Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
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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