that’s Charlie Chaplin?
The point is, the cartoon is pretty bereft of imagination, copying others that have done the same thing, although in fairness this is over ten years down the line since Mintz’s studios took over the character. Still, he hasn’t progressed much, in fact I’d say he’s regressed, till he’s just a poor man’s Felix really. Damned boring if you ask me. I don’t know if the video shown is deteriorating after nearly ninety years, but
The Masquerade Party (1934) seems to have a really annoying reddish cast to it
While
The Trapeze Artist, from the same year, seems to suffer from way too much blue/purple.
As does
Highway Snobbery from two years later. Basically, I’d have to say that either these films have not been well preserved or that the animation was pretty s
hit for the time compared to other studios, and I’d have to think it’s the latter. Krazy Kat may have been a big influence on a lot of animators and artists, but mostly I think through the original comic strip, as these cartoons leave very much a lot to be desired. Krazy Kat’s theatrical adventures ended in 1940, though really he looks to have been winding down by 1936/37 and by 1939 he had had at best staggered appearances compared to previous years, with his final appearances being a mere two shorts in 1940. Mintz did not live to see the last films, dying of a heart attack (what is it with all these animators dying of heart attacks?) in 1939. Walt Disney apparently praised him for “high quality cartoons”: I would not agree, based on what I’ve seen here.
Before we judge him too harshly though, let’s check out the series that opened this article on him, the
Color Rhapsodies, which ran from 1934 to 1949. The first of them,
Holiday Land (1934) suffers of course from the lack of three-strip but the animator, Art Davis, does what he can within the limits he’s forced to remain. A lot of blue, red and black, sort of like those old computer games before you upgraded to an EGA card. What the f
uck are you talking about, Trollheart? Never mind, never mind. Forget I spoke. I wonder is this the first instance of that old favourite, particularly beloved of the Pink Panther in later years, of waking up and grabbing a hammer to silence the alarm clock? First time I’ve seen it anyway.
Some cute ideas. The calendar flipping as important dates are blown off (is this meant to indicate the passage of time, and if so, is this another first? Or is it just the wind blowing the pages off?) and the related figures come out of them and parade around is clever. Father Christmas for December 25, Old Man Time for New Year’s Day, turkeys on Thanksgiving and so on (but do you Americans celebrate Halloween on October 30? It’s the 31st for us, but that calendar page shown is October 30) and I like how the ducks parading for easter drop a small egg and out of it comes duckling, who, seeing he’s being left behind, uses the half-shell as a small boat and rows along behind the others, trying to catch up.
The idea, then, seems to be that a lazy child who won’t get up is visited and taken on a tour of all the major holidays by a tiny Father Time, presumably to show him how if he sleeps his life away he will miss all the good things in life? Well, whatever but this is already far better than the Krazy Kat efforts coming out at this time from Mintz’s studios. As I say, these continued almost into the 1950s, but as our timeline here is only concerned with up to 1940, let’s take one from, oh let’s say 1938. By now, Walt had lost his monopoly on three-strip Technicolor, so let’s see what our friend Ub Iwerks did with that while working for Mintz.
This is, then,
Midnight Frolics (1938) and though - unsurprisingly, given the title - it takes place at night, you can already see the change. The colours are richer, deeper, more resonant. The blues and purples are very deep, the pink is quite rosy. You can almost get a feeling of early
Scooby-Doo about this. The transparency of the ghosts is handled well: you actually can see through them, but in a kind of more translucent way. But damn it, eight years on and it’s still bloody musical based! Clever ideas again. I like the ghost salesman who keeps trying to sell the other ghosts things, and it’s interesting to have a cartoon based entirely on ghosts - I mean, there’s a mouse, but for once he’s just an observer, and also a cuckoo in his clock, but the cartoon revolves around the exploits of the ghosts. Yeah, not bad.