Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
alcoholism impaired his ability.
The Felix of this early period was drawn in an angular style and moved in jerky motions
rather like the walk of Chaplin's Tramp character. He was distinguished by a strong
personality which remained consistent from film to film; audiences could identify with
him and would return to see his next cartoon. Animator Bill Nolan, from 1922 to 1924,
redesigned Felix's body to make him more rounded and cuddly -- more like the Felix
dolls that Sullivan so successfully marketed.
The Sullivan studio was based on BarrÉ's model (Sullivan had worked at BarrÉ's briefly;
many of the animators came from there; BarrÉ himself worked on Felix from 1926 to
1928). Though cels were employed, they were background overlays, placed over sheets of
animated drawings on paper. This saved both the expense of cels and Bray-Hurd
licensing. Variations of the slash system were also used sporadically.
Felix the Cat in Pedigreedy ( 1927) by Pat Sullivan, directed by Otto Messmer . Character © Felix the Cat Productions,
Inc.
Felix became the first animated character to gain the attention of the cultural élite, as well
as huge popularity with audiences. He was the subject of praise from Gilbert Seldes, an
American cultural historian, from Marcel Brion, a member of the French Academy, and
from other intellectuals; Paul Hindemith composed a score for a 1928 Felix film. Thanks
to Sullivan's aggressive marketing, the character also became the most successful movie
'ancillary' (until knocked aside by Mickey). Felix's likeness was licensed for all kinds of
consumer products.
In 1925 Sullivan arranged to distribute through the Educational Film Corporation. Its
national network combined with the increasingly creative stories and superb
draughtsmanship of the Felix studio to generate the richest period, both in picture quality
and in revenue. The Felix craze became a world-wide phenomenon.
But the cat's bubble burst at its height of popularity. The demise of the series can be traced
to several factors: the coming of sound, competition from Mickey Mouse, and Sullivan's
draining the organization of its capital (while Disney was channelling every cent back in).
Despite the excellence of such films as Sure-Locked Homes ( 1928), Educational did not
renew its contract and the series went steadily downhill.
HARMAN, ISING, AND SCHLESINGER
When Mintz and Winkler took over Oswald the Rabbit in 1928, they hired Hugh Harman
and Rudolph Ising from Disney's studio to animate it. After Universal retrieved the series
and gave it to Walter Lantz, Harman and Ising formed a partnership and produced a pilot
film called Bosko the Talk-ink Kid in 1929. Entrepreneur Leon Schlesinger saw the
potential of tying in sound films with popular music and obtained backing from Warner
Bros. The film company would pay Schlesinger a fee to 'plug' its sheet music properties
by animating cartoons around the songs. In January 1930 the partnership began producing
'Looney Tunes' (then, in 1931, 'Merrie Melodies'), the kernel of what would become the
Warner Bros. cartoon studio with its memorable stars, beginning with Porky Pig.
ANIMATION IN OTHER NATIONAL CINEMAS
Every country with a significant silent film industry also had a local animation industry.
With the economic advantage gained during the 1914-18 war, the United States film
industry's financial impact on international cinema was reflected in the dissemination of
American cartoons. Cohl's 'Newlyweds' series, for example, was exported to France,
where it was distributed by the parent company, éclair. Chaplin's successful short films
were accompanied by US-made animated versions. BarrÉ's Edison films were distributed
by Gaumont. Margaret Winkler contracted with Pathé to distribute 'Out of the Inkwell'
and 'Felix the Cat' in Great Britain.
Despite foreign competition, there were two areas in which Europeans had the market to
themselves: topical sketches and advertising. The British sketchers, notably Harry
Furniss, Lancelot Speed, Dudley Buxton, George Studdy, and Anson Dyer, entertained
wartime audiences with their propaganda cartoons. Dyer went on to make some
successful short cartoons in the early 1920s, including Little Red Riding Hood ( 1922),
and would become an important producer in the 1930s. Studdy, in 1924, launched a series
of Bonzo films starring a chubby dog. Advertising was a familiar component of the film
programme. Among the notable names producing animated ads were O'Galop and Lortac
in France, Pinschewer, Fischinger, and Seeber in Germany. In a category by itself are the
productions of the State Film Technicum in Moscow. A regular series of entertainment
cartoons (with a social message) appeared from 1924 to 1927, supervised by Dziga
Vertov. The most important animator was Ivan Ivanov-Vano.
Other specialities were puppet and silhouette films. Ladislas Starewitch began his career
in Russia in 1910 and soon was releasing popular one-reel films with puppets and
animated insects for the Khanzhonkov Company. In 1922 he moved to France, where the
puppet film became his life's work.
Le Roman du renard
, completed in 1930, was the first
animated feature in France.
The important pioneer of the silhouette film was Lotte Reiniger. Her feature
Die
Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed
(
The Adventures of Prince Ahmed
) was released in Berlin
in 1926 and gained world-wide acclaim. Its Arabian Nights story, lively shadow-puppets,
and complicated moving backgrounds took three years to photograph.
Also worth mentioning are Quirino Cristiani and Victor Bergdahl. The former worked in
Argentina and released a political satire,
El apóstol
('The apostle'), in 1917. About an hour
in length (about the same as
Prince Achmed
), it has been called the first feature-length
cartoon. Bergdahl, from 1916 to 1922, animated a Swedish series featuring Kapten Grogg
which was distributed in Europe and in the United States.
As Giannalberto Bendazzi ( 1994) has documented, animation was practised in many
countries throughout the 1920s, both by avant-garde artists and commercially. But despite
the popularity of animation films, the economic realities of the film industry in the 1920s,
and the great cultural diversity in popular graphic humour traditions, made it extremely
difficult for other countries to compete on the world market with the output of the
American studios.
Bibliography
Bendazzi, Giannalberto ( 1994),
Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation
.
Cabarga, Leslie ( 1988),
The Fleischer Story
.
Canernaker, John ( 1987),
Winsor McCay: His Life and Art
.
------ ( 1991),
Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat
.
Cholodenko, Alan (ed.) ( 1991),
The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation
.
Crafton, Donald ( 1990),
Émile Cohl, Caricature and Film
.
------ ( 1993),
Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928
.
Gifford, Denis ( 1987),
British Animated Films, 1895-1985: A Filmography
.
------ ( 1990),
American Animated Films: The Silent Era, 1897-1929
.
Maltin, Leonard ( 1980),
Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons
.
Merritt, Russell, and Kaufman, J. B. ( 1994),
Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of
Walt Disney
.
Robinson, David ( 1991),
'Masterpieces of Animation, 1833-1908'
.
Solomon, Charles ( 1987),
Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation
.
Ladislas Starewitch (Władysław Starewicz) (1882-1965)
Władisław Starewicz was born in Vilnius -- now the capital of Lithuania but then part of
Poland -- and started his film career making documentaries for the local Ethnographic
Museum. His first animated film was
Valka zukov rogachi
('The Battle of Stag-Beetles',
1910), a reconstruction (using preserved specimens) of the nocturnal mating rituals of this
local species, which could not be filmed 'live-action' in the dark.For his first
entertainment film,
Prekrasnya Lukanida
(The fair Lucanida', 1910), Starewitch
developed the basic technique he would employ for the rest of his life: he built small
puppets from a jointed wooden frame, with parts such as fingers that needed to be flexible
rendered in wire, and parts that need not change cut from cork or modelled in plaster. His
wife Anna, who came from a family of tailors, padded them with cotton and sewed leather
and cloth features and costumes. He designed all the characters and built the settings.
Starewicz moved to Moscow, making animations which range from the impressively grim
The Grasshopper and the Ant (
Strekozai I muraviei,
1911) in which the literalness of the
insects reinforces the cruel message, to the enchanting The Insects' Christmas
(
Rozhdyestvo obitateli lyesa,
( 1912). His most astonishing early film, The Cameraman's
Revenge (
Miest kinooperatora,
1911), shows Mrs Beetle having an affair with a
grasshopper-painter, while Mr Beetle carries on with a dragonfly cabaret-artiste, whose
previous lover, a grasshopper-cameraman, shoots movies of Mr Beetle and Dragonfly
making love at the Hotel d'Amour. The cameraman screens these at the local cinema
when Mr and Mrs Beetle are present, and the resulting riot lands both Beetles in jail. This
racy satire of human sexual foibles gains a biting edge from the ridiculousness of bugs
enacting what humans consider their most serious (even tragic) passions -- as when Mrs
Beetle reclines like an odalisque on the divan awaiting the absurd embrace of her lover,
which involves twelve legs and two antennae in lascivious motion. The reflexive
representation of the cinematic apparatus, reaching its apotheosis in the projection of
previous scenes before an audience of animated insects, adds a metaphysical dimension to
the parable.After the Revolution, Starewicz left Russia and settled in France in 1920,
changing his name to Ladislas Starewitch. Here he made 24 films which combine witty
sophistication and magical naïveté, including moral fables such as the splendid The Town
Rat and the Country Rat (
Le Rat de ville et le Rat des champs,
1926) or the lovely
La voix
du rossignol
('The nightingale's voice', 1923), adventure epics like The Magic Clock
(
L'Horloge magique,
1928), a bitter rendering of Anderson's The Steadfast Tin Soldier
(
La Petite Parade,
1928), and a feature-length Reynard the Fox (
Le Roman de Renard,
shot 1929/30, released 1937) which renders the gestures and emotions of the animals (in
sophisticated period costumes) with great subtlety.His 1933 masterpiece The Mascot
(
Fétiche mascotte
) begins with a live-action sequence starring the Starewitch daughters
Irène and Jeanne (who assisted and acted in most of the films) as a mother who supports
herself making toys, and her sick daughter who longs for an orange. A stuffed dog,
Fétiche, sneaks out at night to steal an orange for the girl, but gets caught at the Devil's
ball, where all the garbage of Paris comes to life in a dissolute orgy at which drunken
stemware suicidally crash into each other, and re-assembled skeletons of eaten fish and
chikens dance. The dog escapes with the orange, pursued home by a motley gang of torn-
paper and vegetable people, dolls and animals. Starewitch nods homage to René Clair's
Dada short Entr'acte in his use of speeding live-action street traffic, the saxophone player
with a balloon head that inflates and deflates as he plays, and the climactic mad, weird
pursuit. Starewitch matches his brilliant visual details with witty use of sound, making the
voices of Fètiche and the Devil whining musical instruments, or playing the Devil's words
backwards to sound like unearthly gibberish.