Come one, come all to Professor D. Catamite’s astonishing exhibition of the roots of animated movies! THRILL as you see the mind-bendingly surreal works of Emile Cohl! GASP at Winsor McCay’s giant pet dinosaur, Gertie! WEEP as you hear the depressing fate of animation innovator Emile Reynaud! GET FREAKED OUT by Ladislaw Starewicz and his grisly collection of dead insect puppets! AND MORE! Peel back the mists of time as we look at the early evolution of cartoons, from early hand-drawn shorts to lavish pre-Gold Age spectacles!

So yeah, this is a brief look at the early history of animated movies, or more specifically, some of the particular filmmakers who helped to pioneer the medium and raise it above its origins as just a minor novelty. I’ll start, appropriately enough, with:



If there was there was some kind of  award given out to good people with unbelievably shitty luck, I think Emile Reynaud would probably take first, second, and third place. The guy pretty much invented animation three years before film was even invented, and he still died alone and penniless just because his astonishing new invention was dwarfed by an even more astonishing new invention.
Homeschooled as a child, Reynaud received an extremely broad education from his parents: everything from precision mechanics (from his father the watchmaker) to watercolour painting to physics and natural sciences. All these things would come in handy when he invented the Praxinoscope: it “consisted of a central cage with 12 mirrors and a metal drum, within which was inserted a cartoon strip that represented 12 frames of a subject or a landscape in movement. By rotating the drum very quickly, and by watching the image reflected in the mirrors, it was possible to see a smoothly animated sequence.” Not only was it capable of animating, but it was also considerably more neat and had better picture quality than anything before it. He then made a series of refinements to the Praxinoscope, so that he eventually got something that could not only animate an indefinitely long strip of pictures, but could also project it on the big screen: a parallel-evolution version of a film projector, basically. He began showing his own hand-drawn animated movies, which were a huge success.
Unfortunately for him, film was soon invented, and audiences forgot about him in their rush to the next big thing. There was also the problem that film projectors were much easier to operate than the relatively clunky and delicate Praxinoscope, so while cinemas were popping up everywhere, Reynaud‘s work was consigned to one Parisian museum. Thus, when film was taking over the world, Reynaud’s pioneering work was pretty much forgotten by the world at large, leading to him dying alone and in poverty.
Anyway, morbid stories aside, here’s one of his films, titled ‘Autour d’une Cabine’:



Not to get all gay or whatever, but something about this film really affects me. I dunno, it just has this incredible sense of otherworldliness, and a kind of weird melancholy… Like listening to old wax cylinder recordings, it’s a glimpse into an area of the past which seems completely alien to me, and seeing those drily humorous yet oddly innocent sketches feels like I’m looking at an entire way of life that’s stopped existing. Anyway, it’s a really cool little movie, and I think that some more of Reynaud’s works have popped up on dvd, so keep an eye out for that.





OK, so J. Stuart Blackton didn’t actually invent animation as many people have claimed, but he was sure as hell the first person to popularise it and to bring it to global attention. Blackton was a British vaudeville performer specialising in ‘magic lantern’ shows and something called speed drawing, which basically just consisted of drawing pictures as fast as possible in front of an appreciative audience. After a meeting with Thomas Edison, he bought a camera and a projector and started his own film studio.



Blackton’s first film of note was ‘The Enchanted Drawing’, as seen above. And, well, I say ‘of note’, but really the only thing particularly special about it was that it was the first real glimpse American audiences got of stop-motion, which Blackton used to do things like appear to pull a hat or a cigar out of the picture or to crudely change the expression of a cartoon man. Much more interesting was his most famous film, ‘Humourous Phases of Funny Faces’:



‘Humourous Phases’ was the one that pretty much single-handedly sparked the public interest in animation, making it responsible for nearly all cartoons to follow… Although the animation seems kind of rough today, it’s still easy to see how it could astonish: back then, live-action films were a novelty, so drawings which appeared to move were downright magical. So yeah, it’s worth watching because of how influential it was, but it’s also pretty good on its own terms: there’s a streak of demented vaudeville humour running through it, especially with the cigar-smoking guy at the start, that still makes it feel wonderfully fresh and odd.





Man, I always feel a little weird when I describe something as being art, but when it comes to the work of Emile Cohl I honestly can’t think of a more appropriate word! His films weren’t just like minor comedies and sight gags, they were deeply original, surreal, and imaginative on a level that hadn’t been seen before and has rarely been seen since.
Cohl started out as a caricaturist in France and through that became involved in a number of art movements, including the Hydropathes and the Incoherents (more on those guys later). He eventually began working as a writer and occasional director for the burgudgeoning motion picture industry, which is where he first became exposed to the work of J. Stuart Blackton. Cohl was instantly fascinated by Blackton’s work, and began analysing the movies frame by frame until he was able to pick up the basics of animation for himself. Once done, he began working on a film called ‘Fantasmagorie’, widely considered to be the first fully animated film ever made:



The key to Cohl’s films was the Incoherent movement I mentioned earlier… A group of artists who used deliberately crude, childish drawings and absurdist humour as a response to the increasingly grim atmosphere in Paris at the time. The constantly shifting images and surreal, dreamlike tone in movies like ‘Fantasmagorie’ and ‘The Hasher’s Delirium’(below) were straight homages to this style, and more or less dispensed with narrative in favor of atmosphere and stylization. So yeah, it sounds kind of pretentious, but the thing I like about his work is that really it’s about as unpretentious as you can get: all his stuff has a sense of fun and excitement about it that makes it really enjoyable to watch, like his enthusiasm for his work leaked into every hand-drawn frame.



Cohl eventually moved on from animation, finding it too time-consuming, but he continued to experiment and develop his craft over a series of excellent movies. So yeah, there’s a good lot of his stuff on Youtube, so check it out I guess.





More than anyone else here, Winsor McCay pusher the boundaries of what animation could be… His cartoons had a level of craftsmanship and quality that was lightyears ahead of even his most advanced peers, and it’s even more astonishing when you consider that every meticulously detailed frame was actually hand-drawn by McCay himself.
Starting out drawing portraits for money at small-town fairs, McCay’s natural talent soon led to him doing comic strips for various magazines, culminating in one of the single greatest comics to ever exist, ‘Little Nemo’. But since money was tight, and since he was a massive workaholic, he soon began spending his spare time speed-drawing his comic strip characters on the vaudeville circuit. It was there that he had the idea of making a short animated cartoon based on Little Nemo:



Audiences and other animators alike were amazed by Little Nemo: while it shared a lot of aspects with some other surreal animated shorts (and Emile Cohl’s stuff in particular), it was still a massive leap forward in quality, and even now holds up well: the art is incredible, the animation is smooth, and there’s just a wonderfully offbeat charm to the whole thing that I like.
McCay was hardly through with animation, though, and in 1914 he released possibly his most influential piece: ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’. Gertie was innovative in a number of ways: firstly, the film was designed so that McCay could appear to interact with it at certain points in the performance, such as throwing an orange into Gertie’s mouth or stepping into the frame and riding off on her back. But more important was the fact that Gertie was pretty much the first animated character to have a personality: it was an important step in the development of cartoons that could actually tell stories, as opposed to ones that were just a bunch of jokes strung together. And again, the actual cartoon itself was awesome as well as influential, with the same sense of whimsy and creativity that was in Little Nemo.



Unfortunately, McCay’s newspaper work meant he ended up working at a newspaper owned by William Hearst (the inspiration for ‘Citizen Kane’)… Hearst felt that McCay’s movies were childish and that he’d have a more promising future doing editorial cartoons, and so used a series of restrictive contracts to essentially force McCay away from animation and into the dry, humourless world of political propaganda.
Still, there’s evidence that McCay was still covertly working on animated projects, most notably ‘The Centaurs’… Only brief fragments of that movie survive, but what little there is is astonishing, with a level of detail and a grasp of motion that would only really be equalled by Disney twenty years later.



So yeah, Winsor McCay was all kinds of awesome and everyone reading this ought to track down compilations of his ‘Little Nemo’ strips.





Man, I love Ladislaw Starewicz, because he makes my life so much easier… You don’t have to dress up what he did in jokes or fancy writing or whatever, because he was just so incredibly weird and fascinating in his own right that he can’t help but be interesting. Like, OK, let’s look at his first film, ‘The Cameraman’s Revenge’:

‘The Cameraman’s Revenge’ is a tale of adultery and black humour in the Eastern European tradition, as illustrated with dead bugs moving through stop-motion.

See? I don’t even have to try!
Anyway, Ladislaw Starewicz was born in 1882 and grew up with a strong interest in both art and entomology (the study of insects). He soon began work at the Khanzhonkov movie studio, where he swiftly developed an interest in stop-motion animation. This interest was to come in handy during his first project, where he intended to film stag beetles fighting… He found that the light used during filming scared off the beetles, however, so he decided that the best course of action would be to kill the beetles, cut their limbs off, reattach them with wax to make tiny puppets, and then use stop-motion animation to simulate the fight. Lateral thinking in action, I guess.



Anyway, Starewicz continued to experiment and develop new styles, ranging from animated versions of fables like ‘The Dragonfly and the Ant’ to political satires like ‘The Frogs Who Wanted a King’, to live-action/animated mixtures like ‘The Mascot’ (below), possibly his most inventive and well-realized film and a clear influence on later movies like ‘Toy Story’. His work is even more astonishing when you realise that back then, stop-motion was considered to be just a minor novelty: Starewicz was creating 20-minute long features with plots and actual characters while most of his peers were still making short slapstick comedies.



So yeah, Ladislaw Starewicz was a genuine pioneer of animation, whose films have such a sense of personality and humour that they still manage to astonish. The thing I like about a lot of these early cartoons is that sense of imagination running wild and pushing the boundaries, and that sense of wonder and excitement is in full force in all of Starewicz’s work. Check him out: there’s a ton of his stuff on Youtube apart from the ones I’ve linked here, and they’re all worth a look.





There are still a good few people who’d dispute Otto Mesmer’s place on this list… Not because he wasn’t influential or important: his character Felix the Cat was one of the most popular of the silent era. No, it’s because there remains a good deal of controversy over whether or not Mesmer actually created the character… For decades, studio head Pat Sullivan took the credit for this, and it was only in 1976 that Messmer admitted that he himself did all the work and got gipped out of the royalties. There was even a Simpsons episode based on the whole thing.



Anyway, Felix began as a character called Master Tom, who was drawn as simply as possible in order to fill a gap in the schedule. He proved a hit with audiences and was soon redesigned as the cuter, more streamlined Felix, with added mannerisms taken from Charlie Chaplin. The tone of the cartoons also changed, focusing not so much on slapstick gags as on fantastical surrealist stuff, which critics and audiences both responded well to.
Like many silent movie stars, however, Felix didn’t survive the transition to sound, as vocals were clumsily added in to already existing cartoons in a hasty attempt to catch up with successes like Disney’s ‘Steamboat Willie’. Audiences began to ditch the Felix films, and the studio eventually went bankrupt.



So yeah, Messmer didn’t particularly break the boundaries or whatever but I think this story is still a good example of a systematic change that was occurring throughout the entire animation business… Firstly, that people were starting to use actual characters and plots instead of just random slapstick, in reaction to the fact that animation by that point had stopped being a novelty. And secondly, it shows the beginnings of a more mercenary atmosphere amongst studios, where a more business-oriented attitude began to take place and where smaller studios were beginning to be pushed out by larger ones. Besides, I still like those old Felix cartoons… There was a weird kind of anarchic, absurdist streak running through them that was pretty cool, and they were capable of being quite nasty at times: the ending for the top one there is great (Master Tom impregnates his girlfriend and then kills himself with a gas hose), and that was hardly a once-off thing!





The last of the original generation of cartoonists, and probably also the most famous: Fleischer’s work included such iconic cartoons as Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, Popeye, and the first Superman cartoon.
Fleischer started out as a Polish immigrant in New York City, working as the art editor for the magazine ‘Popular Science’. What set him down the road to animation was his invention of the process of ‘Rotoscoping’, or tracing over frames of live-action film to allow for a simpler animation process and also more realistic movement, a technique which was later used to great effect in Disney movies like ‘Snow White’. Starting his own studio with his brother Dave, Fleischer’s first success came with his ‘Out of the Inkwell’ series starring Koko the Clown. The Koko cartoons became a massive success, but what stands out now is just how strangely groundbreaking they were: a mixture of live action and animation, with Koko regularly breaking the fourth wall to argue with Fleischer himself, and with the rotoscoping technique meaning that the characters actually moved like they had bones instead of having the ‘rubber tube’ effect common about that time.



The next big breakthrough came with the character Betty Boop, who was such a hit with audiences that she was swiftly given her own series. The Betty Boop cartoons illustrate the difference between the work of Fischer Studios and the more ‘family friendly’ Disney cartoons: they were a clear product of the Roaring Twenties, with dark humour and surrealism mixing with a relatively open approach to sexuality to make cartoons that were aimed more at adults than children. Unfortunately, the introduction of the infamous Hays Code forced Fleischer’s cartoons to become more ‘morally acceptable’, which lost them a lot of their popularity.
As time went on, Fleischer Studios began to lose more and more money, due to a mixture of poor accounting, bad luck (they released an expensive feature-length Popeye film two days before Pearl Harbour), and of course the continuous advances being made by their chief competitors Disney, whose films like ‘Snow White’ were infinitely more successful than Fleischer’s work. The last animated works of note from the studio were the 1940s ‘Superman’ cartoons, which still stand up today as being some of the finest cartoons of that era… Astonishingly well-drawn and animated to the point where it would still trump most modern cartoons, they served as a fitting end to one of the most interesting and pioneering studios in the history of animation.



So, yeah, that’s it. By this time, the ‘Golden Age of Animation’ was in full swing, with studios like Disney and Warner Brothers producing excellent cartoons on a regular basis and animation quality steadily increasing. There was a catch, though: there was no longer any real room for the smaller studios, or for the lone experimenters, or for the two-minute hand-drawn works that took a year to create. Winsor McCay accused the more streamlined, big-studio approach of turning animation into “not an art, but a trade”.
Now, personally, I wouldn’t go that far: There’ve been many, many advances that could’ve only occured through the use of large studios, and a process as time-consuming and expensive as animation was pretty much destined to become a studio process at some point. But I think that makes it even more important to remember the pioneers, to acknowledge and respect the wild experimentation and manic creativity that characterised the first few decades of animation.