Before 1910, animated films had been novelties. By the 1930s, however, labor-saving devices had made them a part of nearly every film program. Each of the Majors and Minors regularly released a cartoon series, either under contract with an independent firm or from their own animation units.
Some of these series were highly standardized, turned out by efficient, assembly-line systems. For nearly forty years after 1930, Paul Terry provided his Terrytoons biweekly for Fox120th Century-Fox. Universal released films by Walter Lantz from 1929 through 1972; Lantz’s most famous character, Woody Woodpecker, debuted in 1941. Columbia had its own short-film division, Screen Gems, which made cartoons starring Krazy Kat, Scrappy, and others until 1949.
At the opposite end of the scale from these series were those produced by the Walt Disney Studio, an independent company devoted solely to making cartoons. Disney’s enormous success in 1928 with the Mickey Mouse short Steamboat Willie had brought animation into the sound age and given it respectability. The studio went on centering cartoons around Mickey but also established a series of “Silly Symphonies,” based on musical pieces and containing no continuing characters. Skeleton Dance (1928) featured a macabre celebration in a graveyard.
10.42 In A Dream Walking (1934), Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl all end up sleepwalking on an unfinished skyscraper.
By 1932, Disney moved from Columbia to distribute through the prestigious United Artists. Critics all over the world suddenly hailed these shorts, with their fluid movements and minimal dialogue, as the answer to the problems of the all-talkie sound film. The studio also was among the first to pick up on three-strip Technicolor, beginning with Flowers and Trees in 1932. Disney dominated the cartoon category of the Oscars with such films as The Three Little Pigs (1933), whose song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” became an anthem of Depression-period America. The firm spent a great deal of money on such films, and its huge staff of artists had the leisure to create detailed, shaded backgrounds, lots of figure movement, and bright color schemes (Color Plate 10.14).
In 1937, Disney switched to RKO as a distributor— a move that bolstered that shaky firm when it released the first American feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Despite being terrified by the witch, children were enchanted by the dwarfs, and the film was a huge hit. The studio continued its series of popular short cartoons, starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto. It also planned several additional features. Bambi (1942) took the studio’s propensity for realistic backgrounds further, with soft pastel paintings for the natural settings (Color Plate 10.15). The film also extensively employed the new multiplane camera, an elaborate animation stand introduced in The Old Mill (1937). The multiplane permitted the settings and figures to be divided up onto several cels in layers. These could be moved frame by frame at varying rates toward or away from the camera, giving a powerful illusion of gliding through a three-dimensional space.
The Disney studio was working at its peak during the early 1940s, making Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941) as well as Bambi. Part of the staff was diverted to war propaganda and informational films, but full-time work on both features and shorts resumed after 1945.
Other studios found animators who, with more limited means, could imaginatively exploit the cartoon’s potential for absurdist illogic and rapid, distorted movements. In 1927, Paramount began releasing films by Max and Dave Fleischer, inventors of the “Out of the Inkwell” series. In 1931, they introduced Betty Boop, and Koko the Clown became a supporting character. Betty was a sexy innocent wandering through a variety of adventures, sometimes encountering ghosts and monsters. The Fleischers utilized popular songs; in Minnie the Moocher (1932), Cab Calloway’s band provides the sound track as Betty explores a scary cave.
Betty had to be toned down considerably after the Hays Code was enforced in 1934. A supporting player who had first appeared in Popeye the Sailor, a Betty cartoon of 1933, now became the studio’s main star. The gravel-voiced Popeye, with his simple credo (“I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam”) and his strengthening cans of spinach, rescued girl friend Olive Oyl and adopted child Swee’ Pea from the villainous Bluto and other menaces (10.42).
After Disney’s success with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Fleischers released the feature-length Gulliver’s Travels (1939), which employed realistic ro-toscoped movements for the title character while using caricatural portrayals for the Lilliputians. The other Fleischer feature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town (aka Hoppity Goes to Town, 1941), achieved a more consistent stylized look. By that point, however, the brothers had overextended themselves. In 1942, Paramount maneuvered them out of their own animation firm and took over the Popeye series, as well as the Superman series (1941 on). The Fleischers were never able to regain their prominence as animators.
In 1930, Warner Bros. launched its own cartoon unit, hiring as its heads former Disney animation team Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng. Like many early sound cartoons, the Warner Bros. shorts were built around popular songs from the studio’s feature musicals. The series was labeled “Looney Tunes,” and most of the early entries starred a little black boy named Bosko.
In 1934, Harman and Ising moved to MGM, taking Bosko with them. Over the next few years, Warners hired a new generation of animators who would raise it to the top of the short-cartoon business: Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones, who, along with Freleng, each headed a unit within the animation section. The Warners system was more casual than the usual cartoon factory, and this group swapped ideas with a team of writers in informal “jam sessions.” They developed superstars Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Elmer Fudd.
The Warners group did not have the resources to create detailed backgrounds or elaborate groups of moving figures to match the Disney product. Instead, the animators depended on speed, topicality, and a silly humor that contrasted with the sentimentality and cuteness of most contemporary cartoons. Avery’s taste ran to wild visual puns. Clampett specialized in dazzlingly fast motion: in trying to avoid his induction notice in Draftee Daffy (1943), Daffy whizzes about his house as a lightning bolt or shower of sparks.
Many Warners cartoons refer self-consciously to the fact that they are cartoons. In You Ought to Be in Pictures (1940, Freleng), Porky decides to become a star in live-action features and quits his job with the Warners animation unit (in a scene with the unit’s producer, Leon Schlesinger). In several Warners cartoons, a black silhouette rises up from the audience and interrupts the action; in Thugs with Dirty Mugs, a spectator who says he has seen the cartoon before calls the police and informs on the gangsters (Color Plate 10.16; note also the caricature of Warners star Edward G. Robinson). Warners shorts appealed as much to adults as to children and became immensely popular—an appeal they still retain today on cable TV.
The same adult appeal was injected into MGM’s cartoon series when Tex Avery moved there from Warner Bros. in 1942. Avery created a new repertoire of stars, including wisecracking Screwy Squirrel, unlikely superhero Droopy Dog, and an unnamed Wolf, perpetually expressing extravagant (and frustrated) lust for curvaceous heroines. Avery continued his penchant for literalizing dreadful puns, as when the wolf in The Shooting of Dan McCaa (1945) has one foot in the grave (a little grave complete with tombstone encloses his boot like a slipper). Avery would continue pushing cartoons to manic limits for a decade after the war.
Hollywood enjoyed great prosperity during the war. That prosperity was to continue briefly after 1945, but later in the decade new challenges would change the film industry profoundly (see Chapter 15).
World History
