Virtually everyone alive today grew up with cartoons, our earliest favorite heroes bear silly names like Bugs Bunny or Pink Panther and for most of us animated movies represent our first contact with the world of cinema.
Seated on their mothers’ lap to get a better view, wide-eyed children staring at the brightly-colored characters moving on the big screen - we’ve all been those children at some point and then we grew up to be the parents taking their excited kids for their first movie. Animated movies are a big part of the movie industry, and a quite profitable one, but when did it all start?
The idea of pictures in motion is much older than you’d believe. A 3000 years old bowl found somewhere in Iran decorated with successive images of goats leaping is considered an early attempt to capture the motion of the animal.
Da Vinci’s famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also meant to imply motion. The Magic Lantern, invented in the 17th century, with its images painted on glass sheets, can be considered the first image projector.
The 19th century witnessed the creation of many devices aiming to create the illusion of motion, like the Movieola, which relied on multiple wheels to present moving images and is considered to have shown the first prototypes of animated cartoons.
The history of animation mirrors that of cinema itself. The first hand-drawn cartoon, featuring a stick figure’s adventures, is the 1908 ‘Fantasmagorie’, the creation of the French artist Emile Cohl.
The first animated movie star is considered Felix The Cat, born in 1919, hero of immensely popular short films like ’Musical Mews’ and ’Feline Follies’. The black-and-white cat runs into all sort of amorous adventures and the reason the cartoon dealt with the love life of a tom-cat is that the story was meant to appeal primarily to an adult audience. Going to the movies was still a novelty back then and it was seen primarily as adult entertainment. The first Felix shorts focused on issues like the prohibition or the Russian Revolution, in a humorous way.
Famous writer Aldous Huxley once said that the Felix cartoons were proof of
“what the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic".
As was the case with many stars of the silent era, Felix The Cat lost its appeal once ‘talkies’ were invented. Just as Charlie Chaplin was reluctant to make movies with sound, the creators of Felix took to long in giving the cat a voice and its popularity quickly faded. It was only in the 1950s that Felix was once again brought to the screen, becoming a TV character. Although not that popular today, its image is still easily recognizable and anyway don’t give Felix up for dead. Cats are known to have nine lives and Felix is supposed to make its return to the big screen, this time as a computer-generated character.
Oswald The Lucky Rabbit first appeared in 1927, in ’Trolley Troubles’, and was one of Walt Disney’s first cartoon character.It was Disney’s ambition to give the anthropomorphic rabbit a distinct personality, making him funny, but also alert and venturesome.
"I want the characters to be somebody. I don't want them just to be a drawing.”
At the same time, Disney wanted to make his characters ‘real’, so he moved away from the simplistic drawings of Felix The Cat’s era, tying to emulate the camera-angles and film-editing of real movies.
1928 saw the birth of the most famous rodent in the world, Mickey Mouse, a face everyone can instantly recognize on TV, on T-shirts or the thousands of items that bear its image.
Mickey’s screen debut was in ’Steamboat Willie’ and in the image below you can see a rough drawing and the original storyboard, discovered in Disney’s files years after his death.
If you grew up with the idea that Minnie is Mickey’s girlfriend, you must know that in the early cartoons she repeatedly turned him down, choosing Black Pete instead. The following years, Pluto, Goofy and Donald Duck joined Mickey’s universe and the stories became more complex. In 1935, Mickey underwent some alterations and was colorized, which made it even more appealing to the public. If initially Mickey was drawn in a manner quite similar to that of Oswald, Disney decided to give him a more distinct figure. For instance, Disney insisted that the mouse’s ears were to appear circular no matter the angle. From that moment on the silhouette of Mickey’s head became an iconic image.
1937 represents another milestone in the history of animation, with Walt Disney releasing ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, the first feature film to use hand-drawn animation. Originally, the story was meant to focus more on the dwarfs, but during the production it was decided to give prominence to the relation between the princess and the Evil Queen, so, unfortunately, many scenes with the lovable dwarfs were cut. Even so, it was a gigantic enterprise - 1.5 million cels (drawings) were necessary and Disney was forced to mortgage his house to get the necessary funding. Many in Hollywood referred to the project as ‘Disney’s Folly’, but it paid off. Adjusted for inflation, Snow White is even today on the top 10 list of film moneymakers of all times.
Child-actress Shirley Temple presenting Disney the special Oscar
source
At the 1939, Academy Awards ceremony, Disney received a Honorary Award for his ‘significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field". A special award was designed for the occasion - a normal sized Oscar statuette accompanied by seven miniature copies.
The success of Snow White prompted the film industry to order more animated feature films and over the next few years many of our childhood’s most beloved movies were made: ’Pinocchio’ (1940), ’Dumbo’ (1941) or ’Bambi’ (1942).
With the advent of television, the animated film industry was quickly to seize the new opportunities presented - ’The Flintstones’ appeared in the 1960 and was the first animated series on prime-time TV. ’The Yogi Bear Show’ premiered in 1961, ’The Pink Panther’ came along in 1964.
As we move into the modern era of animation, 1984 marks a turning point with the release of ’The Adventures of Andre and Wally B’, a short film using computer-generated images.
However, it is only in 1995 that the first computer-animated feature film is released, the hugely popular ’Toy Story’.
The 2004 ’Polar Express’ deserves a special mention in this brief history of animation as it brought an “innovative approach that animates computer-generated virtual characters by applying realtime human performances”. The train conductor in the movie was modeled on the performance of the great Tom Hanks.
As mentioned earlier, Walt Disney was the first artist to receive an Oscar for an animated movie, but it was considered a one-time thing. The film industry would not recognize animated movies as worthy of the same awards as real-acting productions until as late as 2001, when a new category was introduced.It was a controversial decision, as many Academy members thought it was beneath them to vote for children entertainment. Some went as far as having their own kids watch the nominated pictures and rely upon their judgment.
The first animated movie to receive its own real Oscar was ’Shrek’.
The 2009 ’Up’ was the first Pixar movie released in 3D and the first tri-dimensional animated feature film to receive an Oscar. Once again, the animated film industry showed its ability to move with the times and nowadays it is rare to see a movie which is not shot in 3D.
Besides presenting a short history of animation, this post aims to be a trip down memory-lane and I have no doubt all of you, dear readers, know at least some of the above mentioned movies. Each era and each country had its own favorite cartoon characters. For me, one of the most vivid memories of my childhood was the parents calling out their kids to come see the nightly cartoon program. A little before 7pm, just before the evening news, the streets and courtyards were deserted as kids sat down to watch the adventures of ‘Mihaela’, the heroine of a Romanian TV cartoon.
Do let me know in the comments which was your favorite cartoon character as a child?!
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References: 1, 2, 3.
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