Wild Minds. Reid Mitenbuler
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In his diary, he raved about it. The cartoon was spooky but also enchanting and fun, like the ideas the Incoherents used to come up with. It featured a mosquito named Steve that occasionally descends on a sleeping man to drink his blood, Steve's abdomen filling like a water balloon before finally bursting. In many ways, it captured the same playful sense that Cohl was going for, except that it was much more elaborate and better drawn. McCay had spent months producing the cartoon and the result was gorgeous. Cohl called him “the most skillful and most graceful draftsman of the United States.”
In 1914, Cohl saw Gertie the Dinosaur, McCay’s third film, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. It was the kind of masterpiece that can change an artist’s perspective. Nobody knew it yet, but Gertie is the film that would inspire many young cartoonists to try animation. (Walt Disney spoke of his first time seeing Gertie the same way priests talk of finding God.) The film was only a few minutes long but had taken McCay nearly two years to make in his free time away from his day job drawing for the newspaper. Every part of Gertie was painstakingly precise. McCay had timed his breaths with a stopwatch in order to capture the motions of Gertie’s heavy breathing, and no matter what Gertie was doing—throwing rocks at a mastodon, munching on trees, performing a dance number—her movements were perfect. The cartoon had little plot, but what made it significant was that Gertie showed personality: petulance, docility, humor, anger. Winsor had been able to capture these emotions with the subtlest of gestures—a crinkle around her eyes, a slight change to her smile. This was the film that would cement his reputation and make him the patron saint of animation.
Ever the showman, McCay started showing Gertie as part of a vaudeville act. As the cartoon played, Winsor stood to the side of the stage and shouted “commands” at his character. He wore long coattails and cracked a bullwhip, like a lion tamer, playfully telling the crowd that Gertie was “The only dinosaur in captivity!” For a sequence featuring Gertie eating apples, McCay would toss real apples up and behind the screen. The show was clever and drew large, paying crowds, prompting Cohl to later write, a bit huffily, “It was lucrative for McCay who never left the theater without stopping by the cashier to be laden with a few banknotes on the way out.”
Émile Cohl’s frustration grew over the years. In the 1930s, long after he had moved back to France, reporters would occasionally visit but find him irritable. Sitting in his humble quarters—a dingy spare bedroom in his brother’s house—the reporters would ask him about his political cartoons, but Cohl would always change the topic to animation. He was annoyed that the French press called animation le mouvement Américain, ignoring the contributions that the French, and by French he mainly meant himself, had also made. He told one reporter from Pour Vous that the French didn’t promote themselves as well as the Americans did, and this also bothered him.
Poor promotional skills might be one reason Cohl was forgotten, but another (much more likely) reason was that almost all the cartoons he animated in America were destroyed. A fire roared through the Éclair studios in Fort Lee a day after he set sail back to France, in 1914. Film stock back then was highly flammable, much more so than today, and the studio flared up like a Roman candle. Only one of Cohl’s Newlyweds cartoons survived, and few other prints ever surfaced later. Nobody was thus able to see his legacy, which survived mainly by word of mouth.
During his later years, Cohl told another story of his time in America, this one verging on conspiracy. He said two strangers had visited him while he was living in New Jersey—one talkative, the other silent. They demanded to know how animated cartoons were made, but refused to reveal what they intended to do with the information. It remains unclear exactly what Cohl told them. Perhaps not coincidentally, a similar visit was made to Winsor McCay around the same time, according to John Fitzsimmons, McCay’s assistant during the time he made Gertie. He said that a man had showed up on McCay’s doorstep asking to learn his methods; McCay, eager to promote animation in the way that a missionary is eager to spread the word, gladly showed him. But this visitor had motives different from McCay’s. The blossoming industry had attracted the attention of men who were more interested in profit than art.
Chapter 3
“The Artist’s Dream”
“Winsor, you’ve done it! You’ve created a new art!” George McManus told Winsor McCay after seeing Gertie the Dinosaur. What McManus should have then added was, “Now, go patent it!”
“Had I taken out patents I would have strangled a new art in its infancy,” McCay later explained. Animation’s business potential didn’t interest him as much as its artistic possibilities. It also helped that McCay wasn’t particularly worried about money; he earned roughly $50,000 a year drawing for Hearst’s newspaper, augmenting his salary with earnings from his vaudeville act. Others, however, were more intrigued by animation’s commercial prospects. Among them was the man who darkened the doorway of McCay’s studio seeking to learn his methods: John Randolph Bray was another newspaper cartoonist, but, on the day of his visit, he posed as a reporter writing an article about animation. It was a disingenuous introduction, designed to conceal his motives, but McCay never appeared to become suspicious—in fact, he was quite the opposite. “Wishing to aid the writer in every way possible,” according to John Fitzsimmons, “McCay showed the young man every detail of the process he had developed.”
Bray then spent the next eighteen months making his own cartoon: The Artist’s Dream, a crowd-pleaser about a clever dog that reaches a plate of sausages on top of a dresser by using the drawers as steps, then eats so many sausages that he explodes. Simple but effective, Bray’s cartoon was released in 1913, after which he immediately sold the rights to the French film company Pathé, which had an office in Fort Lee, down the street from where Émile Cohl worked at Éclair. (Bray briefly worked for Pathé, and is likely one of the men who darkened Cohl’s doorway as well, although he never admitted it.) “I was paid two thousand dollars for that first cartoon,” Bray later remembered about The Artist’s Dream. “Not much money to have earned in eighteen months of terribly hard labor! But that didn’t worry me, for I had worked out a process which made animated cartoons mechanically and commercially possible.”
Still from John Randolph Bray’s The Artist’s Dream (1913).
“I thought there was good money in it,” he told an interviewer, explaining his motives. But before animation could generate significant revenue, the processes behind it would need to be reimagined. What McCay had treated as an artisanal endeavor—slow and labor-intensive—Bray saw as a process that needed to become more efficient. He wanted to speed up production and make animated cartoons on a larger scale. America was at the beginning of a new age of mass media, led by cinema and radio, and Bray predicted that cartoons could be similarly lucrative if he could find a way to release them on a regular schedule. His second film, Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa, a spoof of former president Teddy Roosevelt’s globetrotting exploits, was the first in a series meant to regularly appear in theaters, not as a one-off or as part of a vaudeville act, the way McCay had released his films.
Shortly thereafter, Bray started Bray Productions. Working with an employee, Earl Hurd, he began testing new methods to make animation more efficient. One of the first problems the men addressed was how to combine moving characters with static backgrounds. McCay had simply ignored this problem, drawing everything—both moving and stationary parts—in every single frame, a redundant and time-consuming process. Bray’s solution was to print multiple copies of the background and then draw his characters onto them, scraping away parts of the background that didn’t need to be in the picture. This saved the animator from having to draw the entire background anew for each frame, so it was an enormous timesaver. It also helped make the picture look more consistent, avoiding the little errors and “vibrations” introduced by constantly having to retrace stationary images. Within a year of this advance, Earl Hurd then pioneered the use of “cels,” transparent sheets on which moving parts of the action were drawn. These cels would be a mainstay of animation for decades to come. Placed over the backgrounds,