Animation is a trick of the eye that turned into an industry. Its history runs from a Paris arcade in the 1890s to a Portland studio printing puppet faces in color, and along the way it collected patents, royalties, coin tosses and a surprising number of Academy Awards. These thirty-six stories cover the studios, the films, the characters and the methods.
Every tile in a Animation game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Studios
nine stories
1The studio Walt Disney lost before he found Mickey
On the tile: Laugh-O-gram1921-1923
Before Hollywood, Walt Disney ran a small animation company in Kansas City called Laugh-O-gram. Its fairy tale cartoons went to a distributor, Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee, that promised 11,100 dollars for six films and never paid. By the end of 1922 his crew was working without wages, and several quit. Disney went bankrupt before most of the cartoons reached a screen. His last Kansas City idea, a live girl among cartoon figures, traveled west with him.
Max Fleischer ran the New York studio that rivaled Disney, and one of his first hits was a gadget rather than a character. He had spent the First World War making training films for the Army as a civilian, and said the bouncing ball occurred to him afterward. A white ball hopped word by word across printed lyrics while the theater organist followed it like a conductor. The first song cartoon opened in 1924 on Columbus Circle in New York.
At the Warner Bros. cartoon studio, director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese condensed Wagner's three-day opera cycle into seven minutes of rabbit and hunter. The result, What's Opera, Doc?, joined the National Film Registry in 1992. When a thousand animation professionals, critics and collectors were polled on the best cartoons ever made, it came first, and another Jones short, Duck Amuck, was close behind.
United Productions of America was founded by artists who had left Disney, and it threw out the plush realism they had trained in: flat color, spare backgrounds, and drawings that moved only where movement mattered. In 1951 the Academy gave the cartoon Oscar to its Gerald McBoing-Boing, about a boy who speaks in sound effects instead of words. The producer was Stephen Bosustow; the story came from Dr. Seuss.
William Hanna met Joseph Barbera on his second day at the MGM cartoon department in 1937. Twenty years later the two of them set up their own company for television, and a coin toss settled whose name would lead the title. In 1958 they put out The Huckleberry Hound Show, a good-natured blue dog who became their first hit and won them an Emmy, the first ever given to an animated series.
Toei bought a small animation company in 1956, renamed it Toei Doga, and set out to build a cartoon studio on a Japanese scale. Two years later it finished its first feature, drawn from a Chinese folktale about a white serpent who takes human form. The Cannes festival calls it Japan's first world-standard, full-color animated feature. Taiji Yabushita directed it, and the studio completed it in October 1958.
Moscow's Soyuzmultfilm was set up in the mid-1930s as the Soviet reply to Disney, and it has produced more than 1,500 cartoons. Its best-known films are the quiet ones: Hedgehog in the Fog, from 1975, along with the Cheburashka shorts and a Russian Winnie-the-Pooh. Accounts differ on the founding year, with 1935 and 1936 both in print.
Pixar did not start as a movie studio. In 1979 George Lucas recruited Ed Catmull from the New York Institute of Technology to run a computer division at Lucasfilm. It built hardware and made effects for other people's films, including the Genesis Effect sequence in Star Trek II, the first fully computer-animated sequence in a feature. Steve Jobs bought the division in 1986 and set it up as an independent company of about forty people. The name came with it: the group had already built a machine called the Pixar Image Computer.
Peter Lord and David Sproxton began animating together at school and registered the name Aardman in 1972. After they moved to Bristol in 1976, their first professional job was a small clay figure for the children's art program Take Hart. They called him Morph, and that lump of plasticine helped build one of Britain's best-known studios. The name itself came from a superhero character the two had invented for the BBC.
1The first animated feature, and nobody can watch it
On the tile: El Apóstol1917
The earliest full-length cartoon was not made in Hollywood. El Apóstol opened in Buenos Aires in November 1917, directed by Quirino Cristiani and produced by Federico Valle, a seventy-minute political satire about the Argentine president. Guinness World Records counts 58,000 drawings and a year of work. Cristiani animated with jointed cardboard cutouts instead of redrawing every frame. Every known copy was lost in a fire in Valle's film vaults in 1926.
Lotte Reiniger made her films with scissors. Her silhouette figures, she wrote, were cut from black cardboard and thin lead, every limb cut separately and joined with wire hinges, then moved a fraction at a time in front of the camera, so the whole picture is shadow play. The Adventures of Prince Achmed, made in Germany in 1926 and running about sixty-nine minutes, is the oldest surviving animated feature film and the first one produced in Europe.
On February 23, 1939, the Academy gave Walt Disney an honorary award for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and it looked like no other Oscar: one standard statuette with seven miniature ones lined up beside it, one for each dwarf. Shirley Temple presented it, chosen because she could stand in for the film's audience, the children of the world. The citation called the film a significant screen innovation that had charmed millions.
For Fantasia, Disney and RCA engineers built a sound system called Fantasound, and it did not fit in an ordinary movie house. A theater showing the roadshow version needed three large horns behind the screen instead of the usual one, plus about sixty-five small speakers scattered through the auditorium. The rig was too costly to spread far, especially once the war came, but the Academy gave Fantasia a special award for it.
Nobody knew how to lock a cartoon to a soundtrack, so Disney's staff guessed. Animator Wilfred Jackson, whose mother taught music, suggested a metronome and drew up a chart matching sounds to frames. For the test they set a projector outside a studio window, hung a bed sheet as a screen, and stood behind it, watching through the cloth while they made the noises by hand. The first real recording session, on September 15, went badly: the orchestra could not follow the picture.
Two cartoon debuts were up for the Academy Award for 1940. One was A Wild Hare, the short usually counted as the real arrival of Bugs Bunny. The other was Puss Gets the Boot, the first outing for a cat and mouse who would later be named Tom and Jerry. Both lost. The award went to The Milky Way, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon that almost nobody remembers now.
The animated Beatles of Yellow Submarine were voiced by actors, because the four of them could not be gathered for recording sessions. John Clive, Geoffrey Hughes, Peter Batten and Paul Angelis spoke the lines. The press was not told. Variety informed its readers in July 1968 that the voices were instantly recognizable as the Beatles' own. The band liked the film, though none of them liked the voices chosen for them.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit put hand-drawn characters into a live-action detective story and made them cast shadows, knock into lamps and sit in real chairs. At the 1989 Academy Awards it won four prizes: Film Editing, Sound Effects Editing, a special achievement award, and Visual Effects, shared by Ken Ralston, Richard Williams, Edward Jones and George Gibbs. Three more nominations, including Cinematography, went home empty.
At the 1992 Academy Awards, Beauty and the Beast appeared on the Best Picture list beside The Silence of the Lambs, Bugsy, JFK and The Prince of Tides. No animated film had ever been nominated in that category. It lost to the thriller, but won two awards that night: Original Score for Alan Menken, and Original Song for Menken and the lyricist Howard Ashman. Two more of its songs were nominated as well.
Winsor McCay did not release Gertie the Dinosaur the way films are released now. He took her on the vaudeville circuit. McCay stood beside the screen with a circus trainer's whip, and the animated dinosaur performed on command: she danced, rolled over to play dead and drank a lake dry. For the finish he appeared to step into the picture and join her inside it. The film survives. The act, which was the point of it, does not.
When RCA needed something to point a television camera at, it chose a Felix the Cat figure about a foot tall. The figure was set on a record player turntable and rotated for about two hours a day while engineers tuned the picture. The image that came out the other end was two inches tall. Felix kept turning through RCA's mechanical television tests, from 1928 to 1932, which made a silent film cat one of the first images the company ever transmitted.
The signature on the films looks like a cartoonist's, so people assume Walt Disney drew Mickey Mouse. He did not. After losing the rights to his earlier character on a trip to New York, Disney came home and worked out a replacement with his staff. The job of actually designing the mouse went to Ub Iwerks, his chief animator, with input from Walt, and Iwerks was the animator on the first Mickey cartoons.
Betty Boop's first appearance, on August 9, 1930, in a Fleischer cartoon called Dizzy Dishes, was not as a woman. She was drawn dog-like, with droopy spaniel eyes, a button nose and long puppy ears that tossed about as she sang. Over the next year and a half the studio rebuilt her into a human character, and by the cartoon Any Rags those floppy ears had turned into the hoop earrings she still wears.
E. C. Segar had been drawing his comic strip Thimble Theatre for years when, on January 17, 1929, Olive Oyl's brother hired a sailor as crew for a sea voyage. The sailor had one squinting eye, a pipe and no place in the strip's original cast. Readers would not let him go. Within a few years the strip belonged to him, and in 1937 Crystal City, Texas, the self-described spinach capital, put up a statue honoring Segar and his sailor.
Bugs Bunny became the face of Warner Bros. cartoons, and the Academy gave his series the cartoon Oscar exactly once. It went to Knighty Knight Bugs at the 1959 ceremony, produced by John W. Burton. The two films it beat were a Disney cartoon about Paul Bunyan and a Terrytoon called Sidney's Family Tree. The Bugs shorts people quote today were not the ones that won.
The cat and mouse arrived in 1940 in a short called Puss Gets the Boot. The cat was named Jasper, and the mouse had no name on screen, though the crew called him Jinx. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ran a contest among its staff to rename the pair, and animator John Carr won it with Tom and Jerry. When the series began winning Academy Awards, the statuettes were credited to the producer, Fred Quimby.
Osamu Tezuka was a comics artist first, and in 1963 he turned his robot boy Mighty Atom into a television series made at Mushi Production. It was the first thirty-minute animated series Japan produced. It ran to 193 episodes, went out weekly over the Fuji TV network, and at its peak drew a viewer rating of 40.7 percent. English-speaking countries met the character as Astro Boy.
Nick Park began Wallace and Gromit as a student film at the National Film and Television School. In the early drawings the sidekick was a cat and the man had a mustache. Both changed. Gromit became a dog with no mouth and no lines, so everything he thinks has to be done with his eyes, his ears and a pair of plasticine brows. A Grand Day Out took six years to finish.
Emile Reynaud's praxinoscope was a drum with a ring of mirrors at its center, which gave a bright, steady moving picture instead of the flicker of a slotted zoetrope. He then scaled the idea up, feeding a long painted band between two spools so the action no longer had to loop. On October 28, 1892, in Paris, he began projecting drawn pictures onto a screen for paying audiences, years before movies arrived.
Early animators redrew the whole picture, background and all, for every frame. Earl Hurd filed a patent on December 19, 1914, for drawing the moving parts on sheets of transparent celluloid and laying them over a painted background that only had to be made once. It was granted in June 1915. Hurd and John Bray pooled their patents into a company that held a monopoly on the process until they expired in 1932.
Max Fleischer applied for a patent in December 1915 on a device that threw live-action film, one frame at a time, onto a glass panel so an animator could trace the motion. His brother Dave had worked as a clown and still had the suit, so Dave became the model, and the traced figure grew into Koko the Clown. Years later the studio rotoscoped Cab Calloway dancing and handed his moves to a cartoon ghost.
Flat cartoons look flat when the camera moves, so Disney built a vertical stand that held up to six backgrounds, each painted on its own pane of glass. The lens could pick out any one layer, which gave a drawn scene real depth. Staff working under William Garity designed the rig. The first film shot with it was a Silly Symphony called The Old Mill, which won the cartoon Oscar for 1937. Snow White followed the same year, the first animated feature to use it.
Willis O'Brien made creatures move by photographing them one frame at a time, nudging the pose between exposures. His sculptor, Marcel Delgado, built the bodies: rubber flesh over jointed metal skeletons, forty-nine dinosaurs for one earlier picture. When Merian Cooper wanted a giant ape, Delgado made twin gorillas eighteen inches tall for the jungle scenes, and a twenty-four-inch Kong for Manhattan. On screen the ape looked like it weighed tons.
Norman McLaren animated people. In Neighbours, made for the National Film Board of Canada, two men are photographed frame by frame like puppets, so they glide over the grass and hop through the air while quarreling over a flower that has come up on the property line. The Academy entered it in the documentary short category, and in 1953 it won there, which is how a cartoon became an award-winning documentary.
Inkers used to trace every animator's drawing onto a cel by hand, one cel at a time. Ub Iwerks filed patents for moving xerographic powder straight onto cels instead, which let the animator's own pencil line reach the screen. After Sleeping Beauty grossed $5.3 million on a $6 million budget, One Hundred and One Dalmatians became the first feature to rely on the Xerox camera throughout, ninety-nine spotted puppies and all. Walt found the harsh look hard to get used to, and it took a few more films before he softened toward it.
People use claymation for any clay puppet film, but the word belongs to one person. Will Vinton trademarked it in 1976. His short Closed Mondays had already won the Academy Award for animated short at the 1975 ceremony, shared with Bob Gardiner, beating a Winnie the Pooh cartoon from Disney. Clay animation itself is much older than the name: sculpted heads were morphing on film by 1908.
Disney and Pixar engineers spent the late 1980s building a system that replaced the photocopier and the paintbrushes with software: scan the drawings, color them on screen, composite the layers digitally. The Little Mermaid used it for one closing shot. The Rescuers Down Under, released in November 1990, was the first feature finished entirely that way, though every drawing in it still came from a pencil.