Notes
261 NOTES Introduction 1. Maureen Furniss begins her study of animation aesthetics, Art in Motion, with a similar acknowledgment that, for much of its history, the work of animation has been conceptualized along the model of the “dominant form” of the American animation industry (13). 2. This response is one to which Tom Gunning also points in his discussion of early film audiences, as he notes that “the first spectators’ experience” of cinema involved “an undisguised awareness of (and delight in) film’s illusionistic capabilities,” and he describes that response as “an encounter with modernity” (“Aesthetic” 876). 3. For an account of the various forms of early presentation of protoanimation forms such as the “lightning sketch” and primitive cartoons, see Crafton’s historical study, Before Mickey, especially 48–57. 4. Gregory Waller surveys the early commentary on Disney animation and cites a number of Ferguson’s reviews in his “Mickey, Walt, and Film Criticism from Steamboat Willie to Bambi.” Ferguson, like many other commentators in the 1930s, considered that realism “was always one of Disney’s greatest virtues” (Waller 57). 5. It could certainly be claimed that such animators as Robert McKimson, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones all had distinctive styles, although their generally unfettered approach to action and narrative, as well as their similar fondness for both evoking and exploding convention, also constitutes something of a Warner Bros. house style. 6. For a description of the stylistic changes that marked much of early television animation, and particularly the emphasis on restricted animation, see Furniss, Art in Motion, 142–46. 1. Early Animation 1. Blackton has recounted how, as a young cartoonist and reporter for the New York Evening World, he did a series of impromptu sketches at the Edison studio that were filmed and subsequently distributed. Though he makes no mention of trying to imitate other lightning sketch entertainers on this occasion, 262 we might surmise that when, shortly after, he began making films himself, he would have quickly adopted some of the conventions of this form. See Blackton, “Early History.” 2. Maureen Furniss discusses the foundations of animation studio practice in her Art in Motion, 20–25. 3. For details on Hurd’s patents and his partnership with Bray, see Barrier, 14–15, and Crafton, 150–54. 4. Reiniger provides a detailed history of the shadow and silhouette traditions from which she developed her animation technique in her book Shadow Puppets, Shadow Theatres, and Shadow Films. She specifically traces the origins of the shadow play to three distinct “groups of shadow-playing centres: China; India and Java; and the Middle East, Turkey and Greece” (15). 5. Kanfer, we should note, devotes a few sentences to the stop-motion tradition, mentioning in passing Gumby, George Pal, and the Wallace and Gromit films and remarking that they “never quite won the hearts of the audience” (183). Early efforts in this field escape his account too, however. 6. The Official Guide Book to the World’s Fair emphasizes this 3-D effect, describing how “magically, parts seem to move almost to your side, to take their place in the ‘car that can take it’” (200). 2. Winsor McCay’s Warped Spaces 1. In his history of the cinema, Robert Sklar repeats this common account, noting that “legend has it that some spectators panicked as the engine appeared to come closer.” See Sklar, Film: An International History of the Medium, 30. David A. Cook, albeit with a rather more pronounced skepticism, similarly reports that “audiences are said to have dodged aside at the sight of the locomotive hurtling toward them into the foreground of the screen.” See Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 11. 2. McCay reproduced this well-chronicled vaudeville act as a complete film, one in which we see him standing beside the screen on which his animated dinosaur performs and addressing her through conventional title cards. The film version frames this performance with scenes in which he bets some friends at a gentlemen’s club that he can reproduce a dinosaur and then shows elements of the animation process. 3. The famed animator Chuck Jones has repeatedly stressed the significance of this confrontation with space, noting that one of the most fundamental “goals in drawing is to achieve an object working in pure space.” See Maureen Furniss, Chuck Jones, 31. 4. Vidler describes this new sense of space as resulting from a kind of cultural “crisis of identity,” as “the landscapes of fear and the...
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