Evidence of animation's popularity in America is not hard to find. It can be seen in national icons such as Mickey Mouse; Bugs Bunny is on a postage stamp; and animated feature films such as "Antz" attract audiences both young and old.
These images are the descendants of early black-and-white animated films made more than 75 years ago. And the desire to create animated images for entertainment goes back even further. A new presentation from the National Digital Library's American Memory program, "Origins of American Animation," makes available on the World Wide Web a sampling of 23 of the earliest animated films, made from 1900 to 1921, from the Library's collections. The films include clay, puppet and cutout animation, as well as pen drawings, and reveal some of the earliest innovations made in the animation field.
Interest in the idea of animated images existed well before the 20th century. In the 19th century, moving slides in "magic lanterns" created "animated" images for audiences. Images were put on glass slides, lit by a lamp and projected to tell a story, while the use of multiple lanterns, slide changes and levers produced the illusion of motion.
Other devices were also invented that used rotating discs or wheels with images on them to simulate movement, such as the Phenakistoscope, circa 1828, and the Zoetrope, popular in the 1860s. A similar, albeit simpler, device was the flipbook, or Kineograph, invented in 1868, which used successive photographic images that the viewer would flip through to emulate movement.
"Dud Leaves Home" (1919) from the "Dreamy Dud" series, which stars a boy with an overactive imagination.
Some cite Frenchman Emile Reynaud's work as an early form of animation. In 1877, he developed a Praxinoscope, a rotating drum with a strip of painted images that allowed the viewer to see the motions reflected in a series of mirrors. In 1882, he combined the machine with a projector.
An important innovation in the recording of movement was Eadweard Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope. Made in 1879, the device used many photographs of successive phases of movement to replicate motion. These images were obtained through the use of multiple cameras.
The invention of the motion picture camera and a motion picture viewer in 1891 by Thomas A. Edison's laboratory proved that movement could be recorded and replicated easily using single devices, and within five years projectors were developed to enable showings before large audiences.
It was not long before filmmakers tested the limits of film's possibilities. Trick films were one result, using camera techniques such as stop motion, dissolves and multiple exposures to achieve "magical" results, such as people or things appearing and disappearing.
James Stuart Blackton was an important producer of trick films who became one of the originators of the animated film. Blackton had performed in the vaudeville theater as "The Komikal Kartoonist," doing "lightning sketches," called such because the drawings were made very rapidly. With Albert E. Smith, he founded the Vitagraph Co. in 1896 to make films. His company produced many films for the Edison Co. as licensees, and in 1900 Blackton made "The Enchanted Drawing" for Edison. Blackton sketched on a sheet held by an easel. He draws a face on the paper, then a glass and wine bottle. The bottle and glass suddenly become real, much to the dismay of the face on the paper. The artist gives the face a drink, which makes him happy again. The film continues in this vein as other objects such as a hat and cigar are drawn and then magically become real. The tricks were achieved by stopping the camera between frames and making substitutions, a common technique of trick films.
Six years later, Blackton made what some consider to be the first American animated film, "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces." It features an artist's hand drawing the faces of a man and a woman with chalk. The two faces then begin to interact, as the man blows cigar smoke and tips his hat. Blackton used a combination of chalk drawings and cutouts to achieve the movement. By 1910 he ceased his animation experiments, while others began theirs. Both "The Enchanted Drawing" and "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" can be viewed from the Library's Web site.
Winsor McCay, considered one of the greatest of the early animators, began his career as a newspaper comic strip artist. One of his most famous strips was "Little Nemo in Slumberland," published in the New York Herald in 1905. McCay claimed that his first attempts at an animated film were inspired by some flipbooks his son owned, but his assistant John Fitzsimmons claimed that his efforts resulted from a bet he had made with a fellow artist that he could make enough drawings to produce a four- to five-minute film of the Little Nemo characters. However it came about, in 1911 McCay released the film "Little Nemo." He made 4,000 drawings for the film using translucent rice paper and india ink. To create fluid movement, he devised a wooden holder and put crosshairs in the corners of the paper to keep the drawings in register and used a stopwatch to time the movements on paper to the split second. Subsequent films included "The Story of a Mosquito" and "Gertie the Dinosaur," the latter one of the most famous and influential of early animated films.
"The First Circus" (1921), from Tony Sarg's "Almanac" series, which employed shadow silhouette.
With "The Sinking of the Lusitania," he began working with cels, which were clear sheets of celluloid that could be laid over a background, thus eliminating the need to repeatedly draw every background detail on each sheet. His films "The Centaurs" and "Gertie on Tour," made in 1921, survive only as fragments and are available on the Library's site.
After 1912 the animation field grew rapidly. Many studios sprung up, including the Raoul Barrè Studio, the John Randolph Bray Studio and William Randolph Hearst's International Film Service.
Raoul Barrè was an artist who specialized in comic drawings. He opened his own studio in New York in 1913, the first professional animation studio. He joined with Charles Bowers to form the Barrè-Bowers Studio in 1916. One of Barrè's innovations was a peg system of registering drawings, which kept the paper in place, a system still in use today. To avoid having to redraw the background in every sheet, he used the "slash" system, in which he would lay down one sheet over another and cut away what was unnecessary to reveal the background of the sheet below. This method was soon surpassed by the use of clear cels. Some of the Barrè films available on the Web site are two "Phables" and two others based on Tom Powers's newspaper comics.
John Randolph Bray began his career as an artist for a newspaper. He soon began selling cartoons to magazines. His first animated film was "The Artist's Dream," released in 1913. After signing a contract with Pathe to make cartoons, Bray set up his own studio with other artists. He patented many of his improvements on the animation process, realizing early on the business potential of these developments. One of these innovations was the use of translucent paper to make it easier to position objects in successive drawings.
In 1914 Earl Hurd received a patent for his innovation of using clear sheets of celluloid (cels), which eliminated the need to redraw background scenes, since sheets containing various movements could be laid on top of one another. Bray and Hurd formed the Bray-Hurd Processing Co. in 1914 and created a monopoly on the animation process since they owned the patents to these methods. It was not until 1932 that the patents expired and their animation process became public domain. Inspired by the Buster Brown comic strip, Hurd created the Bobby Bump series of animated films, represented on the Web site by "Bobby Bumps Starts a Lodge."
William Randolph Hearst's International Film Service was established in 1915. The service took out a cel license from Bray and began releasing animated films in 1916. Many of these films were based on comic strip characters from Hearst newspapers, such as Krazy Kat, the Katzenjammer Kids and Happy Hooligan. George LaCava, formerly of Barre-Bowers, was chosen as the studio head. IFS was closed in 1918 after scandals occurring with Hearst's International News Service caused its decline. The Web site includes three Krazy Kat films, one Katzenjammer Kids film and several other IFS films based on Tom Powers's newspaper cartoons.
Other early animation efforts available on the "Origins of American Animation" site include marionette action. Howard S. Moss created the Motoy stop-motion puppet series, of which "Mary & Gretel," available online, is one example. The creator of King Kong, Willis O'Brien, had earlier been a cartoonist. He created figures from india rubber for his puppet animation films "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link" and "R.F.D., 10,000 B.C.," made in 1917 for Edison. Tony Sarg, who had a marionette act in vaudeville theater, made his animated films using the shadow silhouette with Herbert M. Dawley, producer of the films. His work is represented on the Web site by the inventive film "The First Circus."
From "Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse at the Circus" (1916), featuring the popular cat and mouse duo from the comic strip of the day.
Although early animated films contain creative elements amazing for their time, they can still be thought to be in their infancy. Critics of the time argued that these early films were merely sight gags that the animator had devised and that they lacked clear, well-developed plots. Those elements would come later with the rise of animators such as Walt Disney and staffs of writers and production personnel. But without these early efforts, which carved a path for future animation, there would be no Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny today.
Note: Several good resources on silent animation, which have helped inform this article, are Charles Solomon's The History of Animation, Donald Crafton's Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928, and Jeff Lenburg's The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons.
