Animation Comes Alive - 1911 - Little Nemo - J. Stuart Blackton & Winsor McCay

            Little Nemo functions as a promotional vehicle for the multi-talented Winsor McCay; in fact, the film's alternate title is Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics. The majority of the film involves McCay preparing his ‘moving comic’ of Little Nemo for his sceptical friends.

Before entering the world of animated film, McCay was famous for his cartoon strips (we have already looked at a live action cinematic adaptation of one of his cartoon strip Dream of a Rarebit Fiend). Of his various strips, Little Nemo has proved to be his most enduring legacy:

Simply put, Little Nemo revolutionized the comic strip. At 38, McCay was at the very peak of his talent and the New York Herald had the most talented and creative colour printing staff in the business. Together they crafted a weekly fantasy that week by week revealed Slumberland to be more magical than even L. Frank Baum's Oz (created in 1899) and more wonderful than Lewis Carroll's Wonderland (1865). Books and websites abound praising Nemo far more than I could possibly do in this short bio. Nemo was published in the New York Herald until July 23, 1911. The strips have been reprinted many times. Find them and lose yourself in this masterpiece.

            Unfortunately, the strips were not as popular during McCay’s own era:

The strip was not a great popular success in its time. Most readers preferred the slapstick antics of such strips as Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan, and Buster Brown to the surreal fantasy of Nemo, and other comic strips like Krazy Kat. 

            Therefore, although some of the contemporary viewers will have been familiar with McCay’s work, others audience members would have been unaware of McCay’s background as a cartoonist. This meant his background was similar to that of his co-director J. Stuart Blackton, who also began his career as a cartoonist. Furthermore, the symbolism of America’s earliest animation pioneer passing the baton to his immediate successor is evident with the co-direction credits for both Blackton and McCay.
            One of the reasons the film portrays McCay’s thought process behind his creation of his ‘moving pictures’, is that as well as being a cartoonist McCay was also a vaudeville artist. McCay had begun his vaudeville act five years earlier and the film served as a great promotional tool for his act.

             Unfortunately, the weakest part of the film is this lengthy explanation of why and how he went about creating the 4,000 images that began his career as an animator. The section is overtly long, which often undercuts the intended effect of a particular scene. For example, the audience is presented with the fascinating image of McCay surrounded by his thousands of drawings (see image below).

A co-worker or cleaner continually interrupts him and eventually knocks over the majority of the images that have clearly been placed in sequential order. The scene’s unnecessary length stifles the humour of the scene and McCay’s reaction to the spillage further dents any humour that may have been intended. Little Nemo compares unfavourably to the Max Linder film that we just looked at in terms of drawing humour from self-referential scenes in an early silent film.

I also feel that the film missed an opportunity in choosing to evade the question of how the ‘moving images’ were put together. Although we see McCay draw several images and then later witness him in his office surrounded by his images, what would have interested me most would have been to see how he put together the various drawings in order to conjure the fantastical animation that closes the film.

It is the animation that the film should be judged by; under this criterion the film is a great success. The level of detail and the introduction of colour mean that Little Nemo is light years ahead of its predecessors. Although, it does not share the rapid inventiveness of The Hasher’s Delirium or Fantasmagorie, it has no need to do so because the characters that McCay draws are far more concrete and realised. 

The scene where a ‘prince’ give his ‘princess’ a rose (see image above) and their subsequent seating in a dragon’s mouth (see image below) is the most breathtaking image that we have witnessed thus far in animation’s brief history. The addition of a multitude of colours provides the animation with a richness that animation craves far more than live action films do.

Little Nemo marks a significant step in animation’s maturation as an art form. Although its live action sequence is arduous and over-long, the brief animated sequence’s concentrated brilliance more than makes up for this earlier shortfall.   

1910 - An Animated Masterpiece - The Hasher's Delirium - Emile Cohl

The most surprising aspect of early animation is how wildly inventive and playful it can be; both qualities can be found in abundance in the pioneering work of Emile Cohl. As with his first film Fantasmagorie, the main image in The Hasher’s Delirium undertakes a series of transformations.

Unlike his first film, however, there is an image onscreen which remains constant for the majority of the film: an inebriated man. The large white bubble in the middle of the screen represents his drunken thought dreams. As the images within the bubble become more disturbing, the bubble disappears and the man’s body takes centre stage as his body bends like Mr. Fantastic and he kicks himself on his own behind.

By focusing on the inebriated man’s ‘delirium’, Cohl is able to focus his transformations on a specific but broad theme. Furthermore, by experimenting with the effects of alcohol (the words ‘wine’ and ‘absinthe’ both appear within the white bubble) and showing the audience several images which are meant to provoke fear within the inebriated man, Cohl is touching on certain elemental fears which will be exploited routinely in the great horror films of the forthcoming decade. And by having an ‘everyman’ onscreen, Cohl is ensuring that this figure serves as a symbol for our own drunken fears.

The Hasher’s Delirium is not the first film to deal with issues of chemical excess; similar issues were dealt with in the 1906 live action film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend. Film’s interest in exploring this subject matter is unsurprising.

The hallucinatory effects of such activities is a strange blend of what we visualise, think and dream. In Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, this allows Edwin S. Porter to apply Méliès- esque visual trickery to a ‘normal’ scenario (i.e. a man walking home after eating and drinking too much). However, even with modern day films, there are limitations to the rapidity of this particular thought process being examined in a live action film.

In an animated film like The Hasher’s Delirium there is no such problem, and the constant shape-shifting of a man’s ‘delirium’ can be explored with more accuracy. And when the bubble disappears and the inebriated man’s body starts to bend, Cohl manages to capture the moment at which the man’s drunken imagination consumes any semblance of his rational mind and takes complete control of his senses.       

The film has a hypnotic effect on its viewer, as each image transforms seamlessly and at breathtaking pace. As with Fantasmagorie, I found myself watching the film several times to fully digest the range of images that the film presents in less than ninety seconds.

The film has also aged remarkably well, it is the perfect film to introduce your friends to this period of film. Its breadth of imagination and dark humour make it a remarkably modern film.

The first fully animated film - 1908 - Fantasmagorie - Emile Cohl

As with fellow early animation pioneer J. Stuart Blackton, Emile Cohl had been a cartoonist before he entered into the world of animation. According to popular myth, Cohl was walking down a Parisian street, when he noticed an advertisement for a movie that had been stolen from one of his strips. After confronting the manager of the film studio responsible for the advert (Gaumont), he was hired on the spot. Blackton and Cohl share another connection: Blacton’s 1907 film The Haunted Hotel inspired Gaumont to produce animated films:

The idea for doing animation was born from the huge success of the film "The Haunted Hotel", released by Vitagraph and directed by J. Stuart Blackton. It premiered in Paris in April 1907 and immediately there was a demand for more films using its incredible object animation techniques. According to a story told by Arnaud in 1922, Gaumont had ordered his staff to figure out the "mystery of 'The Haunted Hotel'." Cohl studied the film frame by frame, and in this way discovered the techniques of animation. 

As mentioned in one of this site’s earliest posts, there is an inextricable link between film and modern capitalism. As with contemporary cinema, if a particular genre or style of film became popular with audiences; other studios would attempt to build on (or to put it a bit more crudely, exploit) the success of such films. Whereas in modern cinema this often results in pale imitations of the film that makes a particular genre ‘fashionable’ (see the big budget ‘Roman’ films inspired by Ridley Scott’s Gladiator), during cinema’s embryonic phase, attempting to replicate a particular genre’s success often resulted in boundary pushing and wildly inventive films.

Fantasmagorie is an excellent example of this point. Both technically and visually, it significantly develops animation’s scope from Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Animation Xpress explains the developments Fantasmagorie makes:

...Gaumont's Emile Cohl created the first fully animated film, Fantasmagorie(1908), and in the process lifted cartoons out of the realm of trick films and started them on the path toward animated features. The two-minute film Fantasmagorie (alternatively, in English: A Fantasy, Black and White, or Metamorphosis) is made up on approximately 700 double-exposed drawings, using what is known as a "chalk-line effect", a technique probably borrowed from early animator James Stuart Blackton...

Technique of the film

To make his film, Cohl placed each drawing on an illuminated glass plate and then traced the next drawing-with variations-on top of it until he had some 700 drawings. This simple technique produced consistent movement and continuity between the drawings, and allowed just Cohl and a camera assistant to create the film. In those days, chalkboard caricaturists were common attractions and the characters in the film look as though they've been drawn on a chalkboard, but it's an illusion. By filming black lines on paper and then printing in negative Cohl makes his animations appear to be chalk drawings. 

Cohl’s film did manage to lift ‘cartoons out of the realm of trick films and started them on the path toward animated features’. In Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, we are presented with separate vignettes of various characters. In Fantasmagorie, there is a remarkable fluidity throughout the entire film; each scene effortlessly interweaves with the next.

The film requires repeat viewing, because some of its transitions are so rapid that the viewer misses some of the movement during a first viewing. The film’s highlight (see above) is when a woman with a pineapple-esque hat sits in front of our protagonist stick figure, and the protagonist attempts to remove various things from what turns out to be a multi layered hat. The slapstick humour one derives from the scene is similar to that found in Max Linder’s Debut d’un Patineur, which had been released a year earlier.

Fantasmagorie confirms the notion which Humorous Phases of Funny Phases suggested: animation is a distinctive branch of film that differs significantly to the moving picture. The films’ rapidity and ability to shape-shift demonstrates that animated film can perform different, and on a certain level, more impressive, visual tricks that those found in Méliès’ or Porter’s films.

Fantasmagorie’s constant inventiveness typifies the forgotten decade of cinema. During this era of film, ideas supersede concerns with both form and narrative. 

The first American animated film - 1906 - Humorous Phases of Funny Faces - James Stuart Blackton

One of the brilliant repercussions of Melies’ trick film-making is the discovery of animation. Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is widely considered to be the earliest surviving American animated film – and it is as primitive as it is delightful.

The film was directed by John Stuart Blackton, who alongside Albert E. Smith formed one of the first movie studios, Vitagraph Motion Pictures. Before entering the world of film, Blackton had been a vaudeville cartoonist.

An important question to ask as we evaluate the first animated film on this list is: how much of a difference is there between animated films and ‘moving pictures’ (I think moving pictures is a more appropriate phrase than motion pictures when referring to early silent films)? I would suggest that there is a substantial gulf between the two categories.

For example, if we were to draw a family tree of the genealogy of the arts, animated film would stem from a different branch to the ‘moving picture’. The moving picture can be traced back to the earliest photograph, which was produced by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Animation, on the other hand, can trace its roots back far earlier to the earliest drawings that were made thousands of years ago.

Yet again, the answer of how the contemporary audience would have responded to this film would be extremely helpful. Although seeing the earliest Lumiere Brothers’ films would have startled the audience for obvious reasons, what they were witnessing were things which they could experience witness in their day to day activities. A film like Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, however, surely would have completely 

bamboozled them, as they were seeing a drawing come to life.

Also, unlike with the Lumiere Brothers’ first film, La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon, where the workers could not help staring at the camera, the animated film would offer its creator complete control of his/her entire environment. 

   

The Animation Archive provides us with a helpful background to the film as well as the process behind it:

Smith and Blackton created what were then called "Trick Films"... the camera was stopped for a moment while the scene was changed, making things magically appear and disappear; images dissolved from one to another; and shots were double exposed to create ghostly images. In 1900, Blackton experimented with putting his lightning sketch act on film in a movie called "The Enchanted Drawing", but it was in April of 1906 when he made his most important breakthrough. In a trick film titled "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" Blackton created what is regarded as the first American animated film.

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces sees several of Blackton’s drawings come to life. The most sophisticated animation is reserved for the final character, the clown, who instructs a lion to dance on his arm and then jump through a hoop.

It is an awfully simple film and its joy partly derives from the possibilities that the film hints at. When you think of the incredibly sophisticated and layered animation work that goes into the latest Pixar or Miyazaki release, it is important to understand the humble and simple beginnings of animated films.

But it also serves an important lesson for modern animated film makers – animated film is a completely different entity to moving pictures and this should be embraced – I hope that the success of Toy Story 3 does not mean that most major animated films will be shot in 3D. More often than not, simplicity trumps all, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces exemplifies this point.