The Hays Code was initially created in 1930 and began being enforced four years later. The code was meant to help reduce the amount of violence, sex and other 'anti-social' behavior onscreen. It was adopted due to conservative concerns about film content and controversy surrounding several off-screen scandals involving Hollywood stars.
However, many artists and filmmakers felt heavily restricted by the Code's rules which stated that films could not show such actions as: illegal drug trafficking, onscreen nudity or sex, profanity, 'white slavery', and ridicule of the clergy. Additionally, any crime shown on the screen had to be punished and couples could not be depicted sleeping in the same bed together. (Due to competition from other studios and changing social norms, the Code was eventually replaced by the film rating system we have today in 1968. While certainly not perfect, the MPAA's use of ratings does not rely on censorship, and thus allows more artistic freedom.)
A photo taken by A.L. Schafer that symbolically protests the Hays Code. It depicts several elements banned by the Code.
As a result, filmmaking in Hollywood changed drastically. Theatrical cartoons were not exempt. Despite that old animated shorts are often considered to be 'wholesome' / 'safe for the entire family,' many Pre-Code cartoons contained quite a few bizarre and sometimes unsettling scenes. If you don't believe it, then prepare to be enlightened by the ten shorts below.
All of us are familiar with Disney's Aladdin, but there are a surprising number of other cartoons based on similar premises.
Background on the Tales One Thousand and One Arabian Nights is one of the world's most famous collections of fairytales and folktales. It is also one of the oldest literary works. Although the story was originally published in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age, many of the stories are far older and originate from not only Arabian countries but also Egyptian, Indian and Mesopotamian cultures. The stories first became popular in the Western world after their publication into French in the early 1700s by Antoine Galland. English translations soon followed, becoming increasingly common during the 1800s. Translations have continued to be made and revised up into recent years, as scholars endlessly debate about the accuracy of their sources and interpretations. (Earlier translations made during the Victorian era tended to cut out certain stories or aspects due to their depiction of violence and sex. Not all of these stories were originally intended for children. Pretty much the same thing could be said about Grimm's Fairytales.)
For those unfamiliar with One Thousand and One Nights's basic premise, it is a frame story. Everyday the king Shahryar takes a new bride only to behead her by the next day, and then takes another. (Shahryar holds a grudge after finding out his first wife was unfaithful to him.) Eventually the vizier can no longer find any more virgin brides for the king. The vizier's daughter, Scheherazade, offers herself to be the next bride, and the vizier reluctantly agrees. Later that night after the marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell Shahryar a fantastical story. The story does not end and segues into another tale. The king becomes curious about how the tale concludes, so he postpones his bride's execution. This continues to be repeat until one thousand and one nights have passed and Scheherazade has run out of stories to tell. However, Shahryar has fallen in love with Scheherazade over the course of almost three years. So Scheherazade's life is spared and she becomes queen.
An illustration of Scheherazade and Shahryar by Edmund Dulac.
Most of the stories that Scheherazade tells are highly fantastical, involving various heroes journeying to far off lands in search of love or warriors fighting against fearsome monsters. Arguably, the most famous of these stories are Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Adaptations based upon these tales range from classical pieces to role playing games. (So many works have been influenced by these tales that they even have their own Wikipedia page!) Naturally, One Thousand and One Nights has been adapted numerous times into film as well, perhaps most famously by The Thief of Baghdad (both the 1924 and the 1940 versions) and the 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). The number of animated films adapted from One Thousand and One Nights is quite high as well. The stories provide a perfect vehicle for the medium given how imaginative and other worldly they are.
A brief synopsis and review for The Thief of Baghdad (1940).
"Minnie the Moocher" is a famous jazz style song first recorded in 1931 by Cab Calloway. The song has been covered by numerous other performers over the years and appeared in the 1980 film, The Blues Brothers. It is most famous for its use of various scat lyrics and verses which the audience repeats back to the performer. As with two other Cab Calloway songs, "St. James Infirmary Blues" and "The Old Man on the Mountain," "Minnie the Moocher" was adapted into a Pre-Hays Code Betty Boop cartoon by the Fleisher Brothers. In these cartoons Calloway provides both the vocals and dance steps via rotoscoping. The song portion of the cartoon occurs when Betty runs away from home with her boyfriend, Bimbo (an anthropomorphic black dog), after arguing with her parents. Betty and Bimbo quickly become scared of walking alone in the dark and enter a nearby cave. As they walk inside, they are suddenly confronted by a large ghost walrus voiced by Cab Calloway. The walrus, accompanied by menagerie of spirits and bizarre imagery, suddenly breaks into song:
Why a ghost walrus? What did I just watch?
Making sense of the meaning of Cab Calloway’s lyrics and this short’s imagery may seem perplexing at first, as "Minnie the Moocher’s" unusual and often disturbing visuals were heavily influenced by the surrealism movement that began in the early 1920s in Europe. By 1932, when this cartoon was made, artists such as Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Marcel Duchamp had achieved international recognition. Surrealistic art focuses on visualizing the subconscious and has no clear, manifest meanings. However, hidden (latent) meanings can potentially be uncovered by trying to interpret how the abstract images interact with each other and invoke feelings.
The surrealism is so strong in this cartoon, that it even frightens its own protagonists!
Using this approach, one could argue that "Minnie the Moocher" is essentially about the dangers of engaging in reckless behavior driven by selfish desires. Although a commonly overlooked fact today, jazz music was considered 'edgy' when it first became popular in the earlier half of the 20th century. This was not only due to the music’s various drug and sexual references, but also due to the fact that it lacked a traditional, structured musical arrangement in favor of improvisation. Many members of older generations saw jazz as immoral. They associated jazz with the wild behaviors of the 1920s, as it often played in speakeasies. (Also some people had racist assumptions about jazz due to its African American origins.)
The woman in the song, Minnie, is described as a 'red hot hoochie coocher.' The hoochie coochie was a sexually provocative belly dance that originated in the late 1800s. Despite of her unscrupulous occupation, Minnie is described as being kind, having 'a heart as big as a whale.' Minnie sees the man Smokey, who is likely one of her customers, as a way out of her lower class lifestyle. Minnie imagines becoming rich and owning various status symbols including 'a home built of gold and steel' and 'a diamond car with platinum wheels.' Unfortunately, Smokey is a drug addict. He is described as being ‘kokey,’ meaning that he takes cocaine. Smokey also passed his bad habits onto Minnie when he ‘showed her how to kick the gong around’, which means he introduced her to opium. Minnie’s dreams of wealth are nothing more than a hallucination brought on by drugs. They will never come to fruition. (A later version of “Minnie the Moocher” includes extra verses where Minnie attempts to bail Smokey out of jail but is dumped and where Minnie meets a religious man but is unable to give up her ways. It concludes with Minnie being sent to mental asylum where she later dies.) Betty Boop does not appear to partake in any drugs in this cartoon, but she does find herself in a dark, dream-like world while listening to Cab Calloway’s song. While Betty did not deal with any of the problems Minnie ran into, it is implied that bad behavior grows over time, starting with a single selfish act. Even if the act seems small or incidental, it can still lead to trouble. (The character of Betty Boop was built upon the popular flapper and virgin personas, being both ‘sexy’ and ‘innocent.’) The walrus and the other ghosts, be they imagined or not, chase Betty and Bimbo back home in order to make them avoid making mistakes like Minnie and Smokey did. The drunk skeletons are a visual warning of overindulgence. This was a relevant concern at the time, as this cartoon was released right at the tail end of the Prohibition.The ghost prisoners who get electrocuted stand for the ultimate consequence of breaking an important law: death. The ghost cat nursing the kittens represents how unappreciative and selfish children can be when they suck their parents’ wealth and resources dry.
Of course, understanding the meaning behind these images doesn't make them any less unsettling.
“Minnie the Moocher” is not only one of Cab Calloway’s most famous songs, it is also one of the Fleisher Brother’s most memorable cartoons. The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and the cartoon version ranked number 20 in the 1994 book, The Fifty Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals. Like many other early Fleisher productions, “Minnie the Moocher” was the opposite of most of Disney’s output. It was made for an older audience, had several drug references, innuendos, and a stranger, less linear storyline. However, “Minnie the Moocher” also warns its audience not to indulge in too many tempting vices, or else their lifetime goals and ambitions will come crashing down.
Outside of acting, relatively few women get recognized for their efforts in the film industry. This is particularly noticeable in the animation field. While things have certainly improved since the earlier half of the 20th century (where a women had little hope of doing anything but inking, painting, or in-betweening), it is still far more common for female animators and directors to work independently, rather than within the studio system. Female comic book artists are also more common, perhaps for the same reason. Many of them (such as Kaja Foglio [Girl Genius], Kate Beaton [Hark! A Vagrant], and Tracy J. Butler [Lackadaisy]) have met great success 'publishing' on the internet. While women still aren't nearly as common as male cartoonists, they have began to appear in larger numbers in recent years. Below is a list of the ten notable female animators that helped pave way for other artists in the field.
1. Lotte Reiniger
Reiniger's complex stop-motion technique is based on Chinese shadow puppets.
Lotte Reiniger is commonly acknowledged not only as the first significant female animator, but also as a pioneering stop-motion animator. Lotte grew up in Berlin and first became fascinated with film after seeing the works of Georges Melies. In 1918, she was assigned her first major job, animating the wooden rats created for the intertitles for Paul Wegener'sThe Pied Piper of Hamelin. Shortly after, Reiniger began directing her own short films in her trademark silhouette cutout fashion. She directed seven shorts between 1919 and 1922, which were produced and photographed by her husband, Carl Koch.
After three years of hard work, her feature length film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) was finally released, beating out Snow White by over a decade. The film was loosely based on One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and met enough success to allow Lotte to direct a second feature, Doctor Dolittle and his Animals, in 1928. Unfortunately, Lotte and her family were forced to flee Germany after the Nazi regime took control. She lived out the rest of her years in Paris and in London, were she continued to make short fairytale films for advertising companies, BBC, and Telecasting America.
Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving animated film.
2. Lillian Friedman Astor
Friedman was one the first women to work at a major animation studio.
When Lillian Friedman Astor was rejected by Disney, she was not deterred. Instead, she applied to rival studio Fleisher Brothers in 1930 at the age of 19. Within three years, she was 'secretly' promoted from the lowly rank of inker to head animator by Shamus Culhane. She was responsible for animating many key scenes in the popular Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons, as well as several Comicolor titles. Her work includes: "Can You Take It?" (1934), "Betty Boop's Prize Show" (1934), "Be Human" (1936), "Hawaiian Birds" (1936), "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor" (1936) and "Pudgy and the Lost Kitten" (1938).
Although she didn't always receive screen credit and was paid considerably less than her male counterparts, Friedman was apparently very pleased to have a job at Fleisher. So much so in fact, she was rumored to have named her dog Popeye! In 1939, Freedman retired from animating in order to raise her family. Despite her short career, she inspired several others to follow her footsteps and not to be afraid to showcase their talents in a traditionally male run profession.
The classic cartoon "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor".
3. Mary Blair
While technically not an animator, Mary Blair hugely influenced the look of many classic Disney films.
Perhaps no other women at Disney was as well recognized as Mary Blair. She first began working at Disney in 1940 alongside her husband Lee Blair, after previously working at Ub Iwerks Studio and Harman-Ising Studios. Unlike other female employees at Disney at the time (such as Retta Scott and Retta Davidson), Mary Blair was a concept artist and a scenery designer. Blair's art is characterized by her bold use of colors, angular forms, patterns, and simplified shapes. Her style was heavily influenced by her 1941 trip to various South American countries with other Disney artists, as part of Roosevelt's 'Good Neighbor Policy.'
Her designs and storyboards were crucial in the process of creating several animated features including: The Three Caballeros (1944), Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). After briefly resigning from Disney after Peter Pan and working as a childern's book illustrator, Mary Blair helped create the It's a Small World attraction for Disneyland in 1964. Additionally, she created several murals for the theme park up until 1971. For those interested, much of Blair's artwork can be viewed here.
A sampling of Blair's unique concept art.
4. Faith Hubley
Faith and her husband, John, reviving an oscar in 1966.
Faith Hubley began working in the film industry at only 15, when she left home to work in a theater. She made her way to Hollywood three years later. Her first job was as a messenger for Columbia Pictures. Later, Faith worked at Republic Pictures, where she became a music editor and scripts clerk. In 1955, she married animator John Hubley, who had previously worked for Disney and UPA. Soon after, they founded their own independent company, Storyboard Studios. The goal of the studio was to produce one film per year. Both Faith and John made a total of 20 shorts together, between 1957 to 1977.
These films met much acclaim due to their free-form visuals and use of dialogue from actual childern (usually their own), as opposed to using adult actors. Indeed, much of the dialogue in their shorts is nonlinear in nature, and often focuses on relishing things in life that some might consider mundane. The best known shorts the two made are arguably "Moonbird" (1959), "The Hole" (1962), "A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature" (1966), and "Windy Day", all of which won or received Oscar nominations. When John died in 1977, Faith continued to make films on her own up until her own death in 2001. (It should also be noted that Tissa David [who was the second female animator to direct a feature film, and animated the female lead in Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure] frequently worked with the Hubleys.)
A still from "Windy Day" (1967) demonstrating the Hubleys' minimalist style.
5. Sally Cruikshank
Quite possibly the most abstract animator on this list, Cruikshank's films are like no other.
Sally Cruikshank's work is undeniably weird, but extremely creative and mesmerizing. She was drawn to animation at a young age, citing the surreal 1930s shorts of the Fleisher Brothers, Bob Clampett, and Carl Barks's comics as influences. After completing her education at Smith College and thoroughly studying an animation book by Preston Blair, Cruikshank released her first piece in 1971, the three minute "Ducky". Encouraged by feedback from her peers, Cruikshank enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute. After graduating, she produced her most well known short, "Quasi at the Quackadero" (1975), which features two of Cruikshank's reoccurring characters, the infantile Quasi and the temperamental Anita. In 2009, "Quasi" was added to the National Film Registry, and it was voted #46 in the 1994 book, The Fifty Greatest Cartoons.
Cruikshank produced several other surreal short films during the 1970s and 1980s, including "Make Me Psychic" (1978) and "Face Like A Frog" (1988). In 1980, she proposed an animated feature about her duck-like character entitled Quasi's Cabaret, but the project was ultimately abandoned due to funding issues. However, Cruikshank is fondly remembered by many Gen X'ers for an entirely different reason: she animated several segments for the program Sesame Street.
Cruikshank explains her animation process.
6. Ellen Woodbury
Woodbury working at Disney Studios.
Ellen Woodbury made history in 1994, when she became the first woman animator at Disney to supervise a major character. When Woodbury first entered the field of animation, things looked pretty grim. In the early 1980s, very few studios produced films or television series beyond simplistic children's entertainment. Thus, Woodbury was stuck at the uninspiring Filmation. In 1985, her talent was noticed, and Woodbury moved to Disney. She started as a cleanup artist on The Great Mouse Detective,and eventually was promoted to animator on Oliver and Company and The Little Mermaid. Soon after, she animated several iconic Disney characters including Abu (Aladdin, 1992), Zazu (The Lion King, 1994), and Pegasus (Hercules, 1998). In 2005, Woodbury left Disney and became a full time sculptor. She currently teaches character animation at the Art Institute of Colorado. (Anyone who would like to read more about Woodbury can visit the blog, The 50 Most Influential Disney animators, here.)
A model sheet of Abu for Aladdin.
7. Suzie Templeton
Never heard of her? She's one of the most talented stop-motion artists around.
Perhaps no other career is as time consuming as being a stop-motion animator. Up until a few years ago (thanks to the invention of 3D printers), the average stop-motion film took around five years to make. For this very reason, the technique is less commonly used than other forms of animation. Yet a handful of artists have perfected the craft. One of them is Suzie Templeton.
Interestingly enough, Templeton was not originally inserted in becoming an animator. Although she helped her brothers make several homemade movies during her childhood, Templeton graduated in sciences and held odd jobs in different countries for several years. Dissatisfied, she went back to school and switched to humanities. It was only after seeing Wallace and Gromit, that Templeton entered the realm of animation.
Although she originally planned to work for commercial studios like Aardman, Templeton found the studio model incompatible with her style. So she decided to work independently on more personal projects, than to appeal to the masses. (Perhaps this is because her films tend to deal with dense subjects, such as unhappy marriage, loneliness, and death.) Templeton completed two short films at her university, the Royal College of Art, "Stanley" (1999) and "Dog" (2001), which met much acclaim. In 2006, Templeton released her take on "Peter and the Wolf", a half an hour testament of her skill. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Currently, Templeton is working on an undisclosed feature film.
All of Templeton's puppets are extremely detailed.
8. Nina Paley
Independent animator, cartoonist, and free culture activist.
Nina Paley is one of the most active female animators today. She made several short films starting at the age of 13, but did not really begin experimenting with animation until 1998, after she published two moderately successful comic strips, Nina's Adventures and Fluff. Some of her shorts made during this period include: "Pandorama" (1999), the world's first camera-less IMAX film, "Fetch!" (2001), a humorous take on optical illusions, and "The Stork" (2002), a commentary about overpopulation and consumerism.
In 2008, Paley generated much attention for her first feature film, Sita Sings the Blues, which interprets the Indian epic The Ramayana from Sita's perspective and compares it to Paley's own marriage struggles. Due to issues with clearing rights for the film's soundtrack, Paley has often criticized the inefficiency of copyright laws. (Perhaps this best demonstrated by her short, "Copying is Not Theft" [2009]). Currently, Paley writes the comic-strip Mimi and Eunice, and is working on a second film entitled Seder Masochism.
In order to fiancee her projects, Paley works as freelance artist. Notably, she designed the Cruzio Wireless cat logo. Paley is entirely self taught. Although she studied art at the University of Illinois, she never took any formal animation classes. Her work may seem simplistic from a technical standpoint, but her attention to detail and sense of composition makes up for it. Paley boldly tackles many controversial topics that many other animators and directors tend to gloss over or avoid, but she does so without being overly mean spirited and with a good dosage of humor.
Sita Sings the Blues proves that even Flash animation can be used creatively.
9. Brenda Chapman
Chapman is likely the best known female animator today, thanks to Brave (and the controversy surrounding it).
Brenda Chapman has certainly been in the news a lot lately, but her career in film stretches back to 1989, when she worked as a story trainee on Disney's The Little Mermaid after graduating from CalArts with BFA in character animation. Chapman served as a writer and storyboard artist for many renaissance films, such as Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). She also worked on several DreamWorks films and co-diercted The Prince of Egypt (1997), making her the first woman to direct an animated feature at a major studio.
In 2003, Brenda moved to Pixar. Five years later, it was announced that she was to direct the company's first fairytale film, The Bear and the Bow, which eventually was renamed Brave. However, Chapman was removed as director due to creative disagreements, and replaced by Mark Andrews. Despite her dissatisfaction with her removal (and move to LucasArts), Brenda was happy with the film's results, and how it remained loyal to the mother-daughter relationship she wanted to portray.
Some impressive concept art for Brave.
10. Lauren MacMullan
Lauren Macmullan (right) with producer Dorothy McKim (left) at the D23 expo.
Macmullan has directed and storyboarded for several companies over the years. Her speciality seems to be writing for television shows, as she has worked on The Critic, The Simpsons, and Avatar: The Last Airbender, which are some of the most widely acclaimed animated series ever made. Her first venture into film was The Simpsons Movie (2007), where she served as the feature's sequence director.
In 2009, Lauren began creating storyboards for the proposed Pixar film, Newt. Unfortunately, Newt never saw the light of day, due to concerns about its plot being too similar to two other animated films coming out the same year. Lauren Macmullan now seems to be content working at Disney for the time being. She storyboarded Wreck it Ralph (2012), and recently directed a short film starring Mickey Mouse, "Get a Horse!"
Macmullan is known for her use of dramatic lighting and complex facial expressions, two aspects which can often get overlooked in TV animation. Coincidentally, there are two other recent female animators of note that go by the name of Lauren: Lauren Montgomery (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Wonder Woman) and Lauren Faust (The Powerpuff Girls, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic).
This Mickey Mouse short will screen alongside Frozen in November.
Despite being largely abandoned by the late 1930s, rubber hose animation remains commonly tributed and occasionally even employed.
Why does rubber hose style animation continue to be used once in a while? It certainly has not been the norm since the mid-1930s. But there is something appealing about the free form movements, exaggerated expressions, fluid simplicity, and bizarre plotlines of early American cartoons. Some of the longest running cartoon series and most famous characters originated over 70 years ago, and still continue to influence pop culture today (i.e: Felix the Cat, Betty Boop, Popeye, Mickey Mouse). Animators John K and Michael Sporn, although having differing tastes, have often praised the early innovations (and boundless creativity) of old cartoons, on their blogs. Likewise, these older cartoons are becoming more commonly seen again, after being taken off of TV airings for many years, thanks to video sharing sites on the internet, such as Youtube and Blip. Rubber hose may be outdated or be deemed primitive, but when used creatively it can still prove entertaining. For this reason, animation today continues to make references to the style, and certain modern TV series and movies draw great influence from it as well.
Of course, most modern examples of rubber hose are done purposely to invoke nostalgia and for appealing to animation junkies. Recent episodes of The Simpsons and Futurama have parodied the style. The lead characters in The Animaniacs (1993-1998), were 1930s cartoon stars who had been locked away in the Warner water tower for many years, and were initially created to replace WB's bland character, Buddy. Foxy, Roxy, Bosko, Honey, and Goopy Geer were also featured in another Warner Brothers cartoon, Tiny Toon Adventures (1990-1995), in the episodes "Two-Tone Town'' and "Fields of Honey." Reboots of long lasting cartoon characters, utilizing a more retro rubber hose style and modern sensibilities, have also been made. The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat (1995-1997) was certainly a far wilder take on the franchise than the more kiddy '60s cartoons. Disney has recently produced two productions based off of the classic version of Mickey Mouse: "Get a Horse" (a short in the vein of the character's original cartoons), and a new TV series, blending rubber hose with newer styles, set to premie on Disney Channel.
The Animaniacs's lead characters were inspired by early cartoon characters, and the show combined classic conventions with modern humor.
Recently, Disney announced that it will be releasing new Mickey Mouse shorts more in vein of the character's original interpretation.
Not all studio output consists of simply tributes or reboots of old theatrical shorts, however. Sometimes rubber hose animation may be used for humorous effects. Elastigirl from The Incredibles (2004), has the superpower of being extremely stretchy and is able to contort her body in a wide variety of odd ways. While being based on comic book characters such as Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four and Plastic Man, Elastigirl certainly owes some of her movements to the tradition of the loose limbed animation from yesteryear (as does the anime character, Monkey D. Luffy, from One Piece). Spongebob Squarepants, being a well...sponge can also sometimes move his body in weird ways and has noodly arms and legs. Perhaps the best known of example of 'modern rubber hose', would be Adventure Time. All of the show's characters possess tube-like limbs and are simply drawn. Adventure Time's frequently bizarre, sometimes rather unsettling storylines also seem to be heavily influenced by the works of the Fleisher Brothers and Ub Iwerks. Due to Adventure Time's popularity (and perhaps as a way to make animation fluid enough for TV but keep the budget under control), several other recent series have adopted the usage of rubbery physics, including Regular Show, Sanjay and Craig, and the upcoming Wonder Over Yonder.
Strange and loose limbed, Adventure Time is clearly influenced by the physics of rubber hose.
In the independent film making crowd, rubber hose has also been utilized by many different people. Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville (France, 2003), featured a memorable sequence in its beginning were the titular characters and certain period singers and stars are drawn in an old fashioned black and white style, which is perfectly appropriate given that the triplets were music hall singers from the 1930s. The ska band Squirrel Nut Zippers made an excellent homage to the Fleisher Brothers in their music video for the song, "Ghost of Stephan Foster" (1999). A short by animator Fernando Miller, "Flea and Fly in City Troubles" (2012), was made to look like an old, worn print of a theatrical cartoon for a rather different purpose. It is used to boldly portray the real world issues of poverty and homeless childern living in the streets of Brazil. Nina Paley also seems to like rubber hose animation. The lead of her film, Sita Sings the Blues (2008), seems to be modeled off of Betty Boop. Sita also sings Annette Hanshaw jazz numbers in a similar way to how many 1930s characters incorporated popular songs into their plots.
If the above don't scream retro, nothing does.
Rubber hose animation hugely impacted the development of anime, particularly through Osamu Tezuka ('the God of Manga'), who brought us such classics as Astro Boy, Jungle Emperor Leo, Princess Knight, Black Jack, and Phoenix. Tezuka had a fondness of creating young characters with large eyes and small noses, and sometimes wrote rather strange or wacky storylines to counterbalance his more dramatic and serious ones. These elements remain fairly common in modern anime today. Tezuka even outright tributes rubber hose and plays with the audience's perception of film reality in his experimental short, "Broken Down Film" (1980). The influence of American cartoons on Japanese animation can be seen from very early on. For instance, the anime shorts "Ugokie Ko Ri No Tatehiki" (1933) and "The Routing of the Tengu"(1934), show a unique glimpse at the blending of Western and Eastern artistic styles. The video game character Sonic the Hedgehog seems to be heavily based on Western funny animals, having arms and legs that move with little regard to articulation, large conjoined eyes, white gloves, and shoes. Even Hayao Miyazaki acknowledges his love for Fleshier Studios and considers its existence one of his inspirations for becoming an animator. Miyazaki distributed the company's last film, Mr. Bug Goes To Town (1942), through the Studio Ghibli Museum library and his Laputa robot owes a lot to the Superman short, "The Mechanical Monsters" (1941). In Porco Rosso (1992), Miyazaki makes a tribute to Fleshier's rubber hose fare, when Porco is watching a cartoon in a theater that could easily be mistaken for a 1930s short.
Osamu Tezuka was clearly influenced by the style of early American cartoons.
Miyazaki is a huge Fleischer Brothers fan. Here, he tributes them in a clip from Porco Rosso.
During the 1930s, animation began to evolve as artists gained more experience and companies were allowed to make cartoons on a larger budget as the medium continued to grow in popularity. With the adoption of the Technicolor process in the earlier half of the decade, Walt Disney decided to push for more realism in the medium of animation, which had practically been unseen since the earlier work of Winsor McCay. His studio was thus the first to abandon the weightless, 'more cartoony' style of rubber hose and adopted several technical innovations to allow for a sense of realism (i.e.: the multiplane camera, detailed backgrounds, refinement of the studio system). Other companies soon followed, some reluctantly, others shamelessly copying in order to survive. As a backlash to the Disney style, 'wise-guy' and wacky, slapstick cartoons also became common, such as Looney Tunes's Daffy Duck and Walter Lantz's Woody Woodpecker. Short comedic cartoons were also common outside of Disney due to the financial risks that other companies faced in making feature length animated productions.
Disney Leads the Way
"The Tortoise and the Hare" (1935), was made only a year after "The Goddess of Spring," but is far superior technically and story-wise.
While Disney's Mickey Mouse shorts became hugely popular due to their use of sound, his Silly Symphonies series had a harder time standing out as they did not feature a consistent cast of characters, each installment being based on a different popular story or folktale. In order to garner more viewers (and to deal with the loss of animator Ub Iwerks), the company bought out the exclusive rights to have their cartoons filmed in Technicolor for several years. Disney's decision proved to be a wise won, as their first three-strip Technicolor short, "Flowers and Trees"(1932), won the first ever Academy Award for a Animated Short Subject. The use of color added a splash of realism unseen in any productions before. This pushed the company to begin focusing on more believable character animation. "The Three Little Pigs" (1933) put great emphasis on creating distinct personalities and featured heavy use of character interaction through dialogue, which no doubt contributed to its off the charts popularity. Equally important was "The Goddess of Spring" (1934), Disney's first, if rather awkward, attempt at realistic human animation. Within a year, Disney had improved their draftsmanship drastically. So much that the short, "The Tortoise and The Hare"(1935) was practically not rubber hose anymore! Perhaps the best Silly Symphony short that demonstrates this is "The Old Mill" (1937), which made great use of the multiplane camera to create a sense of depth and further believability of the cartoon's environment. Animation at Disney had become fully evolved and was ready for its next stage, feature film.
"The Pointer" (1939) marks the first appearance of Mickey's 'modern' design.
Although animated films had been made before, none of them had been made by a major Hollywood studio or filmed in color. At Hollywood, many believed that no one would be able to sit through a long cartoon, as it was thought that audiences would grow bored of slapstick gags and get annoyed with the lack of realism. So when Walt Disney announced that his studio was going to produce a film based on the fairytale Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, critics dismissed it, stating that Snow White would ruin his career and dubbed the film, "Disney's Folly." Fortunately the critics proved wrong. When the movie premiered in 1937, after three long years in production, it was widely praised for its marriage of cartoon physics and realism. Snow White proved that animation could be used to tackle a wider range of subjects than previously thought and set the trend for all other animated features to follow. Disney's projects then became even more ambitious. Pinocchio (1940) refined everything that was done previously in Snow White. Pinocchio is definitely a stronger film: its animation still holds up remarkably will today, it featured a more complex plot, and it is widely considered to be one of the company's finest productions. Within the same year, Fantasia was released. It experimented with a wide range of animation styles and artistic influences, separated by different musical interludes. Unfortunately, neither of the two films did very well financially due to the outbreak of WWII. Thus Bambi (1942), was the last true feature length animated film released by Disney up until 1950.
A Trailer for Pinocchio (1940).
And Others Follow
In order to stay competitive we must copy Disney!
Disney's success certainly did not go unnoticed by other studios. After the Silly Symphony shorts started to become commercially and critically successful, many companies began to put out their own suspiciously similar cartoons. Ub Iwerks, after leaving Disney for personal reasons, produced his Comicolor Cartoons from 1933 to 1936, which, while bland, did have artistic merit. Van Beuren, however, was largely ignored for its Rainbow Parade Cartoons (1934-1936), which largely came off as blunt Disney ripoffs and made a rather disappointing attempt to revive Felix the Cat. Harman and Ising perhaps made the most expertly crafted cartoons outside of Disney after leaving WB. Their Happy Harmonies(1934-1938) failed to be successful, but still have small sect of appreciative fans to this day. The Fleischer Brothers were reluctant to enter the 'Silly Symphony' fray, but did so with their Color Classics (1934-1941) due to executive meddling. Columbia Pictures is perhaps the most forgotten Disney imitator, as their Color Rhapsodies (1934-1939) tended to be very low budget, and the company lacked any longtime talented directors.
Of course, not all cartoon series released at the time outright copied Disney. However, every animation studio did begin to train their staff to animate more realistically and abandon rubber hose principles. An excellent example of this would be the artistic evolution that took place in Porky Pig's Looney Tunes shorts. Early on, his appearances were marked with less articulated character movements. Porky was initially a very fat young child, not the slimmer adult pig that he later became known as. His redesign increased the character's appeal and believability. Because Porky debuted in 1935, his cartoons rapidly dropped the physics associated with rubber hose, but still utilized exaggerated movements for humorous effects. Another example of a character's evolution towards 'realism' would be the Walter Lantz version of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Lantz first redesigned Oswald to be cuter, have more detailed attire, and a personality more in line with that of Mickey Mouse. By the 1940s, the rabbit became completely unlike his former self. He was aged down considerably, lost his black and white color scheme associated with the outdated rubber hose style, and drawn with consideration to realistic weight and proportions.
Walter Lantz's Oswald from the mid-1930s.
A more rabbit-like Oswald from the early 1940s.
Resistance to the Movement & The Screwballs Emerge
Popeye refuses to be like one of those 'bland Mickey cartoons' !
Not every animation studio was quick to abandon the wackiness of rubber hose, in favor of the 'cutesy,' detailed style embraced by Disney. Ub Iwerks did adopt color for his Comicolor Cartoons and pioneer the usage of the multiplane camera (which Disney later adopted). However, the characters in his shorts retained their exaggerated yet simplistic style, and the cartoons themselves were less sentimental and idealistic than Disney's Silly Symphonies were. The Fleisher Brothers held out longer than Iwerks did. Even though they abandoned Betty Boop after the implantation of the Hayes Box Office Code, the company kept making Popeye shorts which continued to perfect its own brand of rubber hose. Likewise, Fleisher's Superman series (1941-1942), while certainly different from Popeye, approached animation with a more graphical style than Disney, focusing more on fast paced action and drama. On the other hand, Looney Tunes began to increasingly refuse to make Disney clones. Instead, they opted for cartoons focusing on slapstick, parodying the cute animal character archetype common at the time. Daffy Duck (1937), Bugs Bunny (1940), and Bob Clampett's early incarnation of Tweety Bird (1942) all followed this trend.
"I'm wooking for wabbits."
Other companies soon did the same due to WB's success with zany and smart aleck funny animals. After leaving for MGM, Tex Avery gave us Screwy Squirrel (1944), a short lived, literally 'nuts' character who frequently messed with his antagonists' (and the audiences') minds when he broke the fourth wall. Avery also made many one shot cartoons, most notably "Blitz Wolf" (1942), which was a parody of Disney's "Three Little Pigs" and the war against Nazi Germany, and "Red Hot Riding Hood" (1943), which similarly parodied fairytale cartoons popular at the time by updating one for modern audiences. Avery's only consistent recurring character was Droopy Dog (1943), whom Avery loved to use to contrast deadpan humor with other worldly gags. Also at MGM, William Hannah and Joe Barbara created their comedic duo, Tom and Jerry, who first appeared in the 1940 short, "Puss Gets the Boot." Walter Lantz likewise replaced his cute star, Andy Panda, with the zany Woody Pecker, who debuted in "Knock Knock" (1940). Columbia also jumped on the bandwagon when they hired a Warner Brothers employ, Frank Tashlin, to create The Fox and the Crow in 1941. Even Terrytoons, the "Woolworth's of animation," managed to create a few icons such as Mighty Mouse (who started out as a funny animal parody of Superman), and Heckle and Jeckle, two wise cracking magpies.
Tex Avery was the opposite of Disney: wacky, over the top, and sometimes sensual.
What Happened to the Feature Film Outside of Disney?
Why was this film the last major American animated film to be released outside of Disney for many years?
Back in the late 1930s, the only animation studio rivaling the power of Disney was Fleischer Studios. Once Disney met great success with the release of Snow White, Fleischer decided that it had enough resources and the capabilities to do the same. Fleischer first released three Technicolor Popeye Specials between 1936 to 1939, each running around 15 to 20 minutes. The specials had elaborate animation and gorgeous backgrounds that where at the level of what Disney produced at the same time. The experience gained allowed Fleischer to produce its first true animated feature, Gulliver's Travels (1939). Gulliver proved to be financially successful even though it relied very heavily on the use of the rotoscope in order to animate its lead. Encouraged by their success and nomination for two Academy Awards, the Fleischer Brothers put out a second feature in 1941. Mr. Bug Goes to Town is now generally recognized as being the stronger film. It had the artistic merit equal to any of Disney's features, relied far less on the rotoscope, and had an original storyline to boot. Sadly, Mr. Bug proved to be the death knell of the studio despite all of it improvements over Gulliver.It was released two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. This led to the film being a financial disaster and the rest of its market was cut off overseas. Fleischer Studios could not deal with the debt and thus was shut down. It was bought out by Paramount and then replaced with the lower budget Famous Studios in 1942.
Before the tragedy of Fleischer Studios, several other animation companies considered making feature films. However, they became too scared after what happened to Fleischer, many had to deal with impending production costs, and their was that little issue called WWII. (The later resulted in many propaganda cartoons being made up until 1945.) Thus, competing studios adapted by making more anarchic/humor based shorts than Disney. To say that American cartoons during the 1940s-50s were nonexistent in feature film outside of Disney is not entirely correct though. Popular characters from short subjects did make the occasional cameo in live-action film (in a similar manner to Disney's Song of the South [1946]). Jerry made a memorable appearance when he danced with Gene Kelly in Anchors Awiegh (1945), and would later appear alongside Tom in Dangerous When Wet (1953). Bugs Bunny similarly popped up in a dream sequence in Two Guys from Texas (1948) and in the following year in My Dream is Yoursalongside Tweety Bird. Woody Woodpecker appeared in cartoon within Destination Moon (1950) due to producer George Pal being a friend of Walter Lantz.
Most non-Disney cartoons were reduced to cameos in feature film.
The only exception to this rule during the early 1950s was the stop-motion feature Hansel and Gretel: An Opera Fantasy (1954) which remains little known today, and sort of a cult oddity. Non-Disney American animated movies did not really start to appear again until 1959 (with the release of the Mister Magoo film, 1001 Arabian Nights)and did not really become common until the 1980s-90s (thanks to Don Bluth and the Animation Renaissance). Foreign features were slightly more common. China garnered much attention with Princess Iron Fan (1941), which while technically simplistic compared to American features of the time, greatly influenced future anime directors. Several European features were made as well, such as: Tintin's The Crab with the Golden Claws (Belgium, 1947), The King and the Mockingbird (France, 1952), Animal Farm (Britain, 1954), and The Snow Queen (Russia, 1957). It is also worth noting that Japan released its first significant animated production, Hakujaden, during this period in 1958, hinting at the country's future in the industry.
Overseas, a few quality animated films were made during the 1940s-50s.
