The history of movie animation

The year was 1914.

The Chicago vaudeville audience sat on their edge of their seats, mesmerized by the animated dinosaur cavorting on the screen. Her “trainer,” cartoonist Winsor McCay, had just finished explaining how Gertie, as he called her, was created. Ten thousand drawings, showing various stages of motion, had been individually inked -- background and all -- on rice paper. Then each sheet was photographed, one frame at a time, with a motion picture camera. It had taken a full year of painstaking work to finish Gertie. Not a very exciting process to be sure, but the result on the screen was a pure delight.

McCay’s act was a winner and “Gertie The Dinosaur” became the first animated cartoon star. She was also the first cartoon character to show a personality all her own -- now called character animation.

A lot of animation, so to speak, has flowed under the bridge since then, but very little was created before Gertie. Films were almost 20 years old before the first pioneer efforts at animation were even attempted. The reason for the delay was simple economics. French film producer George Méliés had used animation in his fantasy films as early as 1898, so the expertise was in place. But at the time, films were not rented to theaters. Rather they were sold outright -- the standard price being ten-cents a foot. A 100-foot animated cartoon brought in the same $10 as a live-action film, but took a lot more time and money to produce.

J. Stuart Blackton, a vaudeville “lightning sketch” artist, can be called the father of the animated film and conducted the first American experiments. The earliest surviving example of full animation is Blackton’s “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces,” a three-minute film produced in 1906 by his own film company, Vitagraph. Here Blackton draws various faces on a blackboard, which then come to life. A man blows smoke from a cigar, faces draw and un-draw themselves, a clown does a few tricks and his dog jumps through hoops. Even the main title is animated with bits of paper. “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” was an interesting novelty, but nothing more. It did not immediately birth a flourishing industry.

Even Winsor McCay -- in two animated films before “Gertie The Dinosaur” -- failed to arouse much interest in the animated cartoon. The frantic, slapstick of Keystone and other comedy producers created the fast-paced humor needed to keep audiences laughing and were much cheaper to produce. It was advertising that gave birth to the animated cartoon as a commercial enterprise -- cartoons that were made to promote comic strips.

In 1892 the first comic strip, “The Little Bears and Tigers” by James Swinnerton, appeared in the San Francisco Examiner. “Down Hogan’s Alley” by Richard Outcault appeared in the New York World the next year and featured a character wearing a yellow nightshirt called “The Yellow Kid.” In a few years the comic strip was well-established -- “The Katzenjammer Kids,” “Krazy Kat,” and “Bringing Up Father.” Some of these, featuring human characters (like “Buster Brown”), were adopted for live-action movies. Others, like “Krazy Kat,” lent themselves best to animation.

Newspaper publishers, notably William Randolph Hearst, began making animated versions of the Sunday comics to promote circulation. At first animators used simple pen and ink drawings without backgrounds. No way had been discovered to include backgrounds unless they were individually drawn on each frame. And even if they were, like in “Gertie The Dinosaur,” they shimmered on the screen due to tiny variations in each drawing.

Storylines were practically nonexistent. Animated cartoons were nothing more than a few sight gags strung together to make a two or three-minute film. When dialogue was needed, the animator simply drew a dialogue balloon as his newspaper counterpart did. The action would freeze for a moment until the audience had a chance to read the dialogue, then would continue.

At first the little cartoons were well received because they were a novelty, but audiences soon tired of them. Nickelodeon owners began using cartoons to clear the theater between performances, much like movies themselves had been used to clear vaudeville houses when audiences tired of the 30-second vignettes producers had been making for carnival peep show machines more than a decade earlier. Early animators like Barré, John Bray, Earl Hurd, Wallace Carlson, Leon Searl, and Walter Lantz, tried to make their animation smoother and more lifelike by increasing the quality and number of drawings.

The first real breakthrough in animation technology came with cel animation, invented by Earl Hurd, an employee of the John Bray Studio. Now the actual drawings were traced from the animator’s originals onto transparent sheets of celluloid, laid over prepared backgrounds on the animation stand, and photographed.

Cartoons were more pleasing to the eye. The skill of the animators improved and they would often go to great lengths to perfect a single effect. One time at the Bray Studio, for instance, Hurd attempted to realistically animate a flag waving in the breeze -- something that had never been attempted before. The successful result so fired the imaginations of the other animators that they rushed to their desks to attempt similar effects -- better splashes in water, a more natural walk for characters, leaves tumbling in the wind. Bray’s animators were spending so much time trying to imitate life that Bray finally had to call a halt to the experimenting.

Bray had a valid point. There wasn’t much profit in animated cartoons as it was and wasting time on “art” whittled profits down even more. More of an assembly line product was required. That, in itself, was difficult. In those days, a single animator was responsible for a single cartoon. He wrote the story, created the gags, painted the backgrounds and, at times, even operated the camera. He had to draw about 2,700 individual frames for each five-minute short. There was no time to fritter away on experiments.

Early animators worked without a storyboard -- that would come much later. They kept everything in their heads. The animator had to be a good draftsman, not only fast with a pencil but able to keep the character consistent from the beginning to the end of the movie. There are a number of films where the characters drawn by a poor draftsmen changed their appearance to the point where they were almost unrecognizable by the end of the film.

The lack of storyboards and preplanning, more often than not, showed up on the screen. In 1916’s “Krazy Cat - Bugologist,” there are only two basic gags in a five-minute cartoon, and no story line whatsoever. First, Krazy Kat and his friend Ignatz the Mouse find a sleeping bee. Krazy Kat thinks the bee is actually dead and covers him up with his top hat. The bee, however, is very much alive and stings our hero through the hat. In the second gag, Krazy Kat comes upon an elephant (!). Unable to defeat a creature so large, Ignatz comes up with the obvious solution. He presents himself to the beast, who flees in terror at the sight of a tiny mouse.

“He Resolves Not To Smoke,” one of the Dream Dud series, animated the year before by Earl Hurd, is better because there is a real story. Dud steals his father’s lit pipe and he and his dog go outside for a few puffs. As they puff away, images appear in the smoke -- first Dud’s scolding father, then a Greek goddess, then the words “You’re A Bad Boy,” then finally a spirit that seizes the sinning lad and begins floating toward outer space. The dog, of course, begins to cry.

Up, up, they go -- higher and higher. Finally they reach the New Moon and the spirit leaves Dud hanging from the point of the crescent by the seat of his pants. In the meantime, back on earth, the dog has literally flooded the neighborhood with his tears.

Since Dud is now cavorting on the Moon, he decides to break the ice with a little joke. “Did you hear about the three holes in the Earth?” Dud asks. “No,” says the Moon. “Well. Well. Well,” Dud answers. The Moon laughs so hard that Dud is shaken off and begins a gut-wrenching fall back to earth. In the middle of his fall, he tumbles out of bed on top of his dog and wakes up. Like all of Dreamy Dud’s adventures it was only a dream. But Dud has learned his lesson. He’ll never smoke again.

New innovations in animation, including the use of color, appeared in various animated cartoons after World War I. Winsor McCay was back again and so was Gertie. McCay’s son, John, joined him for some new Gertie adventures. And in 1921, the McCays produced a film that foreshadowed “Fantasia.” This was the expertly animated “The Centaurs,” an unhurried little exercise that utilized a kind of multiplane camera. Unfortunately, only a two-minute fragment of this film has survived the ravages of time.

Nineteen twenty-two was a pivotal year for animation. Cels were now being used by nearly everyone and animated cartoons were showing up frequently in film programs. The innovators were still at work. Tony Sarg and Herbert Dawley were reviving ancient “shadow plays,” substituting rod puppets for animation. Not only that, they were adding color by tinting the film. The “Almanac” series was both intelligently produced, funny, and well-animated.

And a new star was rising in the firmament. In Kansas City, Missouri, a young commercial artist was fiddling with animation. His first movies were short advertising films for local businesses, called “Laugh-O-Grams.” Then he had an idea. Why not combine live action with animation? Together with his friend Ub Iwerkes, the two youngsters began production of the “Alice and Cartoonland” films in which a live girl romps with her animated friends. Alice was only the beginning for Walt Disney. Because of his innovations in the coming years, animated cartoons would never be the same again.