Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
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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