The Animated Times

Little Nemo (1911) from Winsor McCay

Winsor McCay was known for both his dream-based comic strips. As a creator of comics, he was innovative in his use of panels, for example, had characters address the reader directly, break their panel's boarders, and even become aware of their own comic strip. Winsor was a very successful artist in his day and his comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland" was extremely popular. There was even a touring musical that toured and sold out all over the United States from 1907-1910 based on the comic strip.

To create this animated work, McCay drew each frame on one of 4,000 pieces of rice paper (image above). This short was a huge step forward from previous works of animation and it is still beautiful and captivating to this day. After the success of this short, McCay went on to create a 25,000 frame short entitled "The Sinking of the Lusitania" heralded as "the picture that will never have a competitor." Quite a bold claim, although it was most likely the first animated depiction of such somber subject matter. 

The thick lines that surround his characters were inspired by Art Neuveau and they look like modern day cel shaded animation. I love that look and it's so cool to see such an old animation using a similar style.

The audiences at the time would have been absolutely amazed by this piece and imagine what it would be like to see this and then have to wait 20 years to see anything of equal quality. There is something about these works that I find absolutely fascinating. They're almost dreamlike... not too realistic, but not "cartoony." The motion is so beautifully smooth, especially in the sequence when a stick floats up and flips around, shrinking down into a pencil for Little Nemo to catch. Such smooth animation for work that's over 100 years old! There is a certain quality in McCay's work that is unlike modern animation and that is intensely satisfying and rich.

On my first viewing, parts of McCay's animation reminded me of Studio Ghibli. This is very high praise, because Studio Ghibi represents for me the absolute magic of animation. When the clown and the imp float around and when the clown's hat lands so heavily on his head that he falls down made me feel like a kid again. It's so playful and totally captured my imagination.

Certain scenes the Studio Ghibli film "Castle in the Sky," are done in a similar style to McCay's animation and those scenes do feel much older and more artesanal than the rest of that film. Those few scenes have always fascinated me. 

Obviously McCay made a huge impact on the field of animation. One time Walt Disney was giving Winsor's son Robert a tour of Disney Studios when he said, "Bob, all this should be your father's."

"It is as though the first creature to emerge from the primeval slime was Albert Einstein; and the second was an amoeba, because after McCay's animation it took his followers nearly twenty years to find out how he did it. The two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and I'm not sure which should go first."

-Chuck Jones

  Fully animated hand drawn animation is fantastic. It's so different from what I'm used to. Most of my exposure to animation has been on television. Animation on television (debuting in the 1950s) was always much lower quality, because it had a much lower budget, and often used limited animation, where only certain parts of each image actually moved. Modern day animation is generally computer generated and that tends to remove some of the soul of the art, in my opinion. Don't get me wrong--I love some CG animation, but there's some kind of old-world charm that it is inherently lacking.

The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican (1954) from Sam Singer

So bad it's almost good.

The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican was one of the first cartoons made for TV. It is featured on Jerry Beck's "Worst Cartoons Ever" and luckily, show may have never actually aired on television.

It's low quality, black and white, and honestly not very good. This show's creator, Sam Singer, was trying, though. He was an innovator. Animation for television had just a sliver of the budget of theatrical animation, which contributes to why this looks much older than, say the first Looney Tunes short (Sinkin' in the Bathtub) from 20 years previous.

From today's perspective, it looks almost comical. It's very amateurish, with a lot of needlessly looped animations and several scenes fade to black before the character is done talking. It comes off as being rebellious, punk, or intentionally bad. It's as if the animator doesn't care about following common practices, but really he just did not have any experience. 

The voice acting is not bad, but the dialogue is. I think he was trying to avoid doing expensive action animation, so he used a lot of dialogue. It's like Sam Singer wanted someone to be talking constantly, but they didn't want to squeeze in too much story, so there is a lot repetition and rephrasing going on. 

Opening theme music is a major part of the cartoon experience for me. It sets the tone for the coming experience and it's generally catchy and easy to listen to. The theme for Paddy the Pelican is terrible. It's just a man making squawking sounds. It's melodic, but the "instrumentation" is awful. I wish they had shortened it to a few seconds or, better yet, used a silent intro. This short also used no foley, which is weird, because that is a large part of most cartoons. The music consists of an organ playing notes, but it's not really a melody and it doesn't match up with the action. It's hard to listen to when compared to older Disney and Warner Brothers theatrical cartoons.

Innovators are absolutely necessary for progress. Unfortunately, their work is not always that good. Sam Singer broke new ground for the future of animation and he showed that it was possible to make animation on a television budget. 

Not much is known about the creation of this show, just that Sam Singer created the show based on his comic strip of the same name. It's sad, but there is really not much information that I could find about Sam Singer. I would love to learn more about that guy and hopefully more details turn up over time.

Sinkin in the Bathtub (1930) from Warner Brothers

The first Looney Tunes theatrical animation.

Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising started their careers in animation working with Walt Disney in Kansas City, Missouri. When Walt's studio went bankrupt and he moved to California, they stayed behind and started their own studio. I'm not sure what happened, but the story goes that they gave up on their studio and followed Disney to California. Harman and Ising worked on the Alice Comedies and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (a character that I adore, by the way). The production work for Oswald was taken over by Universal Pictures and the boys were out of work again.

In 1928, Hugh Harman registered a new character with the copyright office. This character was described as a "Negro boy" named Bosko. They self-financed a short featuring Bosko interacting with  a live action Rudy Ising called Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid. This short caught the attention of Warner Brothers.

Bosko suddenly became the original star of a brand new series called the Looney Tunes. I had no idea that Looney Tunes ever had a blackfaced character. In his pilot animation, Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid, he has a very stereotypical dialect. In the premier episode of Looney Tunes "Sinkin' in the Bathtub," Bosko does not speak much. I'm not sure if Warner Brothers wanted to be more politically correct, or if this episode was just more focused on music instead of dialogue. In the 1990's Bosko was retconned into being a dog instead of an African American. Good call, Warner Brothers.

Discovering the origin of Looney Tunes was fascinating. I love that jolt of learning a fact that does not fit with previous understanding. Bosko is not the kind of character that I associate with Warner Brothers Animation at all. I had never seen him before I started doing my research and I'm really glad that I learned about him and those early years of Looney Tunes.

In this short, I do love the incorporation of music, the now-familiar gags, and the cute visual style. It sets the tone for how fun the rest of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies will be. The basic structure has been in place since 1930, but obviously, some things have changed.

The weirdest part, in my opinion, involved Honey, who is Bosko's girlfriend. There's a part where she hops up to dance on her balcony and her clothes drop while she's dancing. That seemed unnecessary and really caught me off guard. Pretty weird.

The Adventures of Jonny Quest (1964-1965) from Hanna-Barbera

During World War II, Doug Wildey served in the Navy, where he began his art career as a cartoonist for the base newspaper. After the war, he did freelance comic book work at several small companies and then in 1954, Doug was hired by Atlas Comics (which would later evolve into Marvel). His art was much more realistic and cinematic than his peers and he specialized in Westerns, but did some horror-fantasy comics as well.

Eventually Doug Wildey applied to work at Hanna-Barbera and they asked if he could pitch a show based on the radio adventure drama Jack Armstrong. He set this series 10 years in the future and used features from Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Science Digest to show what the future might realistically look like. Hanna-Barbera loved this pitch, but could not get the rights to Jack Armstrong, so Doug repurposed this work into an original concept, eventually titled Jonny Quest. Doug designed all the vehicles, weapons, and characters, aside from Bandit (more on him later). The coolest character from this series was Race Bannon, whose name was taken from Wildey's comic strips' characters Stretch Bannon and Race Dunhill. The art style for this series was similar to Wildey's comic books and Milton Caniff's comic strip, "Terry and the Pirates."

Hanna-Barbera tended to take more credit that they probably should have, and Doug Wildey was only given the credit of "based on an idea created by" although Doug was the main force behind every episode of the series. 

Hanna-Barbera's company was formed to create animation for television. Traditional animation techniques were much too expensive for the small screen, so William Hanna and Joseph Barbera utilized limited animation to save money. In limited animation, as you might have guessed, only certain parts of the image are animated. Eyes, mouths, legs, and arms move, but most of the frame is static. 

The music on this show is the best. Every episode has a great score. Hoyt Curtin composed all the music for the show and he had an amazing group of musicians to record the music. A lot of the music was recorded in one take and Hoyt wrote technically difficult music to give the musicians a challenge. There is a trombone riff in the main theme that is humanly impossible to execute because it requires extremely fast switching of positions. The musician got very close to performing it as it's written, and that is the take they kept in the theme. A lot of this fantastic score was reused in many other Hanna-Barbera series, like The Herculoids, The Fantastic Four, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio.

Jonny Quest aired on ABC in prime time Friday nights from 1964 to 1965 and it went on to reruns for two decades on all three major US networks.

After The Adventures of Jonny Quest was cancelled, Doug Wildey went on to work on Herculoids, Jana of the Jungle, Return to the Planet of the Apes, The Godzilla Power Hour, Mister T, and Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos. He also returned to comics, working largely in Westerns, although he wrote and drew a few Jonny Quest comics.

Jonny Quest was a fantastic departure from Hanna-Barbera's previous work. Hanna and Barbera did not want to completely change the tone from their other shows, so they had an outside designer create Bandit, Jonny's pet dog, for comic relief. Y'know, for the kids. Later, in syndication, 2 minutes of Bandit content was cut from each episode of the original series. 

TaleSpin (1990-1991) from Disney Animation Studios

In the early 90s, Disney created a bunch of new Disney Channel shows starring their preexisting characters. They needed new content for a new generation and they came up with some interesting new takes on their characters. TaleSpin is a series about a 1930s pilot starring  a characters from The Jungle Book.

The series was largely developed by writers Jymn Magon (writer of Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, DuckTales, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, Darkwing Duck, Goof Troop, Quack Pack, and The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh) and Mark Zaslove (Writer of The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Little Mermaid, Oliver and Company, Challenge of the GoBots, and he developed Mighty Max). This team  also were the story editors and supervising producers on the project and they later developed Superhuman Samurai Squad together.

The pilot for the television series was a feature length made-for-tv film entitled Plunder and Lightning, which was nominated for an Emmy in 1991. 

There are some similarities between TaleSpin and the Studio Ghibli film "Porco Rosso" about an anthropomorphic pig who flies a plane. Porco Rosso is based on Hayao Miyazaki's manga that was published in 1989, although the film was not released until 1992. Regardless of if there was a direct influence of one to the other, the creators of TaleSpin admit to being big fans of Studio Ghibli. As TaleSpin creator Mark Zaslove puts it, "...Plunder & Lightning was fine and dandy, but a middle-aged pig that feels guilt for living through the war when his companions did not... that's just wonder." Miyazaki's work is less cartoony and offers a lot more emotional depth than TaleSpin, but that tends to be the difference between theatrical and television stories.