The Insane History of Animation, Part 2: The First Cartoons
Chalkboards, a dinosaur named Gertie, and a lot of very tired wrists.
In Part 1, we went from cave walls to spinning toys. Now it's the 1900s. Movie cameras exist. And a few brave artists decide to draw thousands of pictures by hand to make them move.
1. The first animated films
REAL: in 1906, J. Stuart Blackton made Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. He drew faces on a chalkboard, photographed them, erased a little, redrew, and photographed again. On screen, the faces rolled their eyes and blew smoke.
REAL: in 1908, French artist Émile Cohl made Fantasmagorie, a wild, two-minute film of stick figures transforming into other things. Many historians call it the first fully hand-drawn animated film.
2. Winsor McCay, animation's first superstar
REAL: McCay was a famous newspaper cartoonist who drew the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. In 1911, he animated his characters for the screen.
REAL: in 1914, he made Gertie the Dinosaur. McCay performed live on stage next to the screen, giving orders, and Gertie seemed to obey. At the end, McCay walked behind the screen and appeared to ride away on her back.
REAL: Gertie took thousands of drawings, around 10,000. An assistant helped trace the backgrounds, and McCay drew Gertie himself. She was one of the first cartoon characters with a real personality.
McCay showed the world that animation could be an art, not just a trick.
3. The first studios
Drawing every frame yourself was too slow. So studios started working like factories.
REAL: in 1914, John Randolph Bray opened one of the first animation studios in New York. (Bray. Great name. No relation, as far as I know.) His studio helped develop an assembly-line system: some artists drew key poses, others drew in-betweens, others inked and painted.
REAL: in 1914, Earl Hurd patented the idea of drawing characters on clear celluloid sheets, called cels, laid over a single painted background. No more redrawing the background every frame. Hurd later joined Bray, and cels became the industry standard for 80 years.
REAL: the Fleischer brothers' Out of the Inkwell cartoons, starring Koko the Clown, began at Bray's studio before the Fleischers went off on their own.
It was exciting, but it was hard work. Pay was low and hours were long.
4. Walt Disney
REAL: Walt's first studio, Laugh-O-Gram in Kansas City, went bankrupt in 1923. He moved to Hollywood with almost nothing.
REAL: Steamboat Willie (1928) starring Mickey Mouse was one of the first cartoons with fully synchronized sound, and it was a huge hit.
REAL: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was the first full-length cel-animated feature film made in the U.S. Hollywood called it "Disney's Folly" and expected it to fail. Instead, it became one of the biggest hits of its time. It took hundreds of artists and hundreds of thousands of drawings.
5. The rubber-hose era
In the 1920s and '30s, cartoon characters had bendy "rubber hose" arms, round heads, big eyes and white gloves. REAL: the gloves weren't just a style. They made hands easier to see against black-and-white bodies, and easier to draw.
What we learned
The first cartoons were drawn on chalkboards.
Winsor McCay turned animation into an art.
Studios invented the assembly line, and the cel.
Disney's "folly" became a classic.
Cartoon gloves have a reason.
Up next
Part 3: Cartoons Go to War. World War II, propaganda cartoons and the Hays Code.
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