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This chapter begins with an overview of animation’s beginnings and a discussion of how animation, as both an art and as an industry, took shape in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This is followed by a brief examination of two of the main animation studios in America in the 1930s and 1940s (and Disney’s main competitors), the Fleischer Brothers studio and the animation unit at Warner Brothers. These will help to underline and illustrate a comparison between how animation’s role and worth as a medium were perceived at the Disney studio and other studios. It is also important to outline, in general terms, animation techniques and practices of this period and at various studios in order to achieve a more complete understanding of how and why animated characters were created and presented as they were.

This chapter, despite its presence in a book on the films of the Disney studio, has very little discussion of topics which are directly related to Disney. While this may initially seem odd, there are in fact very good reasons: in order to appreciate the many ways in which the Disney studio differed (and continues to differ) from its competitors, it is important to become acquainted with the nature of Disney’s competition. From 1928 – the year in which the Disney studio achieved its first major success with the release of “Steamboat Willie” – up to the present day, animation at other studios has been defined, understood, and appreciated in relation to Disney (even if only to reject the Disney style and ethos), measuring achievements and failures by how much – or how little – the influence of the Disney studio can be detected. In other words, why the Disney studio did what it did, how it did what it did, what it did, how its ways changed (and how they stayed the same) over time, and even a sense of what Walt Disney and his successors hoped to achieve both within and for animation as a medium, are best understood within the context of how animation was approached at other studios. Because there were two studios in particular between 1925 and the 1950s which could be viewed as being equal to the competition offered by the Disney studio, it is only those two studios – the Fleischers’ studio at Paramount, then the animation unit at Warner Brothers studio – which will be discussed in any detail.⁵⁸ Once the reader has a working knowledge of animation history and an idea of how animation outside the Disney studio was approached, it becomes much easier to understand the very real and important ways in which the Disney studio differed from other studios, and to appreciate the ways in which these differences contributed not only to the choices made by the Disney studio regarding its production, but also to the Disney studio’s ultimate success.

Pre-cinematic animation

It is generally accepted that the earliest precursor to animation – as well as to all film-making – was a device called the magic lantern. It was a very basic machine, consisting of a box in which one placed a lantern or a candle next to a curved mirror so as to project still images. Discussed by the man given credit as its inventor, Jesuit priest Athansius Kircher, in the last chapter of his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae [The Great Art of Light and Shadow], published in Rome around 1645, the magic lantern quickly caught the imaginations of many, despite the warnings of some churchmen that it was somehow linked to witchcraft.⁵⁹ While the interests of some, such as Kircher, led them to see the magic lantern as a tool for education, many others viewed the device as a means of entertainment. By 1735, Dutchman Pieter van Musschenbroek had shown that the magic lantern could be used to create images which had the illusion of movement.⁶⁰ This was done with the aid of a revolving disc which, unlike Kircher’s use of a series of related pictures to highlight/illustrate a story (rather like a modern slide show or PowerPoint presentation), van Musschenbroek’s discs had on them various sequential images which, when used correctly, simulated simple movements. Indeed, according to Charles Solomon, it was van Musschenbroek who would present the first animated show using several magic lanterns. These shows included “synchronised slide changes and long slides (which he slowly passed before the projecting beam) to present more elaborate illusions, such as a storm at sea…”.⁶¹ This form of magic lantern show quickly caught on, and by the eighteenth century it was a fairly common gimmick amongst travelling entertainers. Indeed, magic lantern shows took various forms, including the use of magic lanterns for adding special effects to stage plays. Magic lanterns were used, for example, to project ghostly images onto a stage for a more “realistic” effect, as well as producing phantom images for the popular “Phantasmagoria” shows of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was in these ways that magic lantern shows became widely known in Europe and North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though, smaller, less expensive versions of the magic lantern eventually were mass-produced and sold as parlour toys for the middle and upper classes.

Another device which is accepted as a precursor of animation as we know it today is a toy called the thaumatrope, invented around 1826.⁶² Playing upon the then newly-discovered physiological phenomenon called persistence of vision (which, briefly, is when the human eye fuses a series of consecutive pictures into a single, moving image, provided that the pictures are shown with sufficient speed and light), the thaumatrope was simply a disc with corresponding images on each side of it (such as a bird on one side and a cage on the other) and was manipulated either with pieces of string tied through opposite ends or with the disc mounted on top of a stick. When the disc was spun quickly, the two images on either side of the disc appeared to be combined into a single image; in other words, the bird appeared to be inside the cage.

One step up from the thaumatrope, technologically speaking, was the phenakistoscope, invented by the Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau sometime between 1828 and 1832. The phenakistoscope consisted of two discs, one with a short series of simple sequential images on it and the other with a series of evenly-spaced slits. When the discs were spun, the viewer looked through the slits to see what appeared to be a moving image. Following this was the appearance of the daedalum (Devil’s wheel). Although it was invented in 1834 (by William Horner of Bristol, England), it apparently did not catch on until the 1860s, when its name was changed to the zoetrope (wheel of life). The zoetrope, which also relied upon the phenomenon of persistence of vision, was a drum with evenly-spaced slits in its side and in which was placed a slip of paper with sequential images printed on it. When the drum was spun, the spectator looked through the slits at the images, which appeared to be moving. While a very simple, repetitive image (such as a man hammering or a seal balancing a ball) was all that the zoetrope could produce, nonetheless the device proved to be very popular, and examples of both zoetropes themselves and the paper slips with images for use in zoetropes can still be found in a number of museums and private collections today. Also still surviving in large numbers are kineographs, or flipbooks, which were invented in 1868. In 1895, Thomas Edison created a mechanical version of the flipbook, called the mutoscope, which could be described as being like a rolodex/rotodex with a crank, with a sequential photograph or drawing upon each card in the rolodex. This device, however, which seems to have mainly appeared as an amusement park novelty, most likely arose as an experimental device to accompany Edison’s sound recordings, rather than as a purposeful advance in the history of animation.

What was – arguably – a real leap forward in the history of the animated film as we know it today came when Emile Reynaud invented a device called the praxinoscope in 1877. According to Charles Solomon, the praxinoscope was like the zoetrope in that both devices involved the rotating of a drum with a paper slip of sequential images attached to its inside. Unlike the zoetrope, however, which required the viewer to look through slits in the drum, the images were reflected upon a series of mirrors. By 1882, Reynaud had begun using the praxinoscope with a projector and began to draw animated stories, initially upon long strips of paper, then upon strips of celluloid. He opened his Théâtre Optique at the Musée Grevin, which was a wax museum in Paris, in 1892, and began exhibiting what he called his Pantomimes Lumineuses, which were the short films he was drawing on celluloid. The films were accompanied by music and electrically-triggered sound effects, and proved to be highly successful. Solomon states that between 1892 and 1900, Reynaud gave approximately 13,000 performances of his various Pantomimes Lumineuses, to a total audience estimated at 500,000, which was an exceptionally large number at that time.⁶³ Eventually, however, Reynaud was unable to keep up with the rates of production to be seen elsewhere in the growing film industry, as men like Emile Cohl and Georges Méliès proved to be better suited to producing work for the new medium. Although a few of his films have begun to be rediscovered in recent years, many of them were lost when, in a fit of despair one evening in 1910, Reynaud himself apparently threw his equipment and the majority of his films into the Seine. His place in animation’s history seems to be somewhat debatable, in fact, since, although it is known that (despite his slight ability at animation and drafting) he created colour animated films with synchronised soundtracks long before anyone else, it is not known whether other pioneering animators or other film-makers attended any of his shows or even knew of his work. His influence upon other animated film-makers, therefore, is open to question. By 1900, certainly, the film industry, though still in its infancy, was nonetheless becoming well established and was certainly more sophisticated than anything Reynaud had produced, which could explain why his Pantomimes Lumineuses, which were so popular initially, fell from public favour so rapidly.

Early cinematic animation

Many of the early artists in the American animation industry had fallen into the animation business because of their unsuccessful earlier attempts at careers as illustrators or cartoonists. Emile Cohl, Georges Méliès, and many of their contemporaries had begun their careers as comic illustrators, and the influences of their earlier training can be seen in the style and nature of the animation they produced. Paul Terry, Tex Avery, and Winsor McKay all began as cartoonists. Max Fleischer was the art director of a magazine, and his brother Dave trained briefly at an engraving company. Walter Lantz’s first job, according to Norman Klein, was cleaning Winsor McKay’s brushes at the New York Herald.⁶⁴ Walt Disney took a job as an animator with the Kansas City Film Ad Company because his application to work as a cartoonist at the Kansas City Journal had initially been rejected, and the business he had begun with Ub Iwerks (called Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists) had been allowed to dwindle and had gone into limbo.

Of these, the first to achieve wide-spread renown as an animator was Winsor McKay. A successful cartoonist and illustrator, McKay, who claimed to have been inspired by his son’s flipbooks and, supposedly, was spurred on in his attempt by a bet, is said to have created the first American animation (as we think of it today) in late 1910.⁶⁵ Called “Little Nemo” and based upon his comic strip of the same name, “Little Nemo” premiered at the Colonial Theatre in New York on 12 April 1911 as part of McKay’s own vaudeville act. According to Solomon, McKay was irritated by the fact that his skill as an animator and draftsman caused his audience to mistake his drawings for trick photography involving live actors, a mistake which audiences apparently made again in 1912 with McKay’s film “How a Mosquito Operates”, reportedly believing (according to Solomon) that McKay had rigged up a mosquito dummy on wires and then filmed it.⁶⁶ Because of this mistaken perception of his animation as live-action films, and in particular given the fact that McKay’s rich, detailed, lavish animation was incredibly time-consuming and laborious to complete, McKay chose as his next subject a dinosaur, a creature which would have been much harder to fake in live-action cinema than it would have been to draw one. Thus, “Gertie the Dinosaur” premiered in 1914, again as part of McKay’s vaudeville act. Gertie proved successful at being the first screen character to be accepted by US audiences as an animated character, which perhaps accounts for her popular but inaccurate reputation as the first animated character of the cinema, in place of Little Nemo.

It was not long after “Gertie the Dinosaur” was released that the animated film industry began to expand rapidly. Although McKay neither formed his own studio nor worked for any of the already-established film studios, other artists and animators quickly began to establish animation studios as a more stream-lined way of producing animated films (McKay would occasionally hire one or two assistants, but on the whole is said to have done the majority of the drawings for his cartoons himself). Animated film production elsewhere was largely tied to the characters of the syndicated comics (the “Funnies”) which were circulated in US newspapers, some early examples being Mutt and Jeff and the Katzenjammer Kids. These films were the products of convoluted deals between the studios and newspaper publishers, and more than one studio could be producing simultaneously cartoons of the same characters, providing that each studio had a deal with the newspaper which owned the character.

While the deals which allowed these cartoons to be created were often complex, the cartoons themselves were simple in terms of storyline (when there actually was a storyline), character development (even in the cases of re-occurring characters, very little was put into a character’s motivations or personality), or draughtsmanship. The character of Felix the Cat provides an example. Felix can solve problems by manipulating the things around him, turning them into whatever objects he requires at any particular moment (after all, his world is made of ink, and can be re-formed by him at will so as to serve his purpose). He can use his ability to manipulate the world around him as a tool to outwit his adversaries. He can run, jump, climb, walk, and hop. His face can express fear, triumph, satisfaction, and anger. He can laugh and cry. He can do absolutely anything. He can go absolutely anywhere. He has no limitations. Nothing is much of a challenge for him to overcome. But we never have any strong sense of personality from Felix. Although we may find his antics funny, we cannot identify with Felix, and, even when we can cheer him on, it does not disappoint us if he is momentarily unsuccessful (in fact, we can laugh without any sympathy at his plight). Even his failures serve as a source of enjoyment for his audience. This description holds true for the majority of early cartoon characters. But these early cartoons were not considered by many people – including the artists and studios who made them – to be important, as they were merely short subjects to provide entertainment for audiences between featured attractions, both in the cinema and in vaudeville.

In the early days of cartoons in America, the majority of the cartoon studios were located in New York City, and, consequently, the major distributors were there as well. Walt Disney’s studio (founded in 1924 as the Disney Brothers studio) was the first animation studio to be set up in Los Angeles, and, when Disney wanted to distribute his cartoons, he had to deal with people in New York. It was not until the 1930s, once sound production had become industry-wide, that the animators based in New York and Kansas City (where animators such as Disney, Iwerks, Hugh Harman, and Rudolph Ising began their careers) began to follow Disney to California, as studios such as Disney, Warner Brothers, and MGM began to lure artists westward to create cartoons for them. It was during the 1930s that, initially, the main strategy of many animation studios for competing with Disney was to attempt to copy Disney as much as possible. Indeed, Warner Brothers, MGM, and various other animation studios, in their efforts to compete with the increasingly successful Disney studio, did all they could to persuade Disney artists to come and work for them.⁶⁷

Although, in April 1929, Universal became the first of the major studios in Hollywood to invest in the formation of an animation department for the sole purpose of making their own cartoons, it was during this period, mainly 1928 through to the late 1930s, that the Disney studio became the leader in its industry, mainly owing to the exceptionally high standards it set itself (at least in comparison with other American animation studios at that time), as well as to the Disney studio’s constant striving for improvements both in the organisational methods employed in producing cartoons and in the technological aspects of animated film production. It was the Disney studio, for example, which has been credited with the invention of the storyboard as a way of organising a cartoon’s story and communicating it to the animators. In the technical aspects of filming the cartoon with the greatest degree of realism⁶⁸ possible, Disney led the way for other animation studios with its various technological innovations, an example of this being the invention by a Disney studio employee of the multi-plane camera, which was a way of photographing the various cels so that the overall shot had greater depth and dimension. The innovations of the Disney studio, however, will be discussed at a later stage.

How to make an animated film

The importance of a discussion of animation techniques here is this: because of the artistic and technical limits of animation as an art form, many of the stylistic and visual aspects of the characters, stories, and films are sometimes influenced less by the original vision of the animators and more by the technical constraints of the medium. The trade-off for these technical constraints, however, is the greater “control” which the makers of animated films have over their “actors”. In a live-action film, an actress may disagree with the overall perceptions and/or vision of the director of a film in which she is appearing. Although she may speak her lines and hit her marks as she is directed, she still has the power to influence her audience’s perception of her character through her eyes, her face, and her body language, as well as through the tone of her voice, so that what spectators see in the character is different from what the director had intended for them to see. It is in this way that Annabella Sciorra claims to have not only differed with director Spike Lee, but even to have subverted his intentions for her character, in the making of Jungle Fever (1991). As one writer commented,

Spike and Sciorra would look at the same words in the script every morning, yet take away two entirely different ideas of what they were supposed to mean. As both writer and director, Spike had the final say in the matter: he had the power to make her say his words. But he could not control the way Sciorra delivered these lines, or how … she held her head or set her facial muscles. Through this subtle subversion, Sciorra got her way.⁶⁹

This sort of subversion, however, is largely impossible in an animated film. After all, there is nothing in the portrayal of an animated character – not a blink of an eye, not a tilt of the head, not even the movement of the folds of a skirt – which is not decided upon in advance, carefully mapped out, and then drawn to suit the expectations of the director of a film. All that the actor or actress contributes to the performance is a voice. And, since the dialogue is usually the first step in the process of producing an animated film, the visuals can be made either to complement or counteract the performer’s tone of voice.

It is not known how often an actor or actress who is lending his/her voice to an animated character has tried to change the main perception of a character from that of the director to his or her own. Admissions such as Annabella Sciorra’s are hard to come by in Hollywood cinema. To find such a comment on an animated film – especially a Disney film (coming as it would from the feedback surrounding the output of one of the most notoriously litigious of Hollywood studios) – is, in my experience, impossible. However, it is important to bear in mind when watching and analysing an animated film that no look or gesture is there by accident. All of the visual aspects of a character which come together to influence our perception as spectators are there on purpose, and their inclusion was decided upon not by the actors, but by the director. This point cannot be stressed enough. Indeed, it is upon this concept that the key arguments of this study rest.

During the last five to ten years, animation techniques, thanks to the increased use of the computer, have undergone some of the most dramatic changes in their history. Yet, throughout the period from 1911 to roughly 1985,⁷⁰ the basic aspects of the mechanics of animation remained the same. Characters and backgrounds were drawn by artists, their drawings were photographed onto cels, and the cels were photographed onto film reels. Various people checked to see that the drawings were in the proper sequential order, that continuity was maintained (i.e. that the colours used, the look of each character, and the story elements were consistent throughout the film), and that the story – as it was presented – made sense. This is not to say, however, that there were no innovations in animation during its first eighty years. It is important, however, that an overview of the subject be included in order to give the reader a better understanding of why various aspects of the look of each film evolved as they did.

Animated films, like live-action films, are made up of a series of sequentially arranged individual photographs, called frames. Like the thaumatrope, zoetrope, and other such devices, film relies upon the phenomenon of persistence of vision for the viewer to be able to link the series of frames into what appears to be a moving image. In order for this to be achieved, the film is run at a speed of twenty-four frames per second. In a ninety-minute film, therefore, there are 129,600 individual frames. This means that, for a ninety-minute animated film, a team of artists must produce a number of individual drawings which is many times the number of frames (since there are at least two drawings which are put together to create the layers of a single frame) – an enormous amount of work. It is a gigantic effort which requires that the project possess meticulous organisation and co-operation, but still be run in such a way that individual creativity can easily be admitted into the overall process. It was also during the 1920s that the process of animation became increasingly more factory-like in its “assembly-line” production methods, methods which arose in the various studios as a way to make their work go more quickly from start to finish, thereby making themselves more competitive in terms of both out-put and expenses.

The creation of an animated film of any length involves various stages. In the pre-production stage, the story is chosen and planned, the backgrounds are designed, aspects of how the film’s characters look and act are decided upon, and the music, sound effects, and dialogue are recorded and timed to correspond with the correct frames of the film. It is at this stage of production that the storyboard for the film is put together, an invention which today seems logical and simple but which, when it was first created in order to help the artists at the Disney studio organise their work on “Steamboat Willie” (1928), was a revolutionary idea both for animation and the film industry as a whole. Alfred Hitchcock, for example, later adopted the storyboard method in planning certain sections of his films, with some of his scripts having as many as 600 set-up sketches for the more complicated shots.⁷¹ The storyboard is mainly used as a tool for organising the story as a whole, as well as a way of deciding which lines will be spoken during particular shots in the film. Besides providing a visual aid to the directors and artists of a film, the other advantage of a storyboard is that, especially in the planning stages of a film, it is easy for those working on the film to add, remove, or re-arrange certain sections of the story in order to determine the best possible way the story in front of them can be told.

In the production stage of the making of an animated film, there are basically eight phases: (1) the main drawings of a sequence are created; (2) the extra drawings needed to complete an action in a sequence are worked on by artists known in the industry as in-betweeners; (3) the clean-up artists remove any extra lines from the drawings and, in general, “clean up” the image; (4) the cels are inked (which means that the black outlines of the figures are drawn) and painted; the cels are then (5) checked for any mistakes, (6) assembled, (7) put into sequence, and (8) photographed.⁷² This list of steps does not include the stages when sound is added because, in many ways, it is an entirely separate process from the creation of the drawings of the film itself. Many of the eight steps, moreover, did not evolve in animation until the 1930s.

The use of a storyboard, for example, could make a studio more competitive. The process of creating an animated film, however long or short, is a highly labour-intensive endeavour. If cutting the number of finished drawings down from twenty-four to twenty-two per second is worth-while enough to a studio as a means of cutting down its budget, then obviously cutting down on the number of wasted drawings created for sequences which were later thrown out for not working within the film as a whole, obviously, is a great saviour of time and money. The storyboard (which is made up of single sketches of various shots for the film), by allowing the artists and directors to have a visualisation of what the final outcome of the film will be, often allows them to discard a sequence which does not work within the context of the film as a whole before ever having to animate even a rough version of the sequence. The merits of being able to throw out the three or four rough sketches which stood for a minute of film, as opposed to throwing out the 1,440 drawings which are necessary to create one minute of film, are obvious. It was the creation of the storyboard by the Disney studio’s story department, and its expanded use by the studio’s artists, which not only helped to give Disney a competitive edge at a very crucial time in the history of studio animation, but which also made the creation of a full-length animated feature, an effort which was (and indeed still is) such a monumental undertaking for a studio, not only more easily done in the artistic/conceptual sense, but also (and predominately, in the minds of most animation studio heads other than Walt Disney) in the financial sense.

The rise of American animation and the Fleischer studio

Cartoons in the early years of animation were, by and large, very simple in terms of story and character development. This simplicity was, in large part, due to the limits of the medium as it existed at that time. Stories had to be simple, with easily understood pantomime and gags, as films were, of course, silent. Each cel had to be made from drawings that were completely done by hand, as no other duplication methods existed at that time. Assuming, therefore, that a cartoon ran seven minutes (the average length of a cinematic animated short), and that the animators had included twenty-four frames for each second of film (which, at some of the more profit-driven studios such as Fleischer, was not always the case), a seven minute cartoon could be made up of 10,080 frames and anywhere from two to ten times that number of drawings to make up the entire frame). It should be noted that, typically, each frame is comprised of multiple drawings: two at the most basic level (the background and the characters), three and upwards for more complex, higher-quality animation. These numbers, of course, do not include the numerous drawings which, for whatever reasons, did not work and were therefore not included in the finished cartoon, nor does it include drawings for things like the storyboard. For film with a running time of seven minutes, 10,080 is the number of finished frames on the strip of film, not the number of drawings needed to create that finished film.

Obviously, having to do that number of finished drawings by hand – as well as having to ensure that all of the drawings, by different artists, conform completely in style – can be very expensive in terms of both time and money. Given the low status (in relation to both art and to cinema) which has been endured by animation for much of its history, the idea that a great deal of time, money, and artistic endeavour should be “wasted” on a “mere” cartoon seems not to have arisen at the majority of animation studios, including in particular those studios which, unlike the Disney studio, were owned and run by the major Hollywood film studios. Indeed, many animation studios found that it was possible to get away with twenty-two frames per second of film. Doing so, although it reduced the overall quality of the image, also reduced the overall cost of the film and cut down on the number of man hours involved in the film’s production. By limiting the number of frames in a film from 10,080 frames (which a seven minute cartoon would have when animated using twenty-four frames per second), to only 9,240 frames (as would be the case in a film using only twenty-two drawings per second), a difference of 840 frames and at least twice that number of drawings was eliminated. That being able to reduce the amount of finished frames by 840 for nearly the same results on the screen would be seen as a major saving by a financially strapped studio is obvious, and it was this mindset – which considered financial aspects of film-making over the artistic and aesthetic ones – which was most often found in the less successful animation studios of the 1920s and 1930s.

One of the best ways to understand Disney’s success is to look at why its only real competitors, ultimately, were not as successful. By examining two other studios, Fleischer Brothers and the Warner Brothers animation studio, and looking at some of the myths surrounding Disney’s position in the animation industry at that time, a better understanding will be reached as to those factors which helped the Disney studio to succeed. On the whole, by the early 1930s, there were two major animation studios vying with each other for dominance within the medium: the Disney studio, which was one of Hollywood’s few independent studios to be successful over the long-term, and the Fleischer studio, which, eventually, came to be owned by Paramount. The Fleischer studio, run by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, was the studio which brought to the screen such characters as Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, and Popeye and which, for much of its existence, was considered by many to be the only serious rival of the Disney studio.

It has been argued in an article in the June 1999 issue of Sight and Sound that the Fleischer studio, and Max Fleischer in particular, were in fact the front-runners in animation – both in terms of story development and technical innovation – throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Harvey Deneroff, the author of this article, in his brief discussion of the Betty Boop cartoon “Poor Cinderella” (1934), implies that this, the first of Fleischers’ cartoons to be made in colour,⁷³ was leading the Fleischer studio along the path (which was already being taken at Disney beginning in 1934) towards full-length animated film production. According to Deneroff, had Fleischer committed his studio’s “resources and talent [which] he [had] employed on “Poor Cinderella”, the history of US animation might have taken a different turn. But instead the studio lavished its attention on its newest star, Popeye, whose cartoons following “Popeye the Sailor” (1933) became the most popular short films in the United States, eclipsing even Mickey Mouse”.⁷⁴ What Deneroff fails to realise is that the Disney studio was perhaps the earliest to recognise the importance of “narrative” and plot for a cartoon, which can be defined as the existence within a cartoon of both an overall identifiable story and the presence of motivation for characters’ actions, as well as a series of events which rise to a climax and end in a resolution in a form which at least resembles, if not directly using, the classic paradigm narrative structure. In his book Hollywood Cartoons, Michael Barrier points out that all of the effort which went into the making of “Poor Cinderella” went into such details as the bridles on Cinderella’s coach, not into the story or character development. As Barrier puts it, “There’s no sign in most Fleischer cartoons from the middle thirties, and in the Color Classics [of which series “Poor Cinderella” was the first] in particular, of any real interest in the characters; they’re usually dull or unsympathetic”.⁷⁵

Barrier recognises the enormous amount of technical work which went into the making of “Poor Cinderella”, noting that it was far more detailed than was typical of Fleischer cartoons and does mention the “3-D” effect which Deneroff describes. Barrier notes, however, that rather than being 3-D, “Poor Cinderella” employs a “3-D” process called a “set-back”⁷⁶ (the device to which Deneroff was no doubt referring when he stated that “Poor Cinderella” was “an elaborate production which introduced the 3-D process (invented by Fleischer and John Burks the year before)”.⁷⁷ A “set-back”, which was patented by Max Fleischer in 1933, was when a cell which had the characters and foreground objects painted on it was placed between two sheets of glass and photographed in front of a miniature set, made to be in the same scale as the cel painting, and photographed together as a frame, so that the animated characters would appear to be moving about in a three-dimensional world. In many ways, the idea is similar to the concept, popular since the early 1920s, of imposing animated characters onto a scene from the real world, except that, rather than using live-action film for the background, an actual set is constructed. Because of this small but critical difference, the look of each of these concepts is quite different. Indeed, the effect of the set-back, far from being even remotely convincing, is actually quite eerie and far more unrealistic than it seems intended to have been, the obvious animatedness of the characters contrasting jarringly with the objects and room surrounding them. The notion that a film such as “Poor Cinderella”, with its unappealing characters and its strange aesthetics could have been a stepping stone for the creation of a feature film department at Fleischer is also something of a stretch. It is unsupported by the kinds of cartoons being created by Fleischer at that time, to include “Poor Cinderella”, the main appeal of which was apparently meant to have been the use of the “set-back”, and it is also not supported by the animated feature which Fleischer eventually did produce, Gulliver’s Travels (1939), which did not utilise the “set-back” method at all.⁷⁸ Most importantly, however, the idea that “Poor Cinderella” was an attempt by Fleischer to prepare for feature animation is weakened by the fact that the film concentrates more on its look than on such key elements – often ignored in Fleischer cartoons – as character development and story.

In the early days of animation, although story was stressed to a point, the emphasis of many cartoons was on slap-stick and violence as a means of entertainment, and the Fleischers’ cartoons moved along in this vein, albeit with a twist of New York’s Lower East Side-style humour and speech patterns. The Fleischers, after all, like many of America’s animation pioneers (including Walt Disney), were not only influenced by, but were in many ways taught their craft by the handbook on animation techniques and principles at that time: E.G. Lutz’s Animated Cartoons, published in 1920.⁷⁹ In his handbook, Lutz pointed out in the chapter entitled “On Humorous Effects and on Plots”, that

“To be sure, an animated cartoon needs a good many more incidents than one calamitous occurrence. It is indispensable, for the sake of an uninterrupted animation, that it should have a succession of distressing mishaps, growing in violence. This idea of a cumulative chain of actions, increasing in force and resultant misfortune, is peculiarly adapted to animated drawings.”⁸⁰

The Fleischers’ cartoons before Popeye certainly follow this pattern, and, even during the Popeye series, violence, rather than plot movement or character development, was still used as the main catalyst for both the story and the characters’ actions. Deneroff seems not to have appreciated the fact that there is almost no story whatsoever in the Fleischers’ cartoons. Characters are simply driven from one gag to the next, often for no particular reason, and then the cartoon simply ends, with little closure involved, as there is little or no story which needs to be resolved.

Deneroff states that the Popeye series was an important departure from the Fleischer studio’s earlier work because, prior to Popeye, the Fleischers “… had previously paid little attention to narrative”,⁸¹ as if he thought it was entirely possible to make a successful animated film, running an hour or more in length, which was solely comprised of sight gags, slap-stick violence, and the occasional Yiddish aside, with little or no plot, character development or motivation, or anything with which an audience could identify. When describing why the Fleischers’ studio failed, he says only that the studio suffered serious labour problems and that, in order to get away from having to work with unions, the Fleischers moved to Florida and established a studio there which eventually went bankrupt thanks to their having to pay high wages to attract artists to Florida. That these serious labour problems were in fact a five-month long strike, in 1937, held by lower-level artists (mainly in-betweeners and ink-and-painters), and that the strike was over pay, working conditions, and business practices at the studio, and which had an enormous impact on the studio’s eventual decline, does not come into Deneroff’s discussion at all. Furthermore, he makes no mention in his article of the bitter feud which had arisen between Max and Dave Fleischer,⁸² nor does he mention the enormity of the Fleischers’ debts to Paramount (again, many of which were either created by or exacerbated by the strike). The fact that their departure from Paramount left the Fleischers without any of the merchandising rights to the characters they had created is also not discussed, nor is Max Fleischer’s very real lack of interest in animation as a medium (indeed, his only interest in it seems to have come from his interest in mechanical invention). These, plus Fleischer’s poor understanding of business practices and people management, seems not to have occurred to Deneroff, yet they are vital to understanding how and why the Fleischer studio eventually failed.

The weakness of Deneroff’s argument can be further underlined by pointing out the examples at the Disney studio which were occurring at roughly the same time as the troubles at the Fleischers’ studio. Walt Disney, when he moved his studio out to California (he was the first to establish an animation studio in Los Angeles), had to pay premium wages in order to lure artists west from such places as New York City, and, in 1941, only four years after the labour disputes at Fleischers’ studio, Disney was forced to contend with a strike at his own studio which lasted several months and affected not only morale, but also production and finances. As far as a comparison between Disney and Fleischer animation goes, it is crucial to point out that Disney cartoons, by focusing on story, plot and character development, as well as by concentrating on improving the artists’ abilities in technical animation, were taking much more realistic – and conscious – steps towards feature production from 1933 onward. Fleischer cartoons, which depended mostly on gags, were not being used by the studio to prepare for features, but were simply business as usual. As will be discussed below, the only reason the Fleischer studio seems to have been prompted to attempt feature animation was in order to compete with Disney, rather than out of any real desire to expand the studio in that direction.

A common misconception about Disney’s relationship to other animation studios – in particular in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s – is that Disney was a rich, powerful, and influential Hollywood film studio which simply squashed all its competition by throwing more money at its projects than would have been possible by these other studios. Furthermore, there seems to be an acceptance of the idea that the Disney studio was able to eliminate its competition by saturating the market for animation with its own films. Deneroff, for example, makes the mistake of thinking of the Disney studio as being one of the industry-controlling Hollywood studios of the day, instead of the struggling independent studio which it in fact was, a misconception he demonstrates when he comments that “… undoubtedly the most important and profitable independent [my italics] cartoon studio – and Disney’s most feared rival – was that owned and run by the Fleischer Brothers”.⁸³ Since, in reality, Paramount owned the Fleischer Brothers studio from 1929 until 1938 (a fact to which Deneroff alludes on the second page of his article), the only time in the history of Fleischer Brothers in which the Disney studio could have been viewed as a major contender in the field of animation, it is worth pointing out that Deneroff’s article even confuses which studio during this period was independent (Disney) and which was not (Fleischers).

This may sound like a small point but, in fact, there was a great deal of difference in the advantages and disadvantages of independent versus non-independent studios. Most importantly, it should be noted that the independent studios in Hollywood (to include Disney) did not have a means of independently distributing their films at this time. Instead, they had to make deals with professional distributors and/or those larger studios which owned the movie theatres and controlled the distribution and advertisement of most films circulated in the United States until the monopoly on theatre ownership and film distribution by the so-called “majors” was broken up by a series of cases brought by the federal government between 1946 and 1955. As a result of these cases, and in particular the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of the United States v. Paramount Pictures (decided 3 May 1948), the major studios, in order to comply with the Court’s decisions regarding their violations of various sections of the Sherman and Clayton acts, sold off their theatre chains.⁸⁴ Indeed, in the early days at the Disney studio, one of the greatest controlling factors as to which of the studio’s films were released and promoted was the whim of whomever held their distribution contract, and the percertage of money made by the studio from a film’s profits was also determined by how much the distributor felt inclined to pay. Honest distributors paid the agreed-upon percentage, as was stipulated by their contract, and also offered a fair, equitable deal to the studio. Dishonest distributors found ways to shuffle their accounts so as to keep the Disney studio’s share of the profits to themselves for as long as possible.⁸⁵

The licensing and financial perils of such a system for an independent studio – such as the Disney studio – are readily obvious. The Fleischers were sheltered from the difficulties of distribution by Paramount, which handled the distribution of the Fleischers’ cartoons for them and naturally gave these cartoons preferential treatment in Paramount-owned theatres over the cartoons of other animation studios. Although the Fleischers had to contend with the executives at Paramount when it came to making some of their decisions, the very real, major problems of having to deal with an outside distributor were headaches from which they were protected. An independent studio, such as Disney, was forced to sign contracts with distributors in order to get their cartoons and films shown in enough cinemas for the film to earn any revenue at all, let alone turn a profit for the studio. Furthermore, a part of these contracts could be – and often was – that distributors would be given the right to keep for themselves an agreed-upon percentage of the profits from a cartoon or a film for an extended period of time, thus decreasing the profit margin of the studio which had created the film or cartoon in question. Not only was the potential for fraud great (Disney, for example, probably lost thousands of dollars in the late 1920s and early 1930s thanks to his association with Pat Powers, a distributor in New York City), but there was also the problem, when an independent was dealing with a major studio as its distributor, that the major studio naturally tended to give preferential treatment to their own films over those being produced by an independent studio who had turned to them for distribution.⁸⁶

The fact that the Fleischers were protected by their association with Paramount from such financial constraints was invaluable to them when it came to attempting to compete with Disney with an animated feature film of their own. The Fleischer Brothers/Paramount animated film Gulliver’s Travels, according to Norman Klein, was a hit at the time of its release during Christmas 1939. Although it has not often been re-released since then, Deneroff asserts that the film was a major influence upon such film-makers as Hayao Miyazaki.⁸⁷ According to Klein, Paramount wanted the film to be made as “a Fleischer answer to Snow White”,⁸⁸ thus implying that Gulliver’s Travels was made more as a reaction to Snow White than as a natural progression in animation at Fleischer. Also, although the animation, despite the mix of graphic styles, was good enough, the story as it was presented in the film was not terribly brilliant, and does little to hold the audience’s interest, let alone its attention. Klein sums it up well when he describes Gulliver’s Travels in this way: “The principles of volume and cuteness were observed [in the film]; overall it was more than a competent, if uninspired, effort”.⁸⁹ Gulliver’s Travels was made at a chaotic time for the Fleischer studio. Brothers Max and Dave Fleischer were no longer on speaking terms, and in the midst of this was the studio’s move to Miami (which Paramount helped finance, even though – or perhaps because – the move represented the troublesome Fleischers’ breakaway from Paramount). Indeed, when Gulliver’s Travels is compared to some of the early planning stages of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a similar mix of styles and similar mistakes were being made by Disney artists. The key differences, however, between the Disney studio’s creation of Snow White and the Fleischer studio’s creation of Gulliver’s Travels, were these: (1) Disney had more time to plan, revise, and discard elements which did not really work within the overall film, and had the luxury of time to work on the visual, story, and sound elements (music, voice, and sound effects) of the film until they were exactly right, whereas Fleischer was working under a fairly tight deadline imposed by Paramount, and had to hurry to meet that deadline; (2) the Disney studio had already divided up into various departments which concentrated on perfecting their own parts within the process: a story department, an effects department (which specialised in all the special effects such as fire, rain, and so forth), and a character animation department, just to name a few; furthermore, it had seen to it that all of its staff were well trained, and that this training was an on-going process; the Fleischer operation was far less organised and compartmentalised, which meant a lack of opportunity for individual artists to improve or perfect their craft; likewise, not only had Fleischer not ensured artistic training amongst its staff, it had traditionally discouraged its artists from seeking fine art training or any other training. As one former Fleischer employee described this situation,

Those people who were quite content with the raw, peasant humor, the bad drawing, the kind of not-too-thought-out timing and the simpleminded stories…that bunch stayed [at Fleischer]. The more adventurous, who really wanted to learn to do a better movie, left [Fleischer]. Every one of them. Nobody stayed who had that urge, because there was no way to make such a picture in New York. So, that marked a schism which exists to this day. And it’s a very strange thing. The people in New York who later went down to Miami to work on Gulliver and Mr Bug Goes To Town, to a man they believed that any time that Max would give a little more time to work, they could have done all that stuff in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs easily, no problem. They had been self-hypnotized so they couldn’t see the exquisite drawing which had nothing to do with their work.⁹⁰

It’s most damning “review” came from Walt Disney himself, who is said to have commented on the film, “we can do better than that with our second-string animators”.⁹¹ Furthermore, Fleischer directors were not likely to encourage any kind of experimentation or innovation on the part of their staff. Michael Barrier, for example, quotes a 1977 interview with Ed Rehberg, who described one of the leading directors at Fleischer (and one of the directors for Gulliver’s Travels), Seymour Kneitel, in this way: Kneitel

“had a stock formula for walks and runs, and you either did it his way or it was wrong. There was never any experimenting. He’d say, “You’re stupid if you do it that way. Don’t you have any more sense than that?” He was that crude.⁹²

Clearly, the work/artistic culture at Fleischer was radically different from the one at Disney. Like many studios, it operated under the belief that animation as a medium was not to be valued, and therefore that large amounts of time, money, and effort were not worth the bother. Unlike some of the other animation studios belonging to the majors, however, it was tightly controlled and used by those in charge, and its artists lacked the freedom or resources to build and improve. Though still working under tight budgets, other studios, which granted their animators more freedom to experiment, achieved better results. One studio which proved that beyond all doubt was the animation unit at Warner Brothers.

Animation’s golden age and the Warner Brothers’ studio

Whilst the Fleischer studio may have failed eventually, another animation studio which operated successfully in competition with Disney during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s was that at Warner Brothers. The Warner Brothers-affiliated cartoons got their start on 28 January 1930, when Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising signed a contract with Leon Schlesinger (who had earlier signed a contract with Warner Brothers to provide them with cartoons), binding them to pass on to him the negative of one sound cartoon each month for three years.⁹³ Dubbed Looney Tunes, an obvious take on the Disney studio’s Silly Symphonies series, these cartoons were to be made within a budget of $4,500 per cartoon for the first year, with the budget to be increased to at least $6,000 per cartoon over the next two years.⁹⁴ According to Michael Barrier, when the first Looney Tunes cartoon, “Sinkin’ in the Bathtub”, was shown to Jack Warner in April 1930, Warner, after seeing only half of the cartoon, ordered twelve more Looney Tunes from Schlesinger and, on 17 April 1930, Warner decided to exercise Warner Brothers’ option and ordered a further eleven.⁹⁵

Looney Tunes as their name implies, were intended, like the Silly Symphonies, primarily to highlight music, something in which Warner Brothers was interested as the studio owned several music publishing companies and saw these cartoons as potential vehicles for the songs they were publishing.⁹⁶ Looney Tunes were, however, still very much typical cartoons of their day, full of the same gags and sense of humour in general. The original Looney Tunes featured Bosko, a character created by Harman and Ising, who was originally portrayed as a stereotypical black character who spoke in the “minstrel show”-type dialect. He quickly evolved, however, into a rather close imitation of Mickey Mouse. Bosko was even given a girlfriend, Honey, who fulfilled the same function in Bosko’s stories as Minnie Mouse did in Mickey’s cartoons. This evolution in Bosko’s characterisation probably occurred because of the rise in popularity which Mickey Mouse enjoyed during the first year of the production of Looney Tunes. Although Bosko, as Harman and Ising first conceived of him, was to be featured in cartoons with a much greater emphasis on dialogue, because of the terms of their contract with Warner Brothers (obliging them to use the music available to them from the Warner Brothers’ music catalogues), the cartoons’ subsequent emphasis on music left little room for dialogue. Even the titles of the early Looney Tunes cartoons were either humorous takes on the titles of actual songs published by Warner Brothers, or else the cartoons had the same title as the main song featured in the cartoon.

Although the Warner Brothers music library was well-tapped by the Looney Tunes series, it was the Merrie Melodies series, beginning in 1931, which most heavily utilised the Warners’ musical resources. As Barrier points out, the Merrie Melodies took their titles directly from their featured songs, rather than spoofing song titles as the Looney Tunes tended to do. Also, as the cast of characters in the Merrie Melodies tended to change from one cartoon to the next, they came to resemble the Disney studio’s Silly Symphonies in their form and structure much more closely than did the Looney Tunes. The Looney Tunes, with their emphasis in the first three series on the re-occurring characters of Bosko and Honey, more strongly resembled the Disney studio’s Mickey Mouse cartoons.

By 1933, difficulties began arising between Leon Schlesinger and the partnership of Harman and Ising. In part, the tension seems to have resulted from money troubles. Schlesinger was paying Harman and Ising less money per cartoon by the 1932–33 season, only $7,300 per cartoon instead of the originally promised $10,000 they were to have received at that time. By 1 March 1933, when Schlesinger signed a new contract with Warner Brothers, his own payment for bringing in cartoons for Warner Brothers was further reduced to $6,000 per cartoon, meaning that he could afford to pay Harman and Ising even less than that.⁹⁷ Additionally, the trouble between Harman, Ising, and Schlesinger may have been exacerbated when they were nearly sued by Disney for breach of copyright, on the basis of Bosko and Honey’s increasingly striking resemblance to Mickey and Minnie Mouse.⁹⁸ Also, there seems to have been a degree of personality conflict between Harman and Schlesinger, and through Schlesinger with Ray Katz, Harman and Ising’s business manager and Schlesinger’s brother-in-law. The result of these difficulties for the partnership between Schlesinger and Harman and Ising was that Harman and Ising broke away from Schlesinger. Schlesinger signed a new contract with Warner Brothers, this time forming an animation studio which was directly controlled and owned by Warner Brothers (as opposed to a studio which worked for them under a contract, as Harman and Ising’s studio had done). Schlesinger proceeded to staff his studio by stealing as many animators as he could away from the other studios of the day, and then went on to let his animators get on with the business of animation (Schlesinger himself knew almost nothing about the process of creating an animated cartoon, and so concerned himself principally with acquiring funds for the studio, seldom interfering with the day-to-day running of the animation unit, its artistic decisions, et cetera).⁹⁹

Although the new studio’s early cartoons were neither well made nor successful, by 1934 the role of director had finally been handed over to Friz Freleng, who started out directing Looney Tunes for Schlesinger but who quickly became the sole director for Merrie Melodies. Although some of his early Merrie Melodies can be compared to contemporary cartoons at Disney, the fact that the Merrie Melodies budget per cartoon was only around $7,500 (as compared with the $20,000+ which Disney spent per cartoon), meant that such standards were impossible for Freleng to maintain for very long. According to Barrier, the way that Freleng dealt with his limited budget was to think in terms of time, rather than dollars, and he determined that a cartoon needed to be produced by their studio every four to five weeks. Whilst his first Merrie Melodie was done in the two-colour process, his next six cartoons were done in black and white, which helped to stretch each cartoon’s budget during the initial period of Freleng’s leadership. Although the Looney Tunes continued to be made in black and white for some time, the Merrie Melodies from November 1934 onward were made in colour, which Warner Brothers made allowances for by paying Schlesinger an additional $1,750 per Merrie Melodie, bringing each cartoon’s budget up to $9,250.¹⁰⁰

By 1935, another new director began working at Warner Brothers, Fred “Tex” Avery. Avery was an in-betweener at Universal’s animation department until he was fired from his job in April 1935. In May, Avery went to Leon Schlesinger, declared himself to be a director, and managed to convince Schlesinger to hire him, despite his having no previous directing experience before joining the Warner Brothers animation department. Just as Freleng was the director who proved to be best at organising the new Warner Brothers animation department, so did Tex Avery prove to be the director it took to help the animation studio move forward successfully in its transition from featuring mainly human characters to featuring animals as its stars. In many ways, Avery did much to forward the career of one character in particular who had made a small appearance in a Freleng Merrie Melodie called “I Haven’t Got a Hat” (March 1935), namely Porky Pig. Although it was Freleng who took credit for coming up with Porky Pig’s most lasting and memorable trait – his stutter – it was Avery who, in effect, became Porky’s “career manager” and really made him famous.¹⁰¹

It was also some of the members of the unit under Avery’s permanent direction – Bob Clampett and Charles M. “Chuck” Jones (along with Virgil Ross, and Sid Southerland) – who eventually became some of the Warner Brother cartoons’ most famous animators. Freleng continued to direct his own cartoon unit at Warner Brothers, as did Jack King, who worked with Warner Brothers until April 1936, when he left Warner Brothers for Disney to become the director of the new series of Donald Duck cartoons. Avery continued to feature Porky Pig as the exclusive re-occurring character in his cartoons whilst slowly introducing to the Merrie Melodies series as a whole a newer, more zany style that harkened back to the Felix the Cat cartoons which Avery admired, but still maintaining the more realistic style which had become the industry standard thanks to Disney’s insistence upon more realism in his own cartoons. In fact, it was not until April 1937, in the cartoon “Porky’s Duck Hunt”, that what was in many ways a revolutionary new character – one who differed from Porky in the sense that he was in the cartoon purely to serve as a source of gags rather than a source of story – was introduced into Avery’s work. Although he did not have a name at the time of his introduction, he would soon be called Daffy Duck, and, unlike Porky, he was created decidedly without any influence from the Disney studio. Daffy stood out at the time he was created precisely because he was created with the emphasis less on realism and more on gags. In many respects, Daffy, especially in his earliest incarnation, was the perfect hybrid between the earlier unrealism to be found in cartoons of the 1920s and the push for realism which was so important in cartoons from the mid-1930s onwards.

“Porky’s Duck Hunt” was a significant cartoon for Warner Brothers not only because of the advent of Daffy Duck, however. Supplying Daffy’s voice in “Porky’s Duck Hunt”, as well as giving Porky a new voice, was the soon-to-be-famous voice-over performer and Warner animation institution, Mel Blanc. Although “Porky’s Duck Hunt” was not Blanc’s first performance in a Warner Brothers cartoon, it was nonetheless an important moment for both Blanc and Warner Brothers. First of all, Blanc, a former radio actor, actually knew how to act with his voice, as opposed to simply reading the characters’ lines. He was also gifted with an amazingly flexible voice, and was able to provide most (if not all) of the voices necessary for each cartoon (indeed, Blanc’s vocal gifts would eventually earn him the title of “The Man of a Thousand Voices”). Secondly, Blanc was being given for the first time the task of bestowing voices upon major characters in the Warner Brothers cartoons. Indeed, it was Blanc’s voices, along with Avery’s gradual trend of moving away from the earlier Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies formula of featuring a Warner Brothers’ published song, which proved to be the major forces moving these two groups of cartoons toward the cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s which are now regarded as more typical of the Warner Brothers’ style of cartoons.

Where Avery differed from other animators of his day was that he never seemed even remotely interested in copying the Disney studio’s illusion of realism in its animation. For Avery, the quality of the gag was far more important than the technical quality of the animation.¹⁰² This attitude differed markedly from that of Chuck Jones, who became a director at Warner Brothers’ animation department in 1938 and very quickly began to guide the Merrie Melodies through their next major stage of transformation, into a more sophisticated graphic style.

Chuck Jones was one of the few animators working for Leon Schlesinger who had received any formal art education, having studied for a time as a scholarship student at the Chouinard Art Institute (with which the Disney studio was closely affiliated; it would eventually grow to become the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts). His fine art training, along with his admiration for the Disney style of animation, are readily apparent in his early Merrie Melodies, which posses a much more studied, realistic quality to their animation than do Tex Avery’s rough, undetailed drawings. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, neither Avery’s nor Jones’ cartoons showed much of the character development – even in their re-occurring characters – which was such a Disney hallmark. As Barrier points out, Jones’ characters, such as Conrad the Cat (who often invited comparisons to Disney’s character Goofy), had “only mannerisms…, and not personality”.¹⁰³ Still, it was under Jones’ direction (and Freleng’s, after he returned to Warner Brothers from MGM in 1939) that more of the memorable characters who are now associated with Warner Brothers cartoons began not only to emerge, but take shape into what eventually became their own personalities. Elmer Fudd, for example, who started out as a nameless character in several Avery cartoons, under Jones’s direction evolved into a character with a name, identifiable mannerisms such as, in Elmer’s case, his speech impediment of turning the “L” and “R” sounds into “W’s”, as in one of his catch phrases, “that waskawy wabbit!” (“that rascally rabbit!”). Another character who first appeared in an earlier cartoon under another director but who took shape under Jones’s and Avery’s direction was the above-mentioned “waskawy wabbit”, Bugs Bunny. Starting as an insane, trouble-making rabbit, becoming a country bumpkin, and finally evolving into a cool, collected city-slicker whose adversaries were no match for him, Bugs Bunny was a major innovation amongst animated characters in that, rather than the zany, over-the-top antics which were characteristic of most cartoon characters, he tended to be more understated, and was one of the few early characters who seemed not just to react to situations, but to think them through. The personality which emerged in Bugs Bunny was strong enough, in fact, that after Avery’s departure from Warner Brothers in 1941, Bugs continued largely unchanged in Warner Brothers cartoons, and it was Bugs Bunny’s success as a character which helped to insure that the Warner Brothers’ animation department would remain in successful competition with the Disney studio. In Film Daily’s lists of which Warner Brothers films were being released each year, in fact, the number of “Bugs Bunny Specials” is listed separately from the number of “Technicolor Cartoons”. Perhaps, however, their key to competing successfully against Disney was that, rather than try to beat Disney at his own game, the animators under Schlesinger instead sought to find – and fill – their own niche in the cartoon industry, creating cartoons and characters who, whilst strong and memorable, were also as easily identifiable as being from Warner Brothers in terms of style and personality as characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were as examples of the Disney style.

Conclusion

This chapter has endeavoured to provide a general overview of animation history and technique, in order to make later discussions, which focus on Walt Disney, his studio, and its creations, more comprehensible. It is by no means a definitive account of the Fleischers’ studio at Paramount nor Leon Schlesinger’s studio at Warner Brothers. Nor is it meant to imply, stopping as it does in the 1940s, that the history of animation outside of things Disney ended at that time. Indeed, the field of animation – as well as its output – continues to be at least as vibrant as it was in the first half of the twentieth century. While the difference between these two periods is that animation, apart from full-length animated features, has moved away from the cinema and found a home in the arena of television, what continues unabated is the development of new characters, new techniques, new series of cartoons, and new concepts in the field. By the 1960s, Hanna-Barbara had brought about the concept of the cartoon show as television sit-com, a form which continues to this day in such network television series as The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and South Park. For decades, the cartoons of Warner Brothers featuring Bugs, Daffy, Elmer Fudd, Sylverster and Tweety, Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, and others continued to appear on the Saturday or Sunday morning US network television line-ups aimed at children. Though Warner Brothers cartoons are no longer featured on many network/terrestrial television stations, cartoons continue to reign supreme in the Saturday morning line-up. Since the 1990s, most cable television systems in the United States carry the channel Cartoon Network (not to mention Boomerang and Toonami), which shows not only the products of new cartoon studios (including such hit series as The Powerpuff Girls), but also attests to the continuing popularity of the cartoons of the early days of animation, highlighting in particular the cartoons of Warner Brothers, MGM, Paramount, Universal, King Features, and others. The only cartoons not shown on these animation-centred networks, in fact, are Disney cartoons. They, however, have their own channels, amongst them The Disney Channel and Toon Disney. If there is one thing that has not changed, it has been Disney’s habit of setting itself apart from its competition.