Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
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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