Good Girls and Wicked Witches. Amy M. Davis
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Children have been shown to be well aware of gender roles at significantly early ages, and can even be shown to be aware of what is inappropriate – as well as appropriate – behaviour within these roles. Examples such as those mentioned above point out that psychological observation of normal55 children at play offers substantial backing to the notion that children develop a definite sense of gender-appropriate roles at comparatively young ages.
Furthermore, it is known that children are affected from very early on by the media images with which they are constantly bombarded. The example given above (of Reuben and his being questioned on Snow White) already emphasises the fact that very young children are already exposed to the media.56 Of course, there is some disagreement as to how much or how little children actually take in of what they see in movies and on television. What does seem to be agreed upon by psychiatrists and psychologists studying the impact of media upon children, however, is that visual media have an influence on children (and on adults, for that matter) because film appeals to the sense of fantasy, even when the images being portrayed are “realistic” (such as with documentaries).57 Thus far, however, the amount of recent academic work focusing upon the child audience is comparatively small, the data for examining how children respond to films is limited or flawed, and most research into the effects of media images on children is in any case primarily concerned with television rather than cinema audiences. While there have been a number of studies in the past which have attempted to explore the effects of various media (mainly cinema) on children (one famous example being the Payne Fund studies of the 1930s), these studies are of no use to modern-day researchers into media’s effects on children as they were often distorted by their eras’ attitudes to and prejudices towards race, ethnicity, and class which would today be seen as both irrelevant and elitist, particularly when it comes to their (to modern eyes) patronising and exaggerated concerns about the effects of the movies on immigrants, the poor, and – ultimately – upon all of those who are not white, male, middle-class (or higher), native-born Americans. As the fields of film history and film/media studies grow, this gap will no doubt be addressed. At present, however, the evidence from which I have been compelled to draw my conclusions has been focused more on specific adult audiences (such as women and various ethnic groups), and references to these groups’ viewing interests as children are only briefly addressed, and usually as memory rather than as subjects of long-term viewing habits (which might include, for instance, observing an individual’s movie-going habits over the course of twenty or thirty years and compiling data as to how an individual views films at various points in their lives).
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A Brief History of Animation
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