A Flurry of Drawings
Animation, like life itself, relies on natural principles. Life requires simply (simply!) DNA. Animation requires Persistence of Vision. That means: anything you've glimpsed you'll go on seeing for maybe a tenth of a second after it's gone. If meanwhile a different glimpse gets substituted, the two will blend smoothly. And if they depict successive stages of movement, you'll swear you saw something move.
Ways to substitute the next image derive from flip-books, which have been around since at least the nineteenth century. On the bottom margin of a school scribbler, a sketch of a car. On successive pages, the same car, shifted incrementally rightward. Now. Riffle the pages! Watch that auto move!
To check what they've done, animators riffle stacks of pages. No single drawing stands out. Single drawings, however highly finished, may at best—Chuck Jones says—serve to help us remember some animated sequence we recall en-
joying. But Animation itself Jones calls that "a flurry of drawings." How they're shown is less important than their flurry. A flip-book can display a couple of seconds' worth. For something longer, best photograph each frame; then let a projector sequence them on a screen, fast enough for Persistence of Vision to blend them. Sixteen frames per second was fast enough in silent-film days. Sound, when it came about 1928, required twenty-four because film that carried sound had to move faster. But the eye doesn't need that many; twelve per second will do for the eye. So sound helped ease the animator's lot. Instead of sixteen drawings per second, twelve will suffice, each photographed twice. The eye will detect no jerkiness.
A flurry of drawings: one by one by one. Draw the starting pose; then draw the next instant, then the next, clear to the end of this flurry, each image a modified tracing of the one before it: that's called "animating straight-ahead," and it's how all animation was done for a couple of decades, right into the age of sound, sixteen for each second. In 1914, Winsor McCay's many thousand straight-ahead drawings made Gertie the Dinosaur huff, stomp, lower her neck. Chuck Jones, as he likes to remark, was then two years old. "It all happened within my lifetime." (And McCay, born 1871, lived till 1934; by then Jones, 22, had enjoyed three years of breathing animation's ozone.)
McCay redrew every detail of every frame: not only Gertie, who'd shift from glimpse to glimpse, but also all those things that shouldn't shift: rocks, mountains, trees, horizon. Retracing those with machine-like accuracy being simply impossible even for his (or his assistant's) steady hand, they flickered and shimmered around Gertie. In its time, the effect
did seem rather charming. But what a redundancy of effort! A way to draw a background once, for reuse many dozen times, was one thing that would raise animation above slave labor. It would also permit something later to prove indispensable in establishing a world (stable) that contained characters (a-move). That was a perfectly unambiguous distinction between what was meant to stay rock-steady and what wasn't.
Not that McCay's audiences needed that distinction. When he took his film on tour, and stood beside the screen with a pointer to conduct dialogues with Gertie, many were unclear that they were looking at drawings. Some kind of real animal, surely, though oddly drained of color? Or maybe some kind of model? It's hard to realize how long we can take simply learning to perceive a novel medium. (How about a voice in your head, with no one else in the room? When a prominent Boston lawyer heard the "telephone" demonstrated about 1876, well, after pausing long in embarrassment he came up with nothing better than "Rig a jig, and away we go!")[1]
Nor would slave labor have entered McCay's thoughts. Like many pioneer animators, he was driven by a passion for drawing. To make a hundred pictures in a morning, that was sheer heaven!
We're talking of a gone time of linked passions. Moviegoers had a passion too, for nothing more subtle than the sheer illusion of motion. It sufficed that on a wavery screen they saw—galloping horses! (And therein lay the germ of the Western.) Chuck Jones remembers when it was hilarious
[1] It was Bell's assistant, the famed Mr. Watson, who recorded this. See Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book (1991), pp. 227 ff.
if an animated walker just hopped once in a while, an effect he's used himself in several films. A story? That could emerge from whatever some animator happened to think of next.
(And to keep things steadily lined up, put a row of pegs on the table, to fit holes along an edge of what's being photographed. Raoul Barre thought of that in 1914. Every cel, every sheet of animators' paper, has worn those holes ever since.)
The reusable-background problem was solved, after several fumbles, in 1914: U.S. Patent #1,143,542, issued to Earl Hurd. His solution wasn't obvious, discarding as it did the natural supposition that the drawings the camera would see would be the ones drawn on paper. No. Draw the background—once—on paper. Then trace each of your "moving" drawings onto celluloid. Under the camera, lay each "cel" in sequence over the background; click the button for each. Voilà!
That process created two new occupations: cel-tracer, celwasher. The tracers have now mostly been automated out, and a good thing too, since, careful though they might be, they lost subtleties. Run Jones's How the Grinch Stole Christmas on your VCR; examine the wiggly lines that delineate the Grinch's haggard face in closeup; no way those wiggles could have been reliably traced. By Grinch-time (1966) an unwavering Xerox eye was transferring the animator's every nuanced line to the cel. (Opaque areas—after color came in, colored ones—got painted inside the outlines by hand, and still are.) And the washers? Their job was to permit reuse of precious celluloid, by cleaning the paint off cels that had been photographed. Chuck Jones, at 19, commenced his long life in animation as a cel-washer.
He'd been hired by Ub Iwerks of the (yes) Dutch name, and who was Ub? Ubbe Ert Iwerks, who'd come west in 1924 to rejoin his Kansas City partner Walt Disney. They were both 23. It's no secret that Ub's drawing was more resourceful than Walt's; that he co-created Mickey Mouse; that he, single-handed, animated the pioneer Mickey cartoons, notably the 1928 Steamboat Willie . That was the cartoon that made history with fully synchronized sound, thanks to Walt's nigh-infallible nose for trends. By 1930 an entrepreneur named Patrick Powers had persuaded Ub (wrongly) that he was more important than Walt, and set him up in a studio of his own. Ub proceeded to produce films starring Flip the Frog, who flopped. He had, alas, Chuck Jones recalls, "no sense of humor." That was a considerable drawback.
Ub Iwerks did excel at technical challenges. When Flip climbed a stair the viewer's eye climbed with him, so the stair's perspective shifted with every frame. That called for ultra-resourceful animating.
Later, back with Disney, Ub would tinker with such things as Xeroxing cels instead of hand-tracing them, and with processes for achieving a seamless blend of live action and animation. (There seems to be no substance to printed reports that he fathered Disney's Multiplane project, the camera looking down through widely-spaced cels to automate shifts of perspective as viewpoints shifted. True, he worked on such an apparatus. But the long opening shot of Pinocchio, a Multiplane tour de force of 1940, preceded Ub's return to Disney.)
Anyhow, in 1931, with an infusion of cash, Tycoon Iwerks had been on his own; hiring the likes of cel-washers; also importing from the east animators of the quality of Grim Natwick.
"Grim" is said to be what he'd uttered as a toddler, trying to pronounce his real name, which was Myron. Born 1890, and not gone till after he'd passed his hundredth birthday—Lord, like symphony conductors, animators are long-lived!—Grim Natwick had commenced animating as far back as 1916, for the Pathé Studio in New York, where he'd finish eight dozen straight-ahead drawings before his lunch break. Later, with the Max Fleischer people, he laid claim to what then didn't look like immortality by creating Betty Boop, at first a little dog with spit curls that walked on its hind legs to perform a Boop-boop-a-doop vocal identified with a singer named Helen Kane. (In those early days of sound, animating pop hits was one sure cartoon formula.) By three more films the dog's droopy ears had become earrings, and Betty was, well, Betty. Grim Natwick was the envy of other Fleischer animators because he could join Betty's hand to her arm with a wrist; could even manage knees. That was because he'd had formal art-school training. Most animators, then and for decades to come, learned their craft by merely tracing photographs. When photos weren't available, the arms and legs they drew evaded knees and elbows by bending like rubber hoses.
(Tracing photos, a technique much exploited by the Fleischers, is still known as "rotoscoping." It's a way to get a quick fix on humans, who can be filmed in action as no Bugs Bunny can be. It is widely regarded as cheating. It was also a way to manage Snow White 's wooden prince, rightly noted as that landmark film's principal lapse. Yes, action footage of a girl walking and dancing—the model would become better known as Marge Champion—was studied by the animators of the princess, but those frames weren't for tracing. In changing her overall height from eight heads to five, Hamil-
ton Luske, the man in charge, detached her from human proportions and her artisans from tracery.)
And, long before Snow White was thought of, here's Grim Natwick, 41, at the Ub Iwerks studio. And here's a 19-year-old cel-washer, Charles M. Jones, equipped, like Grim, with a species of formal art-school training. And (Grim would recall) "I took him out, bought him an ice cream soda, and taught him all about crooked lines." Ah, esoterica!
Eventually—the details are elusive—Chuck Jones became Grim's Assistant Animator.
That sounds more grandiose than it was. Assistant Animators were earlier dubbed "In-betweeners," and their craft, like cel-washing, depended on a technical advance. That was the observation that if animators drew key poses—a left foot hitting the ground, a right foot ditto—then the frames in between, the ones that shifted the walker from left foot to right foot, could be as routine to draw as they were to walk, and might as well be assigned to anyone with the skill just to draw at all. (Standards would rise, but that was the way it looked then.) "How fast is the walk?" would translate into "How many in-between frames?"—an instruction the animator could relay. That was the end of straight-ahead animation. Thenceforward, Key Poses and In-betweening By the Numbers. As a dividend, a bright In-betweener might be learning to animate. Most animators of the Jones generation and since have learned their craft In-betweening. (Also, a few In-betweeners have been discerned who seem happy to use up their lives just In-betweening. Chuck Jones doesn't pretend to understand them.)
It all made economic sense too. Animators were freed for uniquely productive work, while In-betweening could be left to the peons. For a labor-intensive industry had long been
sorting out its skills. Someone (Disney, Fleischer, Iwerks) in charge at the top. A few key creative people—Animators. Eager In-betweeners, making maybe nine-tenths of the drawings. A background artist or two. And a phalanx of anonymous inkers and painters, to fuss with the cels the camera would actually see. And, no, don't forget the cameraman; we need him. And some folk to whomp up the sound. Oh—don't forget the story either. We'll return to that.
And what, really, was it all about? That depends on the angle from which we calibrate "really." What the moguls saw—we'll start with them—was money (not much) dribbled out to gaggles of odd people, in return for some hand-drawn footage every week or two. Back when just seeing something move was a delight, audiences had formed the habit of expecting such footage; thus a novelty had become a program fixture. By the 1920s the Pat Sullivan studio, which was mostly Otto Messmer,[2] was affording audiences a routine fix with Felix the Cat, the first clear-cut instance of Character Animation. (Gertie? She'd been a prop for the real character, her creator.)
Felix, whom Messmer cannily reduced to some brushable blobs, routinely stalked, pondered, triumphed. "I put emphasis on personality in Felix," Messmer would recall: "eye motion and facial expressions." He'd long since discovered he could "get as big a laugh with a little gesture—a wink or a twist of the tail"—as he could with gags. That meant, he'd created a Character: an emblem audiences could invest with expectations, disappointments, triumphs. It's unknown how
[2] Died 1982, aged 91. Note the pattern of longevity.
many Felix films got made, several hundred anyhow, and an effort to remember that they all preceded sound. It was also a symptom of emergent custom that O. Messmer's name wasn't credited, just Pat Sullivan's. Pat Sullivan was the Producer, i.e., the financial liaison. But he even got himself photographed as if his days were spent animating.
Sound brought in a new stimulus: music. Audiences could now stomp their feet. And studios tended to own music companies. Warner Bros. owned perhaps six. Aha! Such eyes as Jack Warner's lit up with dollar-signs! Music could bring continuity to Looney Tunes, and the cartoons could help sell the music. For several years that seemed a primary reason to make cartoons. "When I was young," Chuck Jones remembers, "music publishing was a big business because . . . oh, people played the ukulele." (Nowadays, adept with chords on the guitar, many strummers feel no need for sheet music.)
Sound was in some ways a regression: would a hallful of foot-stompers ever miss Character? But yes, a demand persisted for Mickey Mouse, whom Disney and Iwerks had created just when sound was dawning. So for years the Disney output was bifurcated—in alternate fortnights, a Mickey Mouse (character), a Silly Symphony (foot-stomp). Luckily, Walt Disney came to see the Silly Symphonys as carte blanche to just play around. Playing around can pay off. May 1933 saw a turning point in animation history. That was a Silly Symphony called The Three Little Pigs .
In the mid-thirties it was a sensation, a cartoon that went on playing week after week while features came and went behind it. After fifty years it remains amazing. A governing tune—
Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf
Big Bad Wolf
Big Bad Wolf
keeps two pigs a-hopping and a-fluting and a-fiddling while a Practical Pig lays bricks.
And they Hop and they Flute and they Fiddle tweedle dee and Again and Again fiddle fie fee fee and the Wolf jumps WHOMP and they Gallop and they Stomp as their Practical friend can see.
The third pig's rhythms are prosaic compared to theirs; diddle diddle diddle diddle isn't his life style. At bottom it's the old theme of the Ant and the Grasshopper, the Ant thoughtful for tomorrow (a wolf may arrive at the door), the Grasshopper incorrigibly toujours gai .
Chuck Jones compares Walt's founding of the Disney Studios with the founding of the New Yorker by Harold Ross at about the same period. If Ross was no great writer, neither was Walt a great animator. But each created a milieu in which greatness could flourish. And greatness, insofar as it's attachable to animation, undoubtably attaches to The Three Little Pigs, three characters (says Jones) who are characterized solely by the way they move, since they look exactly alike. (Before that, he adds, villains were heavy, victims not. That simple distinction continued into the days of Bluto and Popeye.) Unique selfness, inherent in a way of moving: that is the essence of the Character Animation we're keeping track of. Reality inheres in rhythm.
So yes, yes, things were happening backstage, not always beknownst to studios like MGM and Warners which owned chains of theaters, by the early 1930s all "wired for sound."
Into their theaters they dumped their two-hour "product." That meant, more or less, a ninety-minute feature every week, plus a newsreel, plus a two-reeler, plus a cartoon. A reel is about nine minutes. Cartoons got shaved to seven minutes, then to six. But, however brief, a cartoon there had to be. Lacking it, the package would have seemed short-weighted.
In a way, it's as simple as that. Hence all those flurries of drawings.
