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5 ONE The Silent Era During the first two decades of American animation (1907–27), the medium evolved from a vaudeville act to a film genre noticed by respected critics and exploited by a few Hollywood-based distribution companies . These cartoons were produced mostly in New York City, at first by individual animators but later by teams of illustrators working in studios. In terms of technical quality, they were black-and-white silent films usually running seven minutes long. Some cartoons offered character dialogue as on-screen words or “titles” enclosed in “speech balloons,” like those in newspaper comic strips, but because of the absence of sound, animators generally relied on physical humor and pantomime to carry their films. These pioneers in animation made two different types of cartoons in the years before 1920. Some studios attempted to animate comic strips that audiences had already embraced in newspapers. They hoped to cash in on the previously established popularity of the characters by making them “move” for audiences. Other companies combined live action with animation , creating the effect of an animator interacting with his cartoon characters . In both cases the animators promoted the “motion” of the drawn figures as a novelty act. The films were usually seen on vaudeville stages, and the animators often served as their own distributors, contracting with theater owners to arrange for the exhibition of the cartoons. The New York-based newspaper cartoonist and vaudeville performer J. Stuart Blackton, one of the first animators, used several creative and financially practical production tricks that later became staples of animation. His first film, Humorous Phases of a Funny Face (1906), featured Blackton drawing faces on a blackboard; the faces then appeared to contort into various images. This illusion of the drawing changing itself was a result of the “trickfilm” method, in which the filmmaker filmed an image, stopped filming, changed the image, and then resumed filming. It was not only an 6 Chapter One innovative technique but an economical one as well, since filming people was much less expensive than animating drawings. By showing his hands creating the drawings, he visually presented himself to viewers as the magician giving life and movement to the sketches. Successive cartoons over the next twenty years, especially Max Fleischer’s “Out of the Inkwell” series in the 1920s, borrowed Blackton’s techniques of sketch “trickfilm,” the combination of live action with animation, and image metamorphosis.1 The newspaper cartoonist Winsor McCay, whose comic strip “Little Nemo” had a large following in the 1900s, appropriated Blackton’s concept of the animator as life-giver for his cartoons, but in a radically different manner from that of his predecessor. He sketched on paper instead of a board. For Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) he did not film himself with his star. Instead, he appeared on a vaudeville stage for an exhibition of the film, cracking his whip at the screen in synchrony with moving sketches in which the title character appeared to respond to his commands. His act won rave reviews, leading to a spate of theatrical bookings. Whereas Blackton was the star of his films and drew multiple figures, McCay made Gertie the sole star of his film. The dinosaur, as a result, became American animation’s first popular character.2 McCay also differed from Blackton in the way he created the illusion of movement in his drawings, adding background scenery along with the characters. Although the backgrounds were relatively minimal, McCay had to copy each scene precisely from drawing to drawing in order to simulate motion on film. It was painstaking, time-consuming work, requiring thousands of drawings for each cartoon. But the inclusion of scenery that moved advanced the medium as an art form.3 Other innovations soon followed. In the same year that Gertie the Dinosaur wowed viewers and inspired other animators, the illustrators John Bray and Earl Hurd forever changed animated film by inventing the process of celluloid animation. By drawing characters on transparent celluloid sheets, or “cels,” animators no longer had to redraw entire backgrounds. They did not even have to redraw the entire character itself but could merely draw those parts that the animators wanted to “move” in different positions. Animation suddenly became much less expensive to produce, and Bray and Hurd became wealthy by forming a company together and patenting their invention, thus requiring animators to pay a licensing fee to use cels.4 [3.17.174.239] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 13:03 GMT...

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