Who was Winsor McCay? I'll tell you

I don't know much about Winsor McCay, one of the early pioneers of animation, but I DO know that I love this snippet from his innovative 1910 work, Little Nemo. Though his 1914 short film Gertie the Dinosaur is often called the "first animated cartoon", that is far from the case. People were already experimenting with animation (not yet called "cartoons" - those were the things you saw in the newspapers) back in the mid-1800s, when the concept of stop-motion/flip-books was all the rage. Praxoscopes, zoetropes, mutoscopes, and all manner of scopes were attempts to make still pictures move, and hand-drawn pictures dance around and make us laugh.

Gertie had this long, long, non-animated lead-in which was supposed to be some sort of teaser, and was in black and white. This gorgeous thing is hand-tinted, one frame at a time. Its motion is not terribly smooth, but it's still convincing. For some reason I think of Max Fleischer's charmingly-drawn figures in his early Koko the Clown cartoons. The best part, the most innovative, is the way the dragon (alligator?) swivels around and walks away with its back to us. That's a radical shift in perspective, and it works very well.

More later, I hope. This is too interesting NOT to pursue.

Sometimes the ridiculous is sublime

I think a blog has to have, if not a subject, then certain core subjects that are visited again and again. Since I can't draw worth a tinker's dam (and that's dam, folks - look it up), I live vicariously through the efforts of others.

Here we have an example of early Disney, well before Mickey came on the scene and stole the show. I never liked Mickey Mouse: too bland, too ordinary, even though it could be argued that he was the Harold Lloyd of animation, just a regular mouse. Disney experimented with all sorts of strange things, including a series of Laugh-O-Grams, combinations of live-action and animation which were so bizarre that they almost worked. The star of these was a little girl named Alice, with Pickfordesque corkscrew curls.

It's interesting to see the evolution of Disney from a run-of-the-mill animator with an uninteresting character (Oswald the Rabbit) to the so-called king of animation. It's kind of fashionable to diss Disney now, maybe because of what happened with his empire, the way it evolved into a mega-corp which often seems to lack heart. But the animation goes on, including the mega-blockbuster Frozen which FINALLY provided some strong, interesting female lead characters.

I'm fascinated with the early jumpy, smudgy, quivering, flickering images, post-Gertie the Dinosaur who was supposedly the first real cartoon. I'm fascinated with Fleischer and his surreal clown Koko jumping out of the inkwell. I like the early, gritty Popeye cartoons with their gorgeous rotographic/ stereo-optical backgrounds, which my grandchildren are now fascinated with. They want me to sing that weird skeetin-scattin' Popeye song, which I can't.

(Just look at this, from 1934! A very early Popeye cartoon called King of the Mardi Gras. The background was actually built by hand and mounted on a turntable, then slowly revolved and filmed. Somehow or other the animation was layered on top of it. Who needs 3D?)

I don't know if all this goes back to my childhood, when I sat on the floor (I was probably just a toddler then) and watched the Mickey Mouse Club, which came on every day and padded the live-action clubhouse segments with Spin and Marty episodes and VERY old Disney cartoons. I sat there drooling down the front of my bib and absorbed it all. It was a little bit scary, and it still is, primitive, with a spooky magical energy. Pen-and-ink drawings come to life.

Now we have YouTube, with just about every cartoon ever made, and I drown in it sometimes. My husband growls at me to get out of my office and enjoy the day. And I should.

(Note my radically new ad campaign. I doubt if it will work any better than the old one, which I am not discarding. But at least *I* had fun with it, or some of it. Took me most of the day, in fact. Damn. When I get to the end of it all,  I guess I'll say, . . "Too late.")

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

         It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .

http://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Gunning/e/B001K7NGDA

Early Disney: plenty weird shit

I've never been able to draw or paint worth a shit. Never been able to "get a likeness" or anything else. I did go through one manic phase of thinking I could paint. Plenty weird, or what - because I couldn't; they were merely brush-stroke experiments, but at the time I felt like an undiscovered genius.

Right. So now I content myself with the fun and simple quasi-art form of the gif or GIF (pronounced "gif" as in "gift", "jiff", or Gee Eye Eff, depending on who is right on a particular day.) The gif has entered the culture to such an extent that Kmart has made a whole series of ads of people endlessly freaking out in 2 or 3-second, repeating, shrieking flails, something to do with finding a great bargain at Kmart. Which is about as rewarding as going to that red-and-white, sterilized mausoleum known as Target.

But I digress.

Making these funny little endlessly-repeating doodles got a lot easier for me when these YouTube-to-gif sites sprang up. The one I'm using now - (please don't crash, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease - if I say this too loud it'll hear me) - is called Gifsforum and will actually make a decent-length gif that can tell a tiny story. (The best example is yet to come.) 

The farther back you go in the supposedly-divinely-inspired Disney oeuvre, the stranger it gets. They're pretty primitive, these early Laughatoons or whatever they're called, even predating the long-running Silly Symphony series. In this one, Disney the shameless thief steals Fleischer's invention of combining live-action with animation. Doesn't do it nearly as well, either - the little girl in this bizarre hallucinogenic version of Alice in Wonderland is smudgy and sooty and indistinct. And the animals in these early things, I don't know, they don't look very real to me - their movements are wooden and jerky and often plain ridiculous. This cartoon came out in about 1923, meaning it had no dialogue, and no real story either. It wasn't until the early '30s that animators began to think in terms of story. 

From the infamous Bugs in Love. I remember this one so well! I was over at Ann Peet's house after school, and the Mickey Mouse Club came on and they showed this. Ann and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes and groaned, "Oh nooooooooooo. . . Bugs in Love." We hated it. Now that I actually watch it, it's innovative, even takes stabs at characterization, and beats the hell out of  the gimmicky and rather stupid Alice in Wonderland. 

This might just be the most beautiful gif I've ever made. YouTube is such a mixed bag that along with the usual smudgy, surreal, dredged-up-from-a-bad-dream copies of copies of copies, you once in a while get a pristine example of early animation like this, looking probably better than it did on the movie screens it was originally seen on.

God knows how much later this one came out, but much has happened in the interim: the passersby have a sort of attitude, not just trudging or juddering along stiff-legged, though a couple of things give away the '30s vintage. Mickey isn't in his final form, not yet, still looks a bit snouty, wears a weird sort of  two-button diaper along with his enormous white gloves, and looks flat, like three dinner plates stuck together. The horse pulling the sleigh in the background has the clumpy feet and enormous nostrils typical of early Disney animals. But then there is that holy, Christmas-cardy background, with its mysterious 3D effect. Wonder where he stole that from.

Postlude: just dredged up this very tasty quote from Wikipedia! Taken from a German newspaper during the Third Reich:

"Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed...Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal...Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!"

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934

This is all a little unbelievable, like most early cartoons. Not to mention a little nightmarish. At least Betty looks like a girl: in her first couple of appearances she was a dog with long ears and a snout that popped out from time to time. The animators didn't quite know what to do with her.

After a few episodes she became a sexpot. It's interesting to watch the evolution of her costumes: here, in pre-code Hollywood, she was so scantily clad that you occasionally caught flickers of bare breasts (a wardrobe malfunction, perhaps) and, in her saucily flipped-up hemline, the delta of Venus. By the mid-30s the censors had clamped down, and by wartime she looked like a no-nonsense Army nurse with twill jackets and skirts below the knee.

These were Max Fleischer cartoons, some of the strangest things ever made, and they evolved into Popeye which ran forever but also ran out of steam around the time of the war. Then they became patriotic bullshit and propaganda, and never quite recovered. I like the fact that these characters are all a little hideous, a little smudgy, and almost psychotic in their unpredictable behaviour. By the end they all get stoned, sucking up nitrous oxide like a dentist who has fallen off the rails.

Were cartoons really made for children? I don't think so. They were shown along with movies (there'd be a newsreel, a cartoon, a short subject, and the main feature: or perhaps two), later sent overseas to bolster the morale of the troops. The studios cranked out hundreds and even thousands of them: Disney and Warner Brothers were the big guns, but then you had weirdball Fleischer and, a little later, Bob Clampett with his bizarre puppets-brought-to-animated-life, Beany and Cecil.

This just gets more unbelievable as you watch. Maybe the animators WERE on something.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm