The one shot sequence 4-7, where Geppetto and Pinocchio cross paths, is a typical melodramatic convention where characters just miss each other and don't know it. It's a convention because it works. It worked for Dickens and D.W. Griffith and it certainly works for Disney.
The next sequence starts out with Pinocchio and Jiminy realizing their mistakes and wallowing in self pity. The appearance of the Blue Fairy puts both of them in a panic as they each feel guilt for their actions. Unfortunately for Pinocchio, that guilt isn't enough to make him tell the truth and he tells the Blue Fairy one whopper after another, causing his nose to grow. It's Jiminy who persuades the Blue Fairy to give them another chance, and in a neat structural reversal, he bats his eyelashes at her the same way she did when she convinced him to become Pinocchio's conscience.
The Blue Fairy gives them a fresh start and vanishes, leaving them to head home, presumably wiser for their experiences. Unfortunately, Pinocchio still has a lot to learn.
The self-pity scenes are a duet between Ollie Johnston on Pinocchio and Ward Kimball on Jiminy. Both characters hold their left hands to their faces, visually reinforcing their similar failures and emotional states. Pinocchio's tears, which drench Jiminy, are parallel to the rain that poured down on Jiminy and Geppetto.
Jiminy blows Pinocchio's nose, reminding us that it functions as a nose before Pinocchio's lies turn it into a branch.
With the arrival of the Blue Fairy, Kimball steps out and Bernie Wolf steps in for Jiminy. Once Pinocchio's nose starts to sprout leaves, John Elliotte replaces Wolf and Frank Thomas takes Pinocchio over from Ollie Johnston. However, the animators keep changing. Wolf comes back for Jiminy's eyelash batting and Les Clark and Walt Clinton do Pinocchio scenes inbetween those done by Thomas and Johnston.
What we have here isn't casting by character and certainly not casting by shot or sequence. It's surprising that the sequence works as well as it does in terms of emotional consistency. The animators do get extended acting chances here, but the character arcs are split among many animators. Without tight story work and good character layouts, this sequence could deteriorate into a mess. While the sequence works, you can't say that the work has been logically assigned.
Switching gears for a moment, I want to talk about the assistant director for this sequence, Ford Beebe. I can't imagine how he came to be involved with Disney. Beebe, for those who don't know, is probably best known as a director of live action serials and B movies. He was writing films as early as 1916 and directing as early as 1922, working heavily in westerns. In the 1930s, he specialized in live action films based on comic strips such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Tim Tyler's Luck, Jungle Jim and Secret Agent X-9.
I have no idea how he came to Disney or what caused him to leave. Alberto Becattini credits Beebe as the director of the "Pastoral Symphony" in Fantasia (1940) as well as The Thrify Pig (1941), Seven Wise Dwarfs (1941) and Donald's Decision (1942). And we know from this draft that he was also an assistant director on Pinocchio.
After Disney, he went back to live action B movies, helming the series Bomba the Jungle Boy starring Johnny Sheffield. Sheffield wrote about working with Beebe and makes him sound like a typical B movie craftsman: pleasant, unpretentious and efficient.
If anybody knows more about Beebe's time at Disney, I'd love to hear about it.
Richard Corliss of Time magazine writes about Ratatouille and why Pixar is better. The article contains several quotes from Brad Bird and John Lasseter and reveals that Jan Pinkava, the original director of Ratatouille, is no longer at Pixar.
While characters moved to the beat of the music in early sound cartoons, the use of the human voice was not as important. Dialogue was relatively sparse as animators were inexperienced with lip synch.
Early voices were done by cartoon studio employees rather than trained actors. Walt Disney provided the voice of Mickey Mouse and Marcellite Garner, who worked at the Disney studio tracing animator drawings onto celluloid, provided the voice of Minnie Mouse (Barrier, Speaks 20). Carman Maxwell, the production manager for the Harman-Ising studio, provided the voice for their cartoon star Bosko (Barrier, Speaks 17).
Had an animator been responsible for all of a character’s behaviour at this point in time, animation may have developed like puppetry with the animator supplying his or her character’s voice. For example, Jim Henson not only provided the voice for Kermit the Frog, he was also the manipulator of the Kermit puppet. While Henson acted with something external to his own body, making him closer to an animator in that regard than a live actor, he was still in complete control of Kermit’s behaviour. Because animators had given up exclusive control of a character’s behaviour in the silent era, some animators on a character would be working with another person’s voice. From there, it was a short step to all the animators working with another person’s voice, and that opened up the job for professional actors.
As the 1930’s progressed, animation studios became more sensitive to the possibilities of the voice track. Character voices became more distinctive. Mickey Mouse’s voice is simply a falsetto, but Goofy (who debuted in 1932) and Donald Duck (who debuted in 1934) both have voices whose sound contributes to communicating their personalities to an audience. The sound of Goofy’s voice emphasizes his lack of intelligence; the sound of Donald’s squawk communicates his out-of-control rage.
Like animation, radio was also maturing as a medium in the 1930’s. Lacking visuals, the radio actors who succeeded were those who could create full-blown characterizations with just their voices. Many actors who worked in animation first worked in radio and continued their radio careers concurrently. Mel Blanc, who started in radio in Portland, Oregon, provided voices for the majority of the Warner Bros. cartoon characters (Barrier, Speaks 28). While acting in cartoons, he also performed on The Jack Benny Program, The Great Gildersleeve, Baby Snooks and Blondie (Blanc 132-33). Arthur Q. Bryan, who provided the voice of Elmer Fudd, was first a regular on the radio show The Grouch Club (Barrier, Speaks 29). June Foray worked on radio with Jimmy Durante, Danny Thomas, Bob Hope and Red Skelton before doing voice work for Disney in the 1950’s. She was later the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel on the Bullwinkle TV show (Barrier, Speaks 31).
In the first few years of sound, voice tracks were recorded simultaneously with music and sound effects (Barrier, Speaks 17). This meant that the dialogue for lip synch would be timed out before it was recorded, forcing the voice artists to match the lips of the animated characters, much the way any live action film might be dubbed. With the difficulty of getting music, sound effects and voice all working together in a single take, there was an incentive for dialogue to be simple and brief.
West coast animation studios moved to pre-recording dialogue while east coast studios continued to post-record throughout the ‘30’s (Barrier, Speaks 17-18). These two approaches led to very different results.
In pre-recording dialogue, studios guaranteed better synchronization since the soundtrack would be phonetically analyzed and plotted on the exposure sheet. It was relatively simple for animators to match the lips of their characters to the existing soundtrack, so dialogue became more prominent in cartoons. More importantly, however, animators no longer went first in the collaboration with the voice talent.
When the animators went first, they had more control over how a character would emote while speaking. If a line of dialogue was “Look out!” the animator would be the one to determine how broadly the character would move while saying it and the voice actor would have to scale the reading of the line to match the visuals. With pre-recording, the actor went first. In reading “Look out!” the actor would decide the pace and how much emotion to put into the line and the animator was forced to match the voice track. In effect, the person who went first got to shape the character’s behaviour. Once pre-recording became standard, the actor got to interpret the script and the animator was forced to interpret the actor.
Pre-recorded voice tracks are the raw material of animated behaviour, as can be seen in this advice from Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston: “Listen to [the voice track] carefully; listen to the thoughts and ideas – they are your character’s. He is thinking them, and you must capture them” (467; emphasis in the original). Animator Dick Lundy stated, “It was the dialogue that had the personality that you tried to portray” (Barrier, Hollywood 118).
Andreas Deja was the lead animator on the character of Scar in The Lion King, voiced by Jeremy Irons.
“As a voice talent and actor, he was able to do so much with the dialogue and was a great springboard for the character,’ recalls Deja. ‘He had a way of playing with the words and twisting them so that they would come out very sarcastic and always a bit unexpected. I would watch him at the recording sessions and then run back to my desk because I couldn’t wait to get started with the animation” (Ghez 263).
It’s not just the emotional tone of the behaviour that comes from the voice track. It has an impact on the timing of the character and determines what part of the motion the animator will emphasize to accompany the soundtrack. Animator Chris Buck says that “once the scenes are handed out, I’ll listen to the voice. That will dictate a lot about the character, whether his movements are sharp or slow” (Cawley 203). Animator Mark Kausler says that,
“If I’m starting on a new scene I listen to the [voice] track, if there’s a track on cassette of the character’s voice, 30, 40 times. Then I look at the exposure sheet I’m given and I circle words that seem to be the most important words to hit. That’s your key. Usually the soundtrack will guide you, if there is one, to what’s the most important points in the scene to hit. When I circle those words, I know that’s were I’ve got to make my emphasis” (Cawley 111).
At the Fleischer studio, located in New York City, post-recording continued to be the norm. However, something interesting happened on the Popeye series. William Costello was the original voice of Popeye starting in 1933 (Cabarga 87). His voice was gruff and Popeye was portrayed as a dour, roughneck character. Costello was replaced by Jack Mercer, who was also a talented writer (Cabarga 88). Mercer created ad libs in the recording session, even though there were no animated mouth movements to match his dialogue. Because the animation was already done and would not be changed to reflect Mercer’s additions, he was limited to commenting on the on-screen action. In The Paneless Window Washer, Bluto closes a window on Popeye’s neck and Popeye says, “Hey, you give me a pane in the neck!” In I Never Changes My Altitude, the covering of an airplane wing rips off and Popeye comments, “I think I need a little more mucilage on that fuselage!” Instead of Mercer having to take second place to the animators, restricting himself to accompanying their actions, he used his freedom to add dialogue to build an additional dimension to Popeye’s character, giving out a constant stream of self-conscious humour.
When you compare the Costello and Mercer Popeye cartoons, Mercer’s contribution to the character is clear. Mercer softened Popeye, counterbalancing the violence in the cartoons with good-natured comedy. Mercer was able to have as much impact on Popeye as other voice actors who got to pre-record their dialogue because the Fleischers ignored the necessity of lip synchronization.
Pre- and post-recording had another effect on how voices were recorded. In a post-recording situation, the actors all had to be in the studio at the same time, as music, sound effects and voices were recorded together. It gave actors the same opportunities they had in theatre, film or radio, to work in an ensemble situation where they could react to other actors’ performances in their own. In a pre-recording situation, there was the possibility of recording actors separately. If an actor was recording a scene with two or more characters, he or she might record without the other actors being present, having only the director and the storyboard to guide the interpretation. The DVD release of Open Season includes a documentary on the voice actors that reveals that Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher, the two vocal leads, did not meet during the three years that they each worked on the film.
Some of this is determined by the medium. Based on my own experience, you can record an animated half hour in 3-4 hours. The rush to get it done means that it’s often more efficient to put more than one performer in the booth at a time and let them play a scene out. On a feature, performers may be called back several times, months apart, to record additional dialogue as story ideas develop during production. Re-assembling the entire cast for a few new lines is not efficient, so features default to actors being recorded separately.
Studios and voice actors have their own preferences in this manner. Jay Ward, the producer of Bullwinkle, preferred to have the performers in an ensemble situation (Neuwirth 215-216). Hanna-Barbera worked in an ensemble fashion and Don Messick (the voice of Scooby Doo, among others) liked this approach due to his experience working in radio and on stage. “I like to feel the relationship of the other people I’m working with” (Dobbs, Messick 28). By contrast, Billy West (Ren and Stimpy) prefers to work alone in a recording booth (Dobbs, West 42).
It’s interesting that animation is the only medium where actors are prevented from interacting. One of the purposes of rehearsal is to allow the actors to gauge each other’s performances so that they can blend the performances into a consistent approach. Because animation people take fragmentation for granted, they actually impose it on actors, forcing them to act in a vacuum. The performer has to rely solely on the director’s feedback to judge how he or she is doing. Animation has no equivalent of a table read, where the cast sits around the table reading the script and discovers what chemistry might exist between performers or characters.
Just as a separate character designer and animator split a character’s appearance and behaviour, it has a similar effect on voice actors. Often before creating a voice, an actor will be shown a drawing of the character so that he or she can create a voice that’s appropriate. In the 1940’s, Sid Raymond was shown a drawing of Baby Huey and he created several voices that he thought were appropriate to the design (Dobbs, Raymond 38). John Leguizamo was supplied with a statue of Sid the sloth for Ice Age before creating the voice and “knew the voice couldn’t be myself” (Neuwirth 230).
On the other hand, there has been an increasing reliance on star voices in animated features in recent years, and this has become a major influence on the creation of animated personalities. Disney used the voices of actors who were known to the movie-going public at least as early as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Billy Gilbert, a supporting actor who appeared in many two-reel comedies and in features like Captains Courageous, was the voice of the dwarf Sneezy. Other character actors lent their voices to Pinocchio (Walter Catlett, Cliff Edwards and Frankie Darro) and Dumbo (Ed Brophy, Cliff Edwards and Herman Bing).
For the character of Geppetto in Pinocchio, Disney originally cast Spencer Charters and a one-minute animation test with a design based on Charters’ physical appearance was done. When Charters was replaced by Christian Rub, the design was altered to more closely resemble Rub (Frank Thomas 203-204).
While Rub was known to audiences from his live action roles in films like Little Man, What Now? and You Can’t Take It With You, he was not a major star or box office draw. In recent animated films, voices of stars have been used for their name value and characterizations have been built more on a star’s persona. Eddie Murphy was cast for the role of Mushu in Disney’s Mulan. Tom Bancroft, the lead animator on the character, acknowledged Murphy’s influence.
“There’s a lot of Eddie Murphy in the character. The point in the production when the story really began clicking was when they started writing for Eddie. At first, they were writing for the character and what they felt the needs of the story were. Eddie recorded that, but he was struggling with it. So, he would read it the way we had it and then he would ad lib. And it would always come out so much funnier, whether it was a funny line or not, because he’d put these inflections in it and make these straight lines sound pretty funny. So they went back and rewrote almost all of Mushu’s lines and added some gags and made it more “Eddie-esque.” From there, it really helped the character click a lot, So, early on, we really did start gearing Mushu toward Eddie Murphy” (Lyons 96).
Murphy was later cast as Donkey in Shrek. This character is also “Eddie-esque” and so Donkey’s behaviour and personality very much resemble Mushu. Murphy was cast specifically to bring his own persona to both roles, in the same way he might be cast in live action films and for the same reasons. The audience pays to see Eddie Murphy, so the animators also need to be “Eddie-esque.” They are not just visualizing the emotions and attitudes in the voice track, they are visualizing Eddie Murphy’s persona as much as they can within the confines of the character design.
An animation director uses very different tools than a live action director. A live action director will decide where to place the camera, specify how something should be lit, rehearse the actors and, if the director is lucky, edit the final film. Words are a director’s chief tool, though the director may act something out or draw a quick sketch in order to communicate with someone.
“A director on a live-action picture can work with the actor and see what he is going to do. The actions can be altered, refined, changed or questioned, and the results judged on the spot. In animation, there is no way of knowing ahead of time how the scene will look” (Frank Thomas 81).
In animation, where the visuals are being created from scratch and where the pace of creation is considerably slower, verbal instructions and acting something out are not sufficient to communicate with a crew. The director will time actions down to fractions of a second. The director will draw (or supervise the drawing of) poses that define a character’s actions and express its emotions. Finally, the director will cast his animators.
As directors were already working with musicians to set the tempo for the animation, it was logical for them to time all the action for the sake of expediency. The goal was to get directly to the desired result on screen, so the more control the director exercised, the less likely that the animator would produce something unusable. Dave Hand, who directed for Disney in the 1930’s, recalled,
“The director had to time the whole picture, half-second by half-second, and he could of course always use a stopwatch – sometimes you would get the feel of a thing without a stopwatch for ten or fifteen seconds, but not for technical, close actions. He’d have to time those out” (Barrier, Hand 88).
Not every director timed cartoons in such detail. Disney animator Volus Jones recalled that director Jack Kinney would act out scenes in great detail for him but not add information to the exposure sheet that already contained camera information and the dialog breakdown (Sullivan, Jones 150). Whereas Jones recalled that director Wilfred Jackson timed things in great detail and that his animation for Jackson was better than he expected as a result (Sullivan, Jones 145).
Disney shorts director Jack Hannah was one who believed in nailing the timing down.
“A lot of directors gave the animators more say in timing. I never did that. I timed every foot I directed. I don’t care how good the animator was. To me, it was the most important part of the directing – the timing, the pacing, the pauses.” (Korkis, Hannah 133).
This control of timing directly affected character behaviour. A good director took characterization into account in how actions were timed. Warner director Chuck Jones recalled,
“Of course, I paced things like Pepé le Pew a great deal differently than I paced the Road Runner cartoons, not only because the material was different, but because the characters were different. Pepé, for instance, would never walk at an eight-beat (three steps to the second), he would walk at a twelve-beat (two steps to the second). He’d walk much more casually, and he’d stop and look at something and contemplate it, instead of going right to it” (Barrier, Jones 18).
Chuck Jones’s control over timing was not just motivated by aesthetics. At Warner Bros, there was no money for reshooting or for editing, so the films had to be pre-timed for the proper length.
“We’d time it in our heads so that it would come out pretty close to 540 feet, the average length of a six-minute cartoon. We had to time it ourselves, because we didn’t have the luxury of shooting something and then not using it, as was done at Disney” (Bailey 148).
While storyboards include drawings that define a character’s body position and attitude, and while those drawings might be incorporated into the animation, there are relatively few storyboard drawings compared to the number of frames that exist in a final shot. Directors refine how characters behave through the use of additional drawings. In some studios, such as Disney, there would be a layout artist that was responsible for doing these drawings. Animator Shamus Culhane recalled the birth of the layout function.
“Heretofore, the animators always drew their own layouts, and decided on the size and composition of the characters in their scenes, without much attention to the approach that was being used by the animators who were working on adjoining sequences.
“By having one man drawing layouts and positioning characters, the result was a more cohesive approach. Now Walt [Disney] could see what the whole picture was going to look like before he gave work to the animators” (95).
At other studios, the director did the layout drawings himself. Frank Tashlin recalled doing several hundred drawings per cartoon (Barrier, Tashlin 46-47) when directing at Warner Bros. Chuck Jones did between 300 and 400 drawings for each short he directed. While Jones didn’t insist that the animators follow his poses exactly, he was confident that if they changed them they would still give him something consistent with what he intended (Adamson, Jones 137). Jones recalled,
“My job was to present what I wanted to see on the screen, and their job was to animate it. It was the same thing as conducting an orchestra, where the individual musician has no right to change a note. The director served as the composer and the conductor” (Jurgens 189).
Some animators were happy to work with Jones’ drawings. Animator Virgil Ross worked for Jones in the 1980’s and considered the work easy. “His layouts were so good that it was almost inbetweening” (Province 19). Ross implies that he only had to connect up Jones’ drawings for the scene to be animated.
Not every director would do the final drawings. Friz Freleng would do character layouts and then pass them on to a layout artist, such as Hawley Pratt, who would refine them (Barrier, Hollywood 472). At MGM on the Tom and Jerry series co-directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, layout artist Dick Bickenbach worked over Barbera’s drawings. However, when Hanna handed out work to animators, he would include Barbera’s rough drawings along with Bickenbach’s to make sure that Barbera’s intent was clear. In Tex Avery’s MGM unit in the early 1940’s, Claude Smith would do the character layouts. Preston Blair recalled that he would use a lot of Smith’s layout drawings verbatim in his animation (Barrier, Hollywood 413).
Casting for animation is significantly different than live action as well. Having cast an actor for a live role, it’s difficult to replace that actor on stage or on screen without the audience noticing. In film, live actors are often replaced by stunt doubles during dangerous scenes, and pains must be taken not to show the double’s face so that the illusion of a single performer in the role won’t be broken.
However, in animation, the artists are invisible to the audience. As a consequence, it’s possible for several animators to control the same character in a single film. This is most often done for the sake of efficiency. In order to hit deadlines, it is easier to split a character up among several animators than delay completing the film while a single animator finishes work on a character.
While acknowledging the need for efficiency, there are still three ways that animators get cast for shots. The most basic is that when an animator needs a new shot, the director simply hands the animator whatever shot is ready to go. No one would argue that this leads to consistency, but few productions can afford to have an animator doing nothing while waiting for the next appropriate shot to be ready. While directors attempt to avoid casting in this manner, it is not always possible. Animator Ward Kimball declared that, “the logistics of casting depended a lot on the timetable” (Shale 9).
Studio records for the Walter Lantz cartoon The Pied Piper of Basin Street, directed by Shamus Culhane, show that three shots in a row of the piper were done by three separate animators. The most likely reason is that Culhane had to keep the animators working. Even if he were casting by sequence, so that the piper would be controlled by several animators throughout the film, it would still make sense to give three successive shots to one animator in order to avoid problems with the cutting continuity.
Three successive shots from The Pied Piper of Basin Street with the names of each shot’s animator at top. Images are frame enlargements. Animator identifications taken from Lantz studio records in the collection of the author.
There are two methods of casting that are calculated to produce better results: casting by scene and casting by character. Both remain in use and both have their partisans.
Casting by scene has two advantages: you can assign shots based on an animator’s strengths and it’s more efficient for a single animator to handle all the characters in a shot. However, it does introduce inconsistencies as to how characters are drawn or move over the course of a film. Casting by character provides greater consistency in individual character behaviour, but creates logistical problems that slow down production.
The decision which animator to cast can have a profound impact on the resulting behaviour of a character. The decision to cast by scene guarantees that animators will deal with a further level of collaboration.
A fuller discussion of casting will take place in the section below on animators.
The Animation Guild regularly does an anonymous survey of its members to compile statistics on wages. The survey for 2007, completed in March, can be reached here.
There is a U.S. government database that includes salary information and job titles connected to foreign worker visas that can be searched by company and state located here. Off the top of my head, I typed in Pixar, Sony, Rhythm and Hues, Digital Domain and DreamWorks and got results for each.
This sequence is all about character relationships, something that in later years at Disney would see both characters handled by the same animator. If casting by character, you would think that you'd pick two animators and let them work out the acting between them. However, while Pinocchio is handled by Ollie Johnston, Jiminy is split among Ward Kimball, John Elliotte, Lynn Karp and Walt Clinton. The heavy acting scenes are split between Kimball and Elliotte. As I go through these mosaics, I'm constantly surprised at how little of Jiminy is by Ward Kimball and how good the scenes by the other Jiminy animators are.
The sequence works well. There's a palpable warmth between the characters and there's some nice physical interaction when Pinocchio helps Jiminy put on his hat and coat in shot 27. Jiminy never lets go of the umbrella while putting on his coat, but John Elliotte hides that arm behind Jiminy's body so as not to call attention to it.
The rain in this sequence is beautiful. The cheapest way to do rain is just put a level over the top of the rest of the artwork. Disney goes way beyond that, showing drops hitting the ground and the water reacting to whatever surface it hits. There's water dripping off Jiminy's umbrella and splashing as he runs through puddles to catch up to Stromboli's wagon.
The rain is not just there to show off. It's expressionistically used to show Pinocchio's sorrow at being captured and Jiminy's sorrow over the end of his relationship with Pinocchio. In the next sequence, it will also represent Geppetto's sorrow over the loss of his son and later when the Blue Fairy has freed Pinocchio and Jiminy, the skies will be clear as they head for home. Expressionistic use of backgrounds and effects was one of Disney's strongest tools and the early features are full of this type of storytelling.
Willard Bowsky was a Fleischer animator whose Popeye cartoons were among the most attractive and entertaining of that series. He was also one of the animators most sympathetic to the jazz used on the Fleischer cartoon soundtracks in the early '30's.
Until now, the only real information I've found on Bowsky was in Shamus Culhane's autobiography, Talking Animals and Other People. Joe Campana has written a Memorial Day blog entry on Bowsky with lots of new information, including details of Bowsky's death in France during World War II.
Below is the Popeye cartoon A Date to Skate, animated by Bowsky and Orestes Calpini. There's no Bluto in this cartoon and no conflict with other characters. It's just two people who enjoy each other's company trying to have some fun. I love the warm relationship that Popeye and Olive have in this film and wish that there was more of it in animated shorts.
Steamboat Willie (1928) was not the first sound cartoon, but it was the first to have an impact on audiences. The relationship between the visuals and the soundtrack in that film became the dominant one in the animation business.
The Fleischer Brothers had made cartoons using Lee DeForest’s Phonofilm system as early as 1925. Their first, My Old Kentucky Home, included some synchronized sound of a character playing a trombone and speaking the line “Now let’s all follow the bouncing ball and sing along.” Later Fleischer cartoons using this sound system seem to have only a musical score added with no attempt at synchronization (Cabarga 34).
While in N.Y. to record the soundtrack for Steamboat Willie, Disney saw an Aesop’s Fable cartoon with sound. Disney wrote to his brother Roy in California, “It merely had an orchestra playing and adding some noises. The talking part does not mean a thing. It doesn’t even match. We sure have nothing to worry about from these quarters” (quoted in Bob Thomas 92). Disney was confident because he conceived of sound cartoons in a specific way; he valued the tight synchronization of picture and sound.
Disney’s shift to the production of sound cartoons was born out of desperation. Prior to the creation of Mickey Mouse, Disney had been producing silent Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons for producer Charles Mintz and Universal. When it came time to renew the contract, Mintz insisted that Disney take a $450 cut in the budget of each cartoon or he would take the character and a majority of Disney’s staff away and produce the series himself. Disney couldn’t meet the price cut, so he left the meeting without a character, a distributor, and a large percentage of his staff (Maltin 34).
With his remaining staff, Disney created Mickey Mouse and started to produce cartoons without having a distributor. Two cartoons, Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho (both 1928) were produced as silent films. The third Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928), was conceived from the start as a film with a soundtrack (Maltin 34). Disney needed something to differentiate his cartoon series from his competition; the cartoons had to be distinctive enough to gain a distribution contract or the studio would have no income.
When starting Steamboat Willie, the Disney staff had struggled with how to achieve synchronization. Wilfred Jackson, then an assistant animator, brought in a metronome. Jackson’s mother was a music teacher. As Disney knew that sound film would be projected at 24 frames per second, they were able to work out a relationship between the metronome and film frames. This allowed them to use the metronome to plan the action of the entire cartoon in advance, before the musical score was recorded and the film was animated (Barrier, Hollywood 51).
Exposure sheets existed as an animation tool in the silent era, at least as early as 1916 (Barrier, Hollywood 28). An exposure sheet is a chart that indicates which drawings are to be photographed for each frame of film. During the silent era, the exposure sheet would be prepared after the animation was drawn (J. B. Kaufman 30). Because there was no soundtrack to worry about, the timing of the animation could be changed with little problem. With sound, in order to maintain synchronization, the exposure sheets needed to be planned in advance of animation, so that the animator would know which frames would match a musical beat or a sound effect.
Each horizontal line represents one frame of film. The vertical numbers in the colunms labeled 1 and 2 are drawings that will be photographed for that frame. From Animation by Preston Blair.
Disney developed a new tool for use with exposure sheets called bar sheets. These sheets were essentially musical manuscript paper. One musical staff would include the score and a parallel staff would include the action. Bar sheets took up less space than exposure sheets because they didn’t need space for drawing numbers, camera information, etc. Once the action was plotted on a bar sheet relative to the musical score, the information would be transferred to exposure sheets that were sent to the animators (Barrier, Hollywood 51).
A detail of a bar sheet from the Warner Bros. cartoon Shuffle Off to Buffalo. You can see how action has been planned to work with the musical beats. Courtesy of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive and Mark Kausler.
As a result, Steamboat Willie was more tightly synchronized than any sound cartoon had previously been. “As Disney was well aware, he was now far ahead of any other cartoon producer in his mastery of sound” (Barrier, Hollywood 54).
This approach to timing cartoons became an industry standard. Director and musical director would collaborate on choosing tempos for each section of a cartoon. The director would plan out the cuts and action to work to the musical beat and the animator had to stick to the beat in order to maintain synchronization.
In effect, this approach to synchronizing animation and sound turned all cartoons into the equivalent of musicals. There might be no singing or dancing within a cartoon, but the pacing of the action is still dictated by the musical tempo. Animators were dominated by the musical beat in the same way as dancers. This creates a unified approach to timing, forcing all the animators on a film (and all working on a single character) to adhere to a preset pace. It prevents individual animators from using timing as a means of expression. To use a live action analogy, Walter Kerr talks about how Oliver Hardy’s sense of pace altered silent comedy.
“It was Hardy’s personal rhythm, a rhythm that has been recognized as that of a “Southern gentleman,” that determined the new pace at which both men were to work and to which silent comedy would be forced to accommodate itself. In taking over from [Stan] Laurel as go-getter, as initiator of all catastrophe, Hardy could not behave as the impetuous Laurel had behaved in the role, or as virtually all two reel runaway clowns had eagerly behaved before him. They had sprinted from square one, as though in response to a starter’s gun; there would be further gunshots along the way to make them go faster and faster. Hardy heard music instead, the soothing guidance of a steady 2/4 beat, the mellifluous promptings of a chastely tuned pianoforte” (Kerr 329).
Once the decision to pre-time cartoons to a musical soundtrack was made, it became impossible for individual animators to affect pace in the way that someone like Hardy could. The director and the musical director controlled the pace of a character’s motion, not the animator.
The reliance on the musical beat at Disney loosened by the end of World War II. At that point, dialog sequences were post-scored with music the same way that a live action film would be. By the time Cinderella was in production in the late ‘40’s, even action sequences were no longer timed to music (Barrier, Hollywood 399). However, musical beats remained an integral part of cartoon timing at studios like Warner Bros. and MGM.
As bad as I think things are as to how animated productions are organized, they're not as bad as they are in the visual effects field. Variety reports how schedules are shrinking to the point where parts of films are being locked before other parts are edited and how the industry is coming perilously close to missing a delivery date. How long will it be before a film scheduled to open in thousands of theatres just doesn't show up?
Effects are treated more like a commodity than animation. Productions routinely split effects work up between several studios. Furthermore, the pressure on budgets and schedules is resulting in very long hours, which is causing some of the most experienced artists to leave the field. This is another case where the "needs" of an industry are counterproductive to the long term health of that industry. Sooner or later, all bubbles must burst.
This is one of the great sequences in Pinocchio. It's all character animation. There are no fancy camera moves or extreme perspectives in the layouts. While there's some effects and background animation, this sequence is really about two characters and their power relationship. Pinocchio, naive as ever, is simply pleased to be a success. Stromboli shifts from exhilaration to anger, and both emotions have the same root: greed.
Tytla does a great job of managing the emotional transitions. Stromboli's character is simple, but Tytla's animation is anything but. I say that the character is simple because there's no subtext. The audience can read Stromboli like a book and it's only Pinocchio's inexperience that allows him to be taken in by the puppeteer.
Tytla's draftsmanship and animation are outstanding here. Stromboli is fleshy and dimensional; he has a substantial physical presence. The secondary actions and follow through are extremely complex. Interestingly, Tytla gives Stromboli some contained gestures that one would think should be broad. When Stromboli tosses Pinocchio into the cage in shot 25 and tosses the ax in shot 51, the arm movements are close the body. These movements contrast with Stromboli yelling "Quiet!" in shot 57. There's an odd contrast here where Stromboli's most overt violence is more contained than his dialog.
One thing this sequence excels at is the use of stage business. In too many modern animated films, characters stand around yakking with nothing else to do. The animator is stuck trying to find arm gestures and head bobs that go with the dialog. In this sequence, Stromboli is working with a prop in almost every scene and using the prop to perform specific actions. The knife is used to push stacks of coins and cut food. The slug is the object of anger and then gets handed to Pinocchio. Stromboli drinks from the wine bottle and does a spit take. (Is this the first one in animation? Anyone got an earlier one?) Pinocchio himself is a prop when picked up and thrown into the cage. The ax is tossed into the remains of a puppet and the door is slammed during Stromboli's exit. There's no question that Tytla's animation here is great, but the sequence was well thought out before he got it. Wilfred Jackson didn't leave Tytla hanging, struggling to invent motion to put across the character.
Lars Calonius and Harvey Toombs get Pinocchio at the top of the sequence before he has any real emoting to do. As soon as Pinocchio's emotions come into play, Frank Thomas takes over with a couple of shots by Ollie Johnston. Pinocchio's dawning panic as he realizes he's a prisoner is handled beautifully by Thomas, who has Pinocchio clutch the bars of the cage and kick at them in an attempt to break out.
Besides handling the emotions, Thomas is stuck with the unenviable task of animating Pinocchio in the cage as it bounces around. Animators who have had to match characters to a live action plate with a moving camera will know something of the challenge that Thomas faced. The fact that we don't get distracted by drawing or perspective problems during this action is a tribute to Thomas and whoever was his assistant on these scenes.
May 26 is John Wayne's 100th birthday. His films have continued to be popular, but he's really three different characters. There is John Ford's Wayne, there's Howard Hawks' Wayne and then there's Wayne's own Wayne.
The simplest of these is Wayne's own conception of his screen persona. This Wayne is a hero or an avenger; someone who overcomes adversity or a powerful man with a sense of justice who helps the downtrodden and punishes evil doers. If you look at Wayne's films in the '60's and '70's, which he produced himself, this is the character you'll see. The problem is that the character is pretty shallow and predictable. Wayne's audience obviously responded to this character, but in many ways it's no different than any action hero except for the particulars of Wayne's personality.
Hawks used Wayne like he used Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. In Hawks' hands, Wayne is the consummate professional. Whether Wayne's a sheriff in Rio Bravo or an animal trapper in Hatari, Wayne is supremely capable of accomplishing a task. It's ironic that in Red River, Wayne's first performance for Hawks, Montgomery Clift plays the typical Hawks hero with Wayne being unprofessional by letting personal feelings get in the way of doing the job.
Finally, there's Ford's Wayne, who is the most interesting to me and responsible for whatever claim Wayne has to being a great actor. Ford consistently frustrates Wayne. Instead of being a powerful avenger, Ford makes him powerful but bound by society or by his own conflicting emotions. Initially, the frustration comes from others in films like Stagecoach (where the sheriff wants to send him back to jail rather than let him shoot it out with Luke Plummer), or They Were Expendable and Fort Apache (where Wayne is frustrated by Army decisions). Stating with Rio Grande, however, Wayne's frustrations are mostly interior. He's got to reconcile things that are mutually exclusive. In Rio Grande and The Wings of Eagles, it's duty and family. In The Quiet Man, it's personal experience vs. society's expectations. In The Searchers, it's racism and sexual need against the sanctity of family. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it's personal happiness vs. the force of history.
As I wrote here, it's the difference between character vs. character and character vs. self. In the Wayne and Hawks versions, you have the former. Wayne can be impressive and even charming in these films, but there's little to challenge him as an actor. Ford adds a layer of character vs. self, which elevates Wayne into another league. Ford gives Wayne an element of self-awareness and tragedy that's missing from his other roles.
I'm writing about this because it relates to animation. Wayne as a performer was a known quantity. Yet depending on who was directing him and what the director's conception was, Wayne could be predictable or a revelation. Wayne didn't even realize (or didn't like) what Ford added or he would have brought some of it into the films he controlled.
There's a parallel between Wayne and Bill Tytla. Give Tytla a properly conceived role and he can give you great acting. Give him a poorly conceived role, like all of his post-Disney work, and Tytla's skill isn't enough to create a memorable result on the screen. Animators tend to be fixated on poses, silhouettes, line of action, timing, follow through, etc. but it counts for nothing unless there's something meaningful to say. We'll only get great animated performances and great animated films when they're more ambitiously conceived.
A live actor can take his or her own body for granted. An actor literally has a lifetime of experience living in it and intimately knows his or her own shape, size and physical limitations.
One reason that a producer or director will cast an actor in a role is because he or she is physically suited to it. The actor is the right age and gender for the role and may also be the right height, weight and personality for it. If actors have been chosen for these qualities, they don’t have to think about altering themselves physically, merely about how to best play the role.
When actors do physically alter themselves, it is a novelty that is cause for discussion. When Robert DeNiro gained sixty pounds for the role of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, it was still being mentioned in reviews of the DVD 25 years after the film’s release (Abel 1).
The unity that exists between actors and their physical selves in a performance does not exist for animators. The physical manifestation of a character exists independently of the animator, so the animator must relate to a character’s appearance differently than a live actor would. In addition, animators are not responsible for the creation of their characters’ appearances.
“By the time animation of [“The] Sorcerer[‘s Apprentice”] and Pinocchio got under way in January 1938, Disney had introduced a new layer of character designers. These people would draw preliminary model sheets of new characters, improving on the story sketches, but would not animate the characters; the animators, in pilot scenes, would uncover flaws in the designs and draw the final versions” (Barrier, Hollywood 256)
Somebody needs to determine what an animated character looks like. Character design may start as early as the first inspirational sketches for a film or may start at the storyboard stage. Ultimately, though, the look of a character has to be codified so that it will be consistent throughout a film. Character designers may refine work that has already been done or may design characters from scratch, but they are the ones responsible for pulling the look of a character into focus.
The model sheet was the tool developed for the sake of consistency. Model sheets generally fall into two different types. Some are detailed instructions as to how to draw a character. They include different views of a character so that an animator will know what a character looks like no matter which way he turns. The sheet may also specifically comment about sizes and proportions, either in words or by the use of guidelines. Because characters will probably be handled by more than one animator, model sheets are necessary to maintain a consistent look for a character.
A Jiminy Cricket model sheet from Pinocchio, showing how to draw the character’s head from any angle. From the collection of the author. Click to enlarge.
Model sheets were used at least as early as 1920 (Adamson, Fleischers 27). However, as late as the mid-1930’s, some studios were still not using model sheets, leading to characters whose appearance changed scene by scene.
“The model sheet, which establishes the look, shape, and even dimensions for each character, and which is so essential to professional animation, was unknown at Van Beuren. This meant that even a simplistic, homely character like [director Burt] Gillette’s [sic] real winner, Molly Moo Cow, given to thirteen animators, would emerge as thirteen different cows. Rubber-legged and amorphous to begin with, Molly would go through a most disquieting process of metamorphosis when the work of these thirteen animators was cut together into what was supposedly a single five-minute cartoon” (Barbera 47).
Other model sheets exist to communicate a sense of a character’s personality. These sheets may not draw the character as he will appear in the final film (and may include a warning to that effect as below), but give examples of poses and attitudes that communicate to the animator the essence of who the character is.
A model sheet for The Little Whirlwind. From the collection of the author. Click to enlarge.
Character design has an impact on animated behaviour in very specific ways. The degree of realism in the design determines how realistically the character must move. Here are stills of two rabbits. The viewer instantly gets different expectations from these designs. Max Hare, from The Tortoise and the Hare (top) is designed to resemble a human; he stands on two legs and wears clothing. By contrast, Thumper from Bambi, is designed to more closely resemble a rabbit.
Frame enlargements. Click to enlarge.
The character designer has done more than design a look; the designer has provoked expectations. Presented with these designs, the animator must deal with the expectations or risk alienating the audience. If Max Hare runs, he has to run on two legs. If he were to run on all fours, he would look ludicrous. Thumper, looking more rabbit-like, must move like a real rabbit if he is to be believable.
Design had a similar impact on Andy Serkis when he was cast to play the character of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Serkis recalled,
“There were also sketches by the incredible Alan Lee and John Howe. One pencil sketch by the latter, which to me depicted Gollum as a cross between a homeless junkie and a survivor of a concentration camp, directly influenced how I would move as Gollum in the films. From this image I strongly felt that Gollum should be on all fours at all times, that the weight of the addiction to the ring had reduced him to a crawling wretch” (11).
Design also provokes expectations with regard to personality. Here are examples of early character designs for the Queen in Snow White.
Preliminary designs from The Art of Walt Disney by Christopher Finch; final design from Treasury of Disney Animation Art by John Canemaker. Click to enlarge.
The plumpness of the design at left implies a certain ineffectuality. The facial expression doesn’t imply malice. While the preliminary design on the right appears meaner, the Queen doesn’t appear much of a physical threat.
Contrast them with the final design of the Queen. Her face combined with her trim figure implies that she’s a woman of action who is motivated by hate. She seems far more threatening than the early designs.
In live action terms, the early design might be played by someone like Roseanne Barr while the final design might be played by Angelina Jolie. For performers who were contemporary with the release of Snow White, the early designs might be played by Margaret Dumont and the final design played by Judith Anderson. Forgetting personality for a moment, each of these performers would bring a different physical presence to the role, one that is unique to their own physical beings.
Animators not only lack the unity with characters that live actors have, they also lack the physical identification with a character. The animator’s physique is does not have to relate in any way to a character’s physique. It is possible for a single animator to deal with a range of characters, regardless of their appearances, and the animator must collaborate with designers who shape audience expectations as to how a character should move and behave.
Over the course of Frank Thomas’s career as an animator at Disney, he animated the following characters: mouse (The Brave Little Tailor), dwarf (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), fawn (Bambi), queen (Alice in Wonderland), pirate captain (Peter Pan), cocker spaniel (Lady and the Tramp), wizard (The Sword in the Stone), panther (The Jungle Book), and alligator (The Rescuers). This list is far from complete. These characters vary widely in their sizes, shapes, ages, genders, and species. By contrast, DeNiro gaining sixty pounds is only a minor physical alteration.
The character design and the motion begin separately and the animator has to work to close the gap between them. On Disney features, an initial minute of animation was done for major characters, where the design was put through its paces. Animator Frank Thomas wrote that, “We must study the design carefully, questioning the shape of his whole figure, his costume, his head, cheeks, mouth, eyes, hands, legs, arms – even the setting he is in and how he relates to it” (222).
Animator Grim Natwick talked about the evolution of the design of the Snow White character and the animators’ part of the process.
“There were probably two thousand different drawings made trying to develop Snow White’s character. She started out as a little fairy-book character that that didn’t seem right. As the character changed, they gave us two complete months to practice animation on Snow White before we had to make a single scene that would go into the picture. So if a model came in from the designing department that we animated and we found things we didn’t like, we simply went back and told them. As a matter of fact, every model that came to an animator at Disney’s did not have to be animated until the animator wrote his okay on it” (Maltin 56).
This was not true in later years. During the production of Sleeping Beauty (1959) at Disney, Frank Thomas complained about Eyvind Earle’s “very rigid design” and how it was inhibiting animators (Barrier, Hollywood 557). Thomas and Ollie Johnston later wrote that, “the animator must give up his best tools of communication if he limits his drawing to the restrictions of a strong design” (516). The collaboration between animators and character designers is not always a happy one.
In the realm of stop-motion or computer animation, there is a further step in the design process. In these types of animation, the character must be constructed. In the case of stop motion, the character is constructed out of physical materials where in computer animation, the character is constructed in the virtual world that exists within a software package.
Constructed characters free animators from having to worry about drawing a character in a consistent fashion. However, while freeing animators in one sense, it can restrict them in others. When drawing, animators are only limited by their ability to visualize and draw the characters in various positions. However, there are physical limitations to constructed characters.
Characters for stop-motion are limited by the physical world. They can only bend so far before breaking and their limbs are a fixed length; drawn characters face no such limitations. Computer characters are more flexible than stop-motion puppets, but they go through a process called rigging, where the character is wired with virtual bones and the influence of each bone on the character’s surface determines how the character will deform when moving.
This rigging process includes the face, so how the mouth and eyes move is heavily determined by the rigging work. It’s quite possible that an animator will be frustrated at being unable to create the facial expression or body pose that he or she is looking for. While the way a character looks has an impact on the audience perception of a character’s personality and how it should move, the physical limitations of stop-motion puppets and the process of rigging computer characters can act as a limiting factor on an animator’s control of motion.
The need to synchronize animation with speech and music had a major impact on the way that animation was created. The assembly line approach developed in the silent era was not thrown away; rather, it was modified to take sound into account.
The only way to maintain regular releases while dealing with the added workload of creating and synchronizing to soundtracks was to plan each film in more detail than was done in the silent period. This led to an expansion of pre-production processes that were aimed at pinning down as much of the story, timing and character behaviour as possible before the animator started work.
In the silent era, animators collaborated with each other on the actions of characters like Felix the Cat or Mutt and Jeff. However, in the sound era, animators would not only collaborate with each other, but also with directors, voice actors, musical directors, character designers, story artists, and layout artists, all of whom were focused on behaviour to some degree. These new collaborators attempted to shape a character’s behaviour in such a way that animators would produce the desired interpretation with as little revision as possible. Animators would also rely more heavily on assistants to draw certain details on characters and animate secondary motions. This placed animators in a sandwich situation, located between behaviour collaborators on one side and artistic collaborators on the other.
The expansion of pre-production led to better films and animation. The assembly line in the silent period had focused on efficiency through a division of labour, but it hadn’t focused on artistic control. In the sound period, synchronization was impossible to achieve without control being centralized in the hands of a producer or director. Because of this, the creative role of the animator was significantly reduced. Rather than create a role from a script and with input from a director as a live actor would, the animator was handed a set of parameters that established the limits of the character’s behaviour. Rather than an actor reaching into his or her own experience to find the truth of a role, the animator had to take other people’s experiences and combine them with personal experience and still hope to find a way to create a truthful, consistent character.
This is the nature of the collaboration that an animator faces. An animator is never alone with a character; there are always others who are there as well. Within the following pages, I wish to examination how the coming of synchronous sound reshaped the methods of animated production and, in particular, the creation of a character's behaviour. To do so, I shall in order examine its impact upon the following distinctive but integrated practices:
Character Design Sound, Bar Sheets and Timing Directing Voice Acting Storyboards Animating Assistant Animators and Technical Directors Animation for Television Rotoscoping and Motion Capture
I don't know anything more about the Animagic layoff and the production of Nate the Great than I've read at the link below. I also don't know Shane Glines, though I think he's a very good designer and somebody with excellent taste. Unfortunately, the story that Glines tells is all too typical about the way many animation projects are run these days. Read the thread on Animation Nation.
The creation of coherent behaviour in animation got off to a slow start, as did animation itself. Regular production of animated shorts didn’t begin in earnest until 1913, more than a decade after live action studios were releasing films on a regular schedule. By the time regular animation production existed, the larger film industry and its audience had well-developed expectations regarding costs, film lengths, and release schedules. As animation always comprised a minority of film releases and didn’t generate enough box office revenue to influence the motion picture industry, the animation industry had no choice but to adapt to prevailing conditions if it was to survive.
Those conditions had a major impact in how animation production was organized, that in turn had a major impact on how character behaviour in animation developed. While there was a unity between performer and character in live action, this unity was discarded in animation as soon as it became a studio-produced medium. This lack of unity continues to be a fact of life in animation, though the industry has taken steps to control its effects.
In its initial, pre-studio, stage, animation was presented to audiences purely as a novelty. The fact that objects could move of their own accord or drawings could come to life was sufficient to satisfy audiences.
There are at least two surviving Edison films from 1905 that feature object animation. How Jones Lost his Roll utilizes animated title cards and The Whole Damm Family and the Damm Dog has a scene of stop motion where the dog’s body assembles itself (Crafton, Emile 130-31).
J. Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) is the earliest known example of drawn animation. Blackton was one of the founders of Vitagraph in 1898, a major early film production company (Musser 253-54). His background included time spent as an artist for the New York World newspaper and he himself was the subject of several Edison films in 1896 that photographed him drawing (Musser 120-21). These films led to opportunities for Blackton to perform a sketching act in vaudeville (Musser 121). Blackton continued to use his art skills at Vitagraph, including a film called The Enchanted Drawing (1900) that did “not use frame by frame cinematography, but instead borrows Mèliés stop-action tricks” (Crafton, Before 52).
In Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, the film’s title draws itself on the screen. This is followed by Blackton’s hand sketching a man on a chalkboard. When the man is complete, a woman character is drawn on screen without the evidence of a human hand. The man’s eyes animate to look at the woman and he wiggles his eyebrows. She winks at him. Eventually, the man smokes a cigar and the smoke obliterates the image of the woman. Blackton’s hand then re-enters the frame and erases the chalkboard.
While the behaviour here is extremely rudimentary, the characters do interact with each other and the audience has no trouble understanding their behaviour. Blackton is the first known case of a film animator creating character behaviour through his drawings. As he was the sole artist working on the film, the behaviour is undiluted Blackton.
Humorous Phases also includes a man tossing an umbrella and a clown and dog that appear to be chalk drawings but on closer examination are actually animated cut-outs. There is another drawn animation segment of a man and a woman that appear to have been shot in reverse. These other segments don’t contain much in the way of emoting.
The film, as a whole, has no narrative. It is similar to vaudeville sketch acts where the audience watches an artist draw, but adds the novelty of the drawings coming to life.
Despite Blackton’s history as an artist and his experiments with animation, it was clearly a minor part of Vitagraph’s output. By August 1907, the studio was releasing at least two new films a week, most being half reels (Musser 473). While Blackton was also involved with the 1907 release The Haunted Hotel, a film that used stop motion animation of objects (Musser 471), animation was simply one genre of many at Vitagraph, and nowhere near a majority of its output.
As Donald Crafton writes,
“Between 1908 and the first world war animation was gradually defined as a cinema genre by Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay…. Before then it was a “special effect” and not unlike other effects such as irises and lap dissolves. But with these artists, the technology began to be associated with recurring dramatic situations, narrative structures, iconography, and expectations concerning content” (Before 9).
Vitagraph would play a role in the distribution of animation by Winsor McCay, perhaps the most influential of the first generation of animators. McCay, like Blackton, was a newspaper artist. At the time of his first animated film, he was working for the New York Herald, where he was the author of several comic strips: Little Sammy Sneeze, Hungry Henrietta and Little Nemo in Slumberland (Crafton, Before 93-98). Also like Blackton, McCay had appeared in vaudeville, doing a sketch act entitled “The Seven Ages of Man” (Crafton, Before 98).
McCay’s animated film Little Nemo (released by Vitagraph in 1911) is similar to Humorous Phases in that it has no narrative and is built on the novelty of drawings coming to life. Indeed, the first drawn image of the animation is the character of Flip from the Nemo comic strip with the words “Watch Me Move” written over his head. The character of Impy is assembled out of falling cylindrical pieces and Nemo is assembled from lines that animate in from off-screen. Nemo draws the Princess character, who then starts to move.
A live action prologue was filmed, showing McCay making a bet that he could do 4,000 drawings to make an animated film, perhaps the first time that an animated film was publicly defined by the amount of work necessary to create it.
(This is not a complete copy. Sorry.)
McCay used the film in his vaudeville appearances (Crafton, Before 98) as he did two later animated films, How a Mosquito Operates (1912) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) (Crafton, Before 110). The live action prologue to Mosquito is lost (Crafton, Before 107) but the prologue for Gertie survives. It once again shows McCay taking a bet that he can bring a dinosaur to life through a series of 10,000 drawings. In the vaudeville version of the act, McCay stood to the right of the screen and interacted with Gertie by barking orders that she (usually) followed. For the filmed version, McCay’s commands were used as intertitles.
Gertie is perhaps the first successful animated character. She comes across as easily distracted and somewhat stubborn. She exhibits fear and sorrow with personality touches like scratching her head with the tip of her tail. Except for her size and strength, she behaves in a manner familiar to anyone with a house pet, alternately cute and stubborn.
Blackton and McCay both had day jobs, so to speak, so animation was not their main occupation. Neither ever attempted to do a series of animated films with a regular release schedule. The one animation pioneer who did attempt this was Emile Cohl.
Cohl was an established illustrator in France who also wrote poetry and two comedies for the stage (Crafton, Before 64). He was associated with a group known as The Incoherents, whose philosophy was “iconoclastic, antibourgeois, antiacademic, and violently antirational” (Crafton, Before 64). His first contact with films seems to have been in 1908, when he started contributing scenarios to the Gaumont company in Paris (Crafton, Emile 93). Those scenarios were for a variety of genres, including chase films, comedies and fantasies (Crafton, Emile 119). He was promoted to directing at Gaumont, and his output included comedies, documentaries and dramas, though he specialized in animation. In late May or early June of that year, he completed his first animated film Fantasmagorie (Crafton, Emile 93).
Like Humorous Phases, Fantasmagorie begins with the hand of the artist creating a drawing. Fantasmagorie appears to be an improvised film, with images succeeding each other with very little logic. There is metamorphoses animation, with objects turning into other objects. A man turns into bottle that turns into a flower and then the flower’s stem turns into an elephant’s trunk. While the character of a clown appears throughout the film, Cohl is clearly more interested in the transformations and the succession of images than he is in having the clown or any of the other figures on screen emote.
All three of these animation pioneers attempted to find short cuts due to the amount of work animation required. Blackton resorted to using cut-outs in Humorous Phases in order reduce the amount of drawing that had to be done. Cohl exposed each drawing in Fantasmagorie for two frames, not one, in order to only do 8 drawings per second instead of 16 (Crafton, Before 61). McCay developed the use of “reverse and repeats” and “cycles,” both techniques for using drawings more than once in order to create more footage.1 In addition, he hired an assistant named John A. Fitzsimmons who traced the background McCay created onto every animation drawing of Gertie the Dinosaur (Maltin 4).
As Donald Crafton points out,
“By far the greatest disadvantage was the length of time required to complete a film, which seemed, in 1908, like an eternity. In November Cohl had less than 200 meters of released film to show for seven months of hard work. [At 16 frames per second, this is less than 11 minutes of screen time.] This amount normally represented three to five days of shooting for a typical Gaumont film. And the three films had netted only 750 francs for the artist” (Emile 140).
After his initial three films of drawn animation, Cohl “could no longer sustain the heroic effort that their production demanded” (Crafton, Emile 141) and was forced to shift to other animation techniques such as object animation, puppet animation and cut-out animation in addition to padding his films with live action. Using only a camera operator as an assistant, he completed animated segments for “about four films each month” (Crafton, Emile 120). By using these techniques, he was able to create over seventy films in a three-year period, almost all of them containing animated sequences (Crafton, Emile 151). This level of productivity separates Cohl from Blackton and McCay and prepared him to produce the first animated series with continuing characters, The Newlyweds.
Traveling to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to work for the Éclair company, Cohl completed thirteen films based on George McManus’s comic strip The Newlyweds between March 1913 and January 1914 (Crafton, Before 83). While this is a prodigious output for an animator working alone, Cohl failed to meet Éclair’s release schedule of a new film every two weeks (Crafton, Before 83). Unfortunately only one film in this series has survived, and it shows that the series was made with both drawn and cut-out animation (Crafton, Emile 164).
The use of continuing characters was a natural outgrowth of the star system that was developing in live action. While actors did not receive billing in early films, audiences still came to recognize them from their repeated appearances. Performers and studios began to capitalize on the audience’s interest by using actors as a marketing tool. Years before The Newlyweds series, the IMP company lured both Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford away from Biograph with the promise of screen credit and then advertised the presence of these performers to the movie going audience (Mast 122).
Lacking live stars, animation’s equivalent strategy was to use continuing characters. Newspaper comic strips featured characters already known to the movie-going audience in their original drawn form and in live action movie adaptations. In 1901, Edison made films based on Happy Hooligan (Musser 316) and in 1904 based on Buster Brown (Musser 357). The newspaper strips also provided gags and a drawing style, so they were a logical source for animated films.
The use of continuing characters was a turning point in animation’s popularity. As Donald Crafton notes, “A survey of the trade press shows that before the 1913 Newlyweds series [sic] animated films were sporadic novelty items; after the commercial success of the Éclair films animated series popped up like mushrooms" (Before 86).
The problem was that an animator working by himself could not maintain a steady release schedule. The answer was to create animation studios. In the period immediately following The Newlyweds, two studios sprang up, both focusing on series with continuing characters.
Raoul Barré and Bill Nolan opened a studio in the Bronx that produced a series for the Edison studio called Animated Grouch Chasers starting in 1915.
“Assembly-line techniques were developed in which employees were trained for one specific task. Barré himself eventually acted only as coordinator and supervisor. With many apprentices working on a single cartoon, it was necessary to schematize the drawing style to maintain uniform consistency. To save time, each drawing was sometimes photographed three or even four times to “stretch” the footage, often resulting in jerky and repetitious movements on the screen” (Crafton, Emile 177).
This was a seminal moment for animation. Rather than follow a theatrical performance model, where an artist would be cast as a character for the length of a film, the studios followed an industrial model where the character’s activity was broken into parts so that it could be produced by many hands on an assembly line. This decision, made almost one hundred years ago, has shaped animation production ever since.
In general during this decade, animation studios were preoccupied with the creation of technology that would aid them in production. Barré is credited with the invention of pegs and a punch system to register drawings (Crafton, Before 194). This allowed the spatial relationship between successive images to be fixed, whether on an artist’s drawing board or underneath a camera. Bill Nolan figured out how animation could simulate a tracking shot or pan by moving a long piece of background art under a character that was walking in place (Maltin 11).
John Randolph Bray opened a studio after he showed Charles Pathé his initial film The Artist’s Dream. By 1916, Bray was delivering 1 film a month with a crew of 9 cartoonists, 30 assistant artists and 4 camera operators (Barrier, Hollywood 17). Bray created the character of Col. Heeza Liar, a blowhard adventurer, to star in the cartoons that debuted in 1914. The character ran for about five years and was then revived in 1922 (Canemaker, Bray 28).
Bray also saw animation in industrial terms; Donald Crafton has described Bray as the Henry Ford of animation (Before 137). He patented several animation processes and combined his patents with those created by Earl Hurd. The two controlled the process of tracing characters onto clear celluloid, so that the background art did not have to be redrawn on a frame-by-frame basis, as was the case in Gertie the Dinosaur. Instead, the background showed through the clear celluloid anywhere not covered by an opaque character. It was responsible for speeding up production and allowing for more elaborate background art.
The industrial model was adapted due to one of the hard economic lessons of the film business. Film was paid for by the foot, regardless of what images were on the film (Crafton, Before 28). Because frames of animated films were produced more slowly than live action, the studios were in a more precarious financial position. With a fixed income per foot of film, studios were focused on developing efficient ways to produce and deliver films more than they were focused on creating characters who behaved in a consistent fashion.
Dick Huemer recalled working under Barré in 1916 at a later studio that produced Mutt and Jeff cartoons. The studio had a staff of five animators who turned out a 450 foot film per week. The creative atmosphere was relaxed in the extreme.
“We were given a portion of the picture, over a very rough scenario. Very, very sketchy, no storyboards like we have today, nothing like that. The scenario would probably be on a single sheet of paper, without any models, sketches or anything. You made it up as you went along. You were given a part of the picture and you did what you wanted. If it was a picture about ice skating, you took a scene of somebody on ice skates and you used your own gags and made it all up” (Adamson, AFI 12).
The casual nature of creating the films was not restricted to one studio. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst opened a studio in 1916 to create animated cartoons from his comic strips. Walter Lantz was an animator there at the time.
“We didn’t have any theories that we discussed in those days. I’d just animate a scene, and say to Nolan, “Look, Bill, I’m taking ‘em up from the left and you pick ‘em up from there.” And he’d animate a scene and tell the next animator, “I’m taking ‘em out from the right and you pick up the action from there.” And that’s how we turned out cartoons” (Peary 193).
I. Klein was hired to work with animator George Stallings at the Hearst studio in 1918. The lack of concern for how films were put together even affected individual scenes. Klein recalled that animators left important details of their own scenes to be done by other artists.
“The drawings that Stallings flipped were in pencil. My job, he explained, was to ink them. Offhand, that sounded as if I were to trace over his pencil lines. It was not that simple. The faces and bodies were without features or any other details beyond the animated action. I had to ink in the features of the characters directly, without further pencil drawing. I was given a model chart of the Captain, the Inspector, Mama and Hans and Fritz” (Klein 30).
The use of assistants changed somewhat in the 1920’s. Rather than have assistants add detail to an animator’s drawings, their jobs were shifted to creating drawings from scratch. In the animation process, the drawings that define the shape of a movement are referred to as “keyframes” or “poses.” The animator would be responsible for these. They might be drawings 1, 5, 9, etc. Other drawings serve to connect the keyframes together and these drawings are referred to as “inbetweens.” They would be drawings 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, etc. Starting in the 1920’s at the Fleischer studio, Art Davis was assigned to draw inbetweens for animator Dick Huemer. The job classification became known as inbetweener and Huemer estimated that Davis would do 75% of the drawings in a scene (Adamson, Fleischers 25). Huemer was the Fleischers best animator and Davis was assigned to help increase Huemer’s productivity.
These tight deadlines, division of labour and the casual approach to story and characters worked against any kind of coherent characters in the films of the time. While studio animation existed for 15 years before sound altered the production processes, only one character emerged from the period who can be said to have developed a consistent personality: Felix the Cat.
Felix was the work of Otto Messmer, an employee of the Pat Sullivan studio. Messmer started in the animation business in 1915, just as studios were getting off the ground. He was working for Sullivan by 1916, when he contributed to a dozen animated cartoons based on Charlie Chaplin (Canemaker, Felix 38). Messmer recalled that, “Chaplin sent at least thirty or forty photographs of himself in different [poses]…and we copied every little movement that he did” (Canemaker, Felix 38).
By 1916, Chaplin had already enlarged film comedy’s vocabulary and would continue to do so into the 1920’s. Perhaps Chaplin’s greatest contribution was acting that was far subtler than earlier performers who mugged and waved their arms. It’s significant that Messmer spent time attempting to match Chaplin’s gestures in animation as Felix would later achieve the reputation of the best character in silent cartoons.
Messmer created Felix in 1919, though the cat wasn’t named Felix until his third film (Canemaker, Felix 56). In the film, Felix woos a female, despite the attempted interference by humans. Canemaker describes Messmer’s style as having “a coolly detached yet determined protagonist, who uses his brain and the magic of metamorphosis to solve problems; the simple, direct pantomimic acting; dry wit expressed through visual puns” (Felix 18).
Initially, Messmer was able to avoid the assembly-line nature of the studio as he was the sole animator on the Felix series until 1924. In that year, when the release schedule was doubled to a cartoon every two weeks, guest animators were brought in to help. Bill Nolan and Raoul Barré each worked on Felix at separate times as guest animators (Crafton, Before 310-12).
“The crew worked on only one film at a time, on a two-week schedule, but naturally there was a lag between the various phases of production. The animators were ahead of the inkers and blackeners, and the cameraman might be behind half a film, or even finishing work on the previous one. This system differs from, say, those of the Terry or Fleischer studios, where subcrews worked on two or three films simultaneously. The reason is evident: The Assembly line was essentially an extension of Messmer. It was linear so that he could control the operation completely and efficiently” (Crafton, Before 314-317).
Crafton should have added stylistically as well. Messmer’s tight hold on Felix provided him with a consistent personality, perhaps the major key to his popularity with audiences. Felix was the first merchandising phenomenon to come out of the animation industry; there were Felix toys, dishware, comic strips, clocks and popular songs (Canemaker, Felix 4).
In many ways, Felix was the prototype for what animated characters would become in the sound and TV eras, especially in terms of presenting a coherent persona to audiences. Because Messmer controlled his character more tightly than the filmmakers who made Mutt and Jeff or Krazy Kat, he was able to counteract some of the fragmentation introduced by the assembly-line system. This was still a far cry from the unity of a theatrical or film performance, but Messmer demonstrated that with a strong guiding hand, a small crew of artists could be made to work in a consistent fashion, giving the appearance of a character having a unique, individual mind.
This approach continued to be used in the sound era, though at times the creative force was the producer, the director or a lead animator. However, while a variety of approaches evolved, they all involved someone leading a crew. The speed animation was produced prevented the possibility, in most cases, of a single person controlling a single character’s behaviour in a studio setting.
Three other issues affected the status of character behaviour in animation during this time period: source content, artistic lineage and the length of films.
The content of live action film was based on a variety of sources. Some were based on comic strips, such as Porter’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (Edison, 1907), but others were based on historical subjects (The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots; Edison, 1895), novels (Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Lubin 1903), plays (Passion Play; Lubin, 1898) operas (The Barber of Sevilla; Mèliés, 1904), and popular genres (Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; Vitagraph, 1905 and The Great Train Robbery; Edison, 1903). By contrast, the content of early animated films was based on the vaudeville genre of the sketch act (Humorous Phases of Funny Faces and Fantasmagorie), comic strips such as The Newlyweds and Mutt and Jeff, and the circus, with McCay playing an animal tamer in Gertie the Dinosaur.
I mention this specifically because the range of content that live action drew from had a more developed sense of characterization than the source material for animated films. Because the source material for animated films was based more on novelty and gags than live action films, animation prior to Disney was not nearly as concerned with characters behaving in a consistent fashion.
There is also the issue of artistic lineage. Many of the actors for live action came from vaudeville and the theatre, so playing a role was their stock in trade and they entered films as experienced performers, though they had to adjust their technique for the camera. In the theatre, they had the benefit of working with more experienced performers and had the entire tradition of acting to draw on. Most importantly, they had direct contact with an audience, allowing them to gauge their success as performers.
Many of the early animators had worked as cartoonists for print media. They were not academically trained, so they were ignorant of art history. They were not used to creating narratives longer than a Sunday comics page. They found themselves in a medium where art now had to move, but there was no tradition to draw on and no predecessors to learn from. They had no experience of an audience’s presence, so relied more on personal judgment. As a result, their goals were more modest than experienced actors’. The animators’ only goal was to get a laugh. This is why a Mutt and Jeff cartoon could be split among several animators with no concern for the lead characters behaving in a consistent fashion.
At the time the animation industry was developing the capability of hitting a regular release schedule, the live action industry was increasing the length of films. Where one and two reel films had been the standard in the first decade of the 20th century, the succeeding decade saw many producer, directors and stars move into films longer than two reels. Dramas by D.W. Griffith (The Birth of a Nation), Thomas Ince (Civilization), William S. Hart (Hell’s Hinges) and John Ford (Straight Shooting) are examples of this trend.
Comedy, as a genre, was slower to expand into longer lengths. While Mack Sennett directed the feature Tillie’s Punctured Romance in 1914, it really wasn’t until the 1920’s that comedians like Chaplin, Arbuckle, Lloyd, Keaton and Langdon moved from one and two reelers into feature films.
During this time period, animated films stayed at less than a reel in length. The shift to longer films put pressure on live action narratives and characterizations to be more complex in order to hold the audience’s attention. Because animated films remained short, they did not experience the same pressure.
At the same time film lengths were increasing, the live action film business was migrating away from New York and New Jersey and moving to California. The animation industry remained in New York, physically separate from the major part of the business. In addition, while major live action studios were growing in the 1920’s (the merger of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Warner Bros. buying Vitagraph and First National Pictures), animation studios remained small and independent. The artistic advances being made in live action acting and storytelling had little effect on animation, as animation studios were separated by distance and the lack of close business relationships (except for distribution) with the larger film world.
Given all these things, it isn’t surprising that characters in silent animation were underdeveloped and that animators were not concerned with the lack of unity in how a character behaved.
I've worked as an animator, writer, producer and director in TV animation for 29 years. I created the cgi series Monster By Mistake.
I hold a Masters degree from York University in Cinema and Media Studies.
Switching gears for a moment, I want to talk about the assistant director for this sequence, Ford Beebe. I can't imagine how he came to be involved with Disney. Beebe, for those who don't know, is probably best known as a director of live action serials and B movies. He was writing films as early as 1916 and directing as early as 1922, working heavily in westerns. In the 1930s, he specialized in live action films based on comic strips such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Tim Tyler's Luck, Jungle Jim and Secret Agent X-9.
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