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The Evolution of Animation & an Animator
By Arley Owens
In 1825, English physician, John A. Paris, attached two strings to a disk with a different image imprinted on either side. The gadget, called a thaumatrope, demonstrated that two separate depictions could be perceived as one. By holding a string in each hand and spinning the disk, Side A and Side B seem to appear simultaneously.
Why is it we can’t tell the fluid dance of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as they grip their canes while singing “Overture, curtain, lights” is merely a rapid series of still cartoons? For the same reason the two pictures appear to converge using a thaumatrope. The eye retains an image a split second after it’s removed. When another appears fast enough, the illusion of seamless progression is achieved.
Live film works the same way, i.e. still photographs flash before our eyes in split-second increments. But there’s quite a difference between filming a living actor and bringing a cartoon character to life.
The animator has to produce twenty-four frames for each second of sound film. A ten minute cartoon requires fourteen-thousand-four-hundred meticulous drawings, each one smoothly advancing the action of every character or object in motion. If that sounds like a lot of work, imagine making a feature-length animated film. You’d only have to draw a paltry one-hundred-twenty-nine-thousand-six-hundred cartoons to get a ninety minute movie.
Animation has been around as long as motion pictures. The French newspaper cartoonist Emile Cole who did the film Fantasmagorie (1908) is considered by many to be the first true animator.
An animation technique known as stop action was used by early animators. With the camera stopped, items would be rearranged, removed, or added to the shot then the director would start rolling again. Live action films using this procedure were called Trick Plays.
American studios soon turned to flat animation as opposed to dimensional animation, finding it much more efficient for their “assembly-line techniques” of making animated films. To illustrate the difference between the two, picture Gumby (a dimensional character) as opposed to Tweety Bird, a drawing.
The introduction of cel animation in 1914 by Earl Hurd made the cartoonist’s job easier by reducing the number of times a picture had to be redrawn. Since clear cels could be laid over a single image, a landscape for instance, the artist could draw a character in action without having to reproduce the background for each scene.
In 1928 Walter Elias Disney, who used cel animation, decided to put audio with a rodent, and ushered in a new era in cinema cartoons. Working with animator Ub Iwerks he created the most famous character in drawn animation history, Mickey Mouse.
Disney met Iwerks in Kansas City, Missouri, where he also made the acquaintance of composer Carl Stalling. Steamboat Willie (1928), containing a musical score written by Stalling, was the third film developed for Mickey, and the first animated cartoon to feature synchronized sound. It made the Mouse famous. The Walt Disney Company influenced the whole world and is largely responsible for making cel animation the industry standard.
Warner Brothers acquired Brunswick Records and four music publishers in 1930, and wanted to make some musical animated shorts to promote the material and cash in on phonograph records and sheet music sales. They made a deal with Leon Schlesinger and he began producing cartoons for them, hiring Rudolph Ising and Hugh Harman to create them. Warner’s first star, Bosko, debuted in the short Sinkin’ in the Bathtub in 1930.
Ising and Harman left Warner’s in 1933 over a budget dispute, taking with them all the rights to their cartoons and characters. Schlesinger negotiated with them to keep the name Looney Tunes and the famous slogan “That’s All Folks!’
Looney Tunes (often misspelled Looney Toons) aired in theaters from 1930 to 1969. The name was a variation of Walt Disney’s concurrent series Silly Symphonies. The biggest Looney Tunes star, relative late comer Bugs Bunny, was created in 1939 by Ben “Bugs” Hardaway (who created Bugs’ prototype), Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Robert McKimsom (creator of the “definitive Bugs Bunny character design”), Chuck Jones, and Friz Freleng. The famous voice behind many cartoon characters, Mel Blanc, spoke for the original Bugs.
Porky Pig was the first Looney Tunes character to draw audiences based on his star power. Porky’s stutter came about because Joe Dougherty, the original voice for the porker, stuttered in real life. Dougherty’s inability to control his stuttering made production cost too high. In 1937 Mel Blanc became the voice of Porky and continued the stutter as a comedic effect.
Columbia Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Terrytoons, Walter Lantz Productions, the Van Buren Studio, and studios headed by animators such as Ub Iwerks, who left Disney in the 1930's, were other significant animation studios of the 30's and 40's, known as animation’s Golden Age.
In 1941 David Hilberman, Zachary Schwartz, and Stephen Bosustow started United Productions of America (UPA). Having worked for Disney whose style of cel animation is known as full animation which provides constant movement and contains a high number of drawings for each second of film, they set out to create a new style using fewer drawings per frame which came to be known as limited animation. UPA’s simplified designs using stylized color impacted the world of advertizing and the emerging field of television.
As UPA emerged and television became more prominent in American society new animation studios were born. The 1960’s saw the creation of “Bullwinkle” by Jay Ward while Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera brought us “Yogi Bear”, “The Flinstones”, and “The Jetsons”. A great number of animators exploring new themes, especially social issues, arose during the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.
Women had been largely relegated to inking and painting or other relatively noncreative tasks in the Golden Age. But during this time several notable female animators such as Faith Hubley found their way to the forefront. Hubley won two Oscars, both shared with John Hubley, for Best Short Subject, Cartoons: The Hole (1962) and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass Double Feature (1966). On April 19, 1987 an animated short premiered as part of The Tracey Ullman Show. Created by Matt Groening, The Simpsons expanded into a half hour show on prime time, and became a long running hit on the Fox Network.
Traditional Drawn Animation works as follows: The plot scenes are sketched, forming a storyboard, and the soundtrack is made. All the crucial animation frames are drawn by the chief animator, then the frames in between those scenes are completed. Lastly, color is applied and each frame is filmed. This can now be done by computer.
Computer Animation works exactly like film, presenting one still image after another in rapid succession. First used to control the camera and the motion of the pictures, computers now create the artwork and simulate the camera.
Home computers and constantly improving technology provide fertile breeding grounds for new genres of animated cartoons, the creators of which have ample opportunity to display their wares on the internet.
Bill Plympton didn’t have such tools at his disposal when he entered the work place. Fascinated by animation all his life, at fourteen he sent some of his cartoons to Disney. Though told by the most renowned animation company on the planet that his work showed promise, he was too young to be taken aboard.
Growing up in rainy Portland, Oregon, the weather often kept Plympton indoors where he cultivated his drawing abilities and dreamed of making a full-length movie. That vision was realized by releasing sections of his creation The Tune as short films to generate funds for production. One of the shorts entitled Push Comes to Shove won the 1991 Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival.
Financed entirely by Plympton, he drew and painted thirty-thousand cels for his dream project. His labor was rewarded: The Tune took the Houston WorldFest Gold Jury Special Award and was a Spirit Award nomination for Best Film Score.
After The Tune Bill decided to make a live-action film. What followed was a wacky, surreal comedy about a sleazy lawyer who meets a magical talking dog that changes his life, called J. Lyle.
As he says in his biography, “Making THE TUNE, I had a lot of ideas I realized wouldn’t work with animation, but would be lots of fun with real people! I took those ideas and made J. LYLE. Besides, my hand needed a rest after drawing THE TUNE.” J. Lyle, also financed by Plympton, was released in theaters around the country after enjoying a successful festival circuit.
Bill’s film’s Your Face (1988) and Guard Dog (2005) were Oscar nominations for best animation. He has achieved success but it wasn’t exactly a cakewalk getting there.
After earning a degree in Graphic Design at Oregon State, Bill joined the Coast Guard to avoid the Vietnam War and moved to New York City in 1968. He took a gig as a Belt Salesman but found he couldn’t sell a single one. Despite the initial setback, he spent a year studying at the School of Visual Arts and became an illustrator and cartoonist.
His illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, House Beautiful, The Village Voice, Screw, and Vanity Fair. Some of his cartoons found homes in magazines such as Viva, Penthouse, Rolling Stone, National Lampoon, and Glamour.
In 1975 he began a political cartoon strip, Plympton, in The Soho Weekly News which was syndicated by Universal Press. In 1983 the Android Sister, Valeria Wasilewski, approached Bill to work on Boomtown, a film she was producing of Jules Feiffer’s song. According to Plympton, Connie D’Antuono, also one of the film’s producers, “sort of held my hand through the whole process. It was a great way to learn to make a film.”
After Boomtown he started making an animated film of his own called Drawing Lesson # 2. Bill once played steel guitar in a Country Western Band led by Maureen McElheron, and when inclement weather slowed production of live action scenes he opted to start another film. He asked Maureen to write the musical score and sing. That film was Your Face.
After Your Face received the Oscar nomination his work started appearing with more and more frequency on MTV. His shorts were winning prizes like crazy and he wanted a new challenge. That new challenge turned out to be The Tune, his childhood dream of making a full-length movie come true.
Not bad for a failed Belt Salesman.
I asked Bill what he felt was the turning point of his career, and what animators and cartoonists influenced him the most.
“My turning point was when my cartoons appeared on MTV. It seems even now, all over the world, people remember me as the MTV animator. My influences are: Tex Avery, Walt Disney, Bob Clampett, R. Crumb, Winsor McCay, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Capra, Roland Tupor, Carols Nine, A.B. Frost, Charles Addams, plus many others.”
I want to thank Molly Hahn for relaying my questions to Bill and his answers back to me.
So why do we like cartoons so much? Well for one thing, the characters don’t require stuntmen. When that sledge hammer comes down on Sylvester the Cat’s big toe and it grows to the size of a watermelon there’s no trick photography involved. When Mighty Mouse flies through the air singing “Here I come to save the day!” there are no strings holding him up. Our hero is really flying. When Daffy Duck blows himself up on stage to one-up Bugs Bunny, his body actually splatters into a zillion pieces.
The stories are beautifully simplistic. We forget our complicated lives for a moment as Grieg’s Morning plays and Foghorn Leghorn rises to greet the new day before being stalked by a baby chicken hawk.
There’s a sense of permanence. Unlike human movie stars, the characters never change, and they don’t disappoint us. We never have to worry about them being exposed as criminals or perverts.
Maybe it’s simply because most of them make us laugh.
Whatever the reason, Toons are here to stay.