Flamin' and Arcade Myself!

Since the very beginning of time, man has always been interested in capturing a sense of motion in every work of art. Right from the eight legged boar that was first found in the Altamira caves in Northern Spain to right alongside the mummified remains of pharaohs long gone, this craze for capturing motion is always evident in every artistic endeavor known to man.

A good example of what an ancient comic strip would like can be found in the ancient Egyptian wall decorations. A famous illustration by Leonardo da Vinci depicts how various limbs would look in different positions. Giotto’s seem to miraculously be taking flight in their motions, and the Japanese made use of scrolls to tell their stories.

Real animation can never be achieved without the person first understanding a basic principle: “the persistence of vision”. This particular principle was first brought to our notice in the 19th century by a Frenchman with the name of Paul Roget, who also invented the thaumotrope. This particular contraption happened to be a disc with a string attached on both ends. One side of the disc had a bird on it and the other an empty cage. When the disc was twirled, the bird would appear to be in the cage. This only goes to show that the human eye can retain images even when it is exposed to a series of pictures, one at a time.

Since then, there have been two other inventions that have gone a long way in furthering the cause of animation: the phenakistoscope by Joseph Plateau and the zoetrope by Pierre Desvignes. The phenakistoscope was a circular card like structure with slits along the edges. When the viewer held this whirling device up to a mirror and looked through the slits, a series of drawings along the circumference of the card would appear to the viewer as a moving object. The same technique was used for the zoetrope, wherein a strip of paper containing drawings was carefully inserted into a cylinder. The cylinder was then twirled on a spindle and the viewer would gaze through the slots on the top of the cylinder. The figures on the insides of the cylinder would magically come to life.

The invention of the motion camera and projector by Edison was the first real invention that propelled the concept of animation into reality. And although, animation became reality with the motion camera, it was still in its simplest of forms. The short film by Stuart Blackton, “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” was probably the first real movie to bring animation to life. For the movie, comical faces where drawn on a blackboard and then photographed, after which they were erased and another stage of expressions would be drawn.

This particular “stop motion” effect managed to captivate audiences by the simple fact that it managed to make basic drawings come to life.

In the early 20’s, the hype surrounding animated cartoon began to diminish while movie exhibitors began to look elsewhere for other sources of entertainment media. The reason behind this being that the audience was bored stiff of watching animated figurines doing their thing without there being any real storyline to it. Up until this point, animation was still in its basic form (with the exceptions of Winsor McCay’s works like Gertie the Dinosaur). What McCay managed to accomplish was a character in this dinosaur that he brought to life, something which was only seen in Felix the cat by Otto Messmer. The very notion of a dinosaur coming to life was in itself remarkable.

The biggest drawback about the animated flicks that came out during this time was the fact that there was never any importance given to plots. The animated flicks during this time were only a series of gags that were haphazardly strung together. And not what anyone today would call funny.

Of course you have to take into consideration that most of the animated movies were based on stringing primitive gags (and in many cases violence) together. In many movies you would have one character beating another character mercilessly. Or, the hero would cut the villain into tiny slices of ham.

As nonsensical as it may sound to us today, it did work for a while back then, until a big change came about in the animation industry towards the mid twenties. The bigger animation studios began to take over the smaller projects and set certain industry standards for animation. Animators were given a definite number of drawings to draw per day and cartoons began to be manufactured cheaply and in quantity.

And this is how the animation industry got started before the times of Disney.