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Far Out Films from a Century Ago by Karl F. Cohen
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Scene from Georges Méliès's 'Trip to the Moon', 1902. image: courtesy Animation Museum
LONG BEFORE TIM LEARY WAS
encouraging people to “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” animators were turning on their creative minds and taking audiences on amazing trips. Perhaps the most wonderful were voyages into outer space and into secret worlds inside our planet. Now you too can take those adventures, thanks to websites like YouTube and Vimeo. When you are ready to relax and enjoy some mind traveling, click onto a few of these animated gems below.
The first great visionary adventurer was Georges Méliès, a stage magician who fell in love with the magic of cinema. His “Trip to the Moon” from 1902 is still a delightful work that showed what was possible before animation was even invented. A hand-colored restored print of his classic film can be seen here.
Like Méliès but in America, James Stewart Blackton was a part-time stage magician. But his day job was reporter and when he was assigned to write an article on Edison’s latest invention, the movie projector, he fell in love with movies. After Edison invited him to his studio and made a film of Blackton drawing a fast sketch, Blackton not only bought a camera and projector.
He ended up opening the Vitagraph in Brooklyn in 1898, a company which grew to become America’s first major film producer of live action films of all kinds, including newsreels.
Around 1900 Blackton made a film of himself doing “The Enchanted Drawings”. It included him drawing, in fast motion, a bottle of wine and a glass, putting his hand over the drawing and removing a real bottle of wine, from which he pours some into a real glass. But he didn’t do actual drawn animation until “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces”, in 1906.
It is the first known example of a film that includes full animation, where the drawing moves by itself and we do not see the artist drawing it. Blackton experimented a little further with animation, but while the films are of historical interest, they are not great. He had a company to run so he didn’t have time to become America’s first great animator.
Gertie the Dinosaur from Winsor McCay, 1914. image: courtesy Animation Museum
The man earning that honor was Winsor McCay, a successful and very well-paid newspaper illustrator, who did elaborately drawn comic strips and editorial cartoons. McCay’s fascination with doing wild stories led him to animated in 1911 and, the following year, his work was shown as part of an act he did in vaudeville theatres. They were minor hits, but in 1914 he created what we now consider a milestone in animation, “Gertie the Dinosaur”.
To prove his work was drawn and not a fancy, live-action magic trick, he created an enormous extinct creature. The film opens with a live action prologue, filmed at Blackton’s Brooklyn studio, where he explains how he created Gertie. Then we see a drawn landscape and him coaxing Gertie to come out of her cave to do a few tricks.
She not only shows off her skills, she also expresses emotions when she cries. We also learn she is tame enough to give Winsor a ride seen here
McCays realized that to captivate and excite an audience, he needed to continue telling outrageous tall tales. His subsequent films included a topless female mythological centaur and a four-legged pet that grows into a monster which begins to destroy New York City before the military attacks it.
Felix the Cat by Otto Messmer, circa 1924. image: courtesy Animation Museum
Then there is “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend”, which started as a cartoon strip by McCay in 1904, became a silent film by Edwin S. Porter in 1906, and re-emerged as McCay's animated film “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend: The Pet” (1921), viewable here.
McCay’s last film was “The Flying House”, 1921. In it a man turns his house into a flying machine and heads off to… well, that would be a spoiler wouldn’t it. Expect the unexpected, is all I can say, as it can and will happen. See it here.The next great explorer of the medium was Otto Messmer, from New Jersey, who created Felix the Cat. He was the silent screen’s greatest star and one of his adventures is “Astronomeous”, 1928, a wonderful adventure into space, viewable here.
Part of Felix’s charm was his ability to express his thoughts and feelings. Before creating Felix, Otto did a dozen authorized Charlie Chaplin cartoons. Chaplin had sent Messmer’s studio photos of key poses expressed different emotions so Otto became an expert in showing his characters emoting what they were thinking.
The arty Felix from Messmer. image: courtesy Animation Museum
In the early 1930s, a few cartoons were full of mind-blowing images. Two Betty Boop cartoons, “Minnie the Moocher”, 1932, and “Snow White”, 1933, will take you into a different kind of world, cinema caves full of mysterious goings on, set to Cab Calloway’s music.
Cab’s world included mentions of cocaine in his lyrics, on two different occasions. When I was interviewing two former Fleischer directors, over two decades ago, I asked if the animators had much knowledge of the use of drugs. Both Shamus Culhane and Myron Waldman told me that, when these cartoons were made, they had no understanding of the drug reference in the lyrics.
Shamus said when he was at the studio during the last days of Prohibition, they were daring if they drank bootleg alcohol. Myron depicted the average studio employee as a young, talented guy fresh out of high school, who was making enough money to dress well, including wearing spats on their shoes, and send money to help their family’s get by the Great Depression.
On weekends they drank and played cards with their girlfriends. Myron also made a point to let me know that he was more mature, had been to college and didn’t hang out with the young guys.
A drug dream from Betty Boop, circa 1934. image: courtesy Animation Museum
As you watch “Minnie the Moocher” (1932) there are several subtle details to look out for. We know Betty Boop’s father is an Orthodox Jew, as he is a wearing a skullcap (known as “kippah” in Hebrew or “yarmulke” in Yiddish). There is a nude woman in the film, a statue on the last post of the stairway, whom you barely notice her until she pulls up her costume—a subtle pre-Hayes Code touch.
The walrus that dances is based on live action footage of Cab Calloway dancing. The footage was traced over on a Rotoscope machine, a system Max Fleisher invented and applied for a patent in 1915.
One verse of Minnie tells us “She messed around with a bloke named Smokey. She loved him though he was cokey [cocaine]. He took her down to Chinatown, and he showed her how to kick the gong around [smoke opium].”
Betty Boop, who happened to be Jewish, gets high with Cab Calloway. during the Swinging '20s. image: courtesy Animation Museum
“Minnie the Moocher” was rated as number 20 in Jerry Beck’s book “The World’s Greatest Cartoons” (1994), here. The second Betty Boop has her cast as the star of “Snow White”, 1933. It was rated as number 19 by Beck and can be seen here.
As wonderful as Betty Boop’s two films made with Cab Calloway’s music are, there is another that may be even be greater, “Bimbo’s Initiation”, 1931, animated by Grim Natwick. In 1994, it was voted #37 in Jerry Beck’s book. Check it out here.
This article will continue next month with works by Walt Disney, Harmon-Ising, Bob Clampett, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. The third part will highlight more recent animators including films by Sally Cruickshank and Vince Collins.
Karl F. Cohen—who decided to add his middle initial to distinguish himself from the Russian Karl Cohen, who tried to assassinate the Czar in the mid-19th century—is an animator, educator and director of the local chapter of the International Animation Society and can be reached .