by Cal Meacham
As the father of a four year old, I get to watch a lot of Disney movies and other children’s flicks. Over and over and over and over and over and OVER. And then I get to watch them again. Fortunately, a lot of these stand up to repeated viewings, but with all these repeated viewings, you begin to pick up on details and nuances you hadn’t noticed before. My wife has found surprising details in The Wizard of Oz I had been completely unaware of, and she detects a subtle anti-feminism in Mary Poppins that makes it hard for her to watch. I, on the other hand, notice overall trends. And one that has struck me with particular force is the over-representation of Inventors.
In A Bug’s Life, Flick is an ant inventor, trying to make life easier for his fellow food-gatherers. In Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Belle is the local Inventor’s Daughter (!!! – in eighteenth century France! How many professional Inventors could there have been?) Inventors have been a Disney staple for years – The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, Flubber, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes – but, as I thought about it, I realized that inventors were far too common in children’s features, especially in cartoons, and in comic books and strips.
The Betty Boop cartoons made by the Fleischer Studios in the thirties featured a character named “Grampy”, who would, before the end of the cartoon, be faced by a dilemma. He’d put on his thinking cap – a wonderful device that looked like a college mortar-board cap for graduation, surmounted by an oversized light bulb. Grampy would sit down with his Thinking Cap on, holding his chin and muttering sotto voce in the characteristic Fleischer cartoon style, getting several false starts before finally hitting on the solution. At this point, the bulb would light up, the metaphor made literal, and spring into frenzied activity. In the 1936 cartoon Christmas Comes but Once a Year Grampy serves up a Christmas for an orphanage full of unhappy kids, improvising toys from junk, making it snow indoors (years before Real Genius) by attaching soap to the pendulum of a clock and having it rub against a grater. In 1933’s Betty Boop’s Birthday Party he improvises a band, popping the connections off a gas manifold to make a flute, attaching it to the steam radiator for an air supply, and tying up two gloves to play it, using a fan to move the gloves.
There are plenty of other examples of such inventors – Ross Bagdasarian’s Clyde Crashcup. The current Dexter’s Laboratory. Nickelodeon’s Jimmy Neutron. Foghorn Leghorn’s nemesis Poindexter in the Warner Bothers cartoons. And there are plenty of examples of non-inventors in the cartoons doing their share of inventing, using household items for unusual purposes. Mickey Mouse started off in his first sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, using animal parts as instruments. Felix the Cat had done the same sort of thing years earlier, taking the question mark that appeared above his head to indicate puzzlement, and using it as a fish hook. Impromptu invention has been constant, in all studios, ever since the beginning.
There has been a lot of it in the comic strips, as well. Rube Goldberg virtually built a career out of improbable and needlessly complex inventions. A 1950’s comic book called The Brain was filled with such inventions (like a hose full of running hot water, used as a heated blanket in the winter), an encouraged readers to send in suggestions. The Catholic comic book Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact ran Goldbergesque inventions, and also encouraged reader suggestions. Duck Cartoonist extraordinaire came up with inventor Gyro Gearloose for his Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge adventures. Cartoonist Al Jaffee has been doing pieces on absurd inventions in Mad magazine since the 1960s.
Inventors and inventions are common today, of course, but they weren’t always so. That’s what makes the inventors in Beauty and the Beast and A Bug’s Life so jarring. A primitive gatherer society like the ants in Bug’s Life really couldn’t tolerate a wacky inventor. Such societies are barely above subsistence (and, besides, they have that Seven Samurai-like gang of grasshoppers to feed), and would be extremely conservative. When the choice is between getting enough food to stay alive (by using the time-honored methods of food production) and possibly earning some extra free time (by using Flick’s innovative but risky harvesting machine), the risky invention loses every time. (Notice that I am bothered by the choices this primitive society makes, but not by talking insects, or by four-legged ants.)
In fact, in any such society ruled by a king or queen, it’s in the ruler’s best interests to quash most inventions – they risk time and food, and at best they grant the peasants extra time, which doesn’t benefit the ruler at all.
Clearly the animator’s aren’t trying to accurately depict life. They’re producing moving drawings of inventors and inventions because they’re visually interesting, and they’re making the invention outrageous because they’re funny. Stand-up comedians have used wacky inventions as part of the act for a long time – Ed Wynn used to do it. Peter Schikele came up with ridiculous musical instruments (The Windbreaker, The Horn and Hardart) as part of his P.D.Q. Bach act. Joel Hodgson was using it long before he started Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the Invention Exchange was a regular feature on that show, continuing even after he left. Carrot-Top and other prop comedians rely upon such odd inventions. Ludicrously complex or absurdly inappropriate inventions are funny.
The inventions in cartoons are different, though. They are even more complex than these props. The divine gift of animation lets the animator show the invention defying the laws of physics to accomplish its end. In the Real World, Grampy can’t really tie two gloves to pieces of string, animate them with kitchen fan, and expect them to play melodies on his improvised flute. But in the world of cartoons it’s not only possible, but expected. It’s outrageous to expect soap shavings from a single bar to create an indoor blizzard, but it’s because of that very impossibility that the gag works.
This is one reason that animators are so drawn to absurd and complex inventions – they provide an excuse to show how something complex moves. The essence of cartoons is the depiction of motion, it’s properties and characteristics. It’s not the ability of the animated cartoon to bestow apparent life on talking anthropomorphic cats, dogs, and mice that draws people to it. It’s the ability to show the way they move. To quote animation historian Joe Adamson: “…An animated character seems unwilling to go from the corner of the room to the door without enduring dramatic transformations of form and texture, undergoing insidious insurrections in all known joints, losing and regaining a generous portion of his clothes, and assuming every split second a new posture more appropriate to some victim of a hard-boiled fit of the ague. He never just walks over, unless the guy at the drawing board has abandoned him.” (Tex Avery, King of Cartoons, 1975, p. 15)
Case in point: Chuck Jones’ Coyote an Road Runner. At first glance, you might think that this is just a series of jokes about the obsessed Coyote using increasingly complex inventions (another inventor!) to capture pretty dismal little meal, and being perpetually thwarted. But the real humor, the real joy of this series lies in the way that rubber-bodied Coyote moves in setting up his schemes, or reacting to their failure. If you don’t believe me, compare any of the early (late forties to mid 1950s) Chuck Jones Roadrunner cartoons to the later made-for-TV efforts of fellow Warner Brothers artist/director Friz Freleng. (I don’t mean to put Freleng down – he’s the underappreciated workhorse of the Warner pantheon, and probably made an awful lot more cartoons for them than Jones or Clampett. But the Roadrunner series wasn’t his style, and, when he made them for TV, he had neither the time nor the budget to do it right.) There’s no comparison. Jones’ coyote indulges in bits of business, makes false starts, registers dismay with a droop of his nose. The later coyote just does stuff, without flourishes. A good gag will make you laugh in one of those cartoons, but the way the coyote moves won’t.
So when, in a Jones cartoon, the coyote propels himself along in a vehicle that consists of a balloon holding up a garbage can with a fan attached to the side blowing against a sail to give it impetus, we can laugh at it on several levels. The damned thing won’t work, in the first place. The merging of all of these disparate parts into a single operating device is another – The Coyote didn’t just buy a Powered Hot Air Balloon, after all, he put it together from inappropriate parts. (And all of them from the Acme Corporation. Which brings up its own associations – why the hell does Acme sell stuff like Earthquake Pills? How can the coyote afford to keep buying it? Why doesn’t he just buy food from Acme instead of chasing the Impossible Bird?) You get to see the different arts moving in their own individual ways – the fan turning and struggling, the balloon fighting upwards against the unaccustomed weight of coyote, barrel, and fan. The way the balloon ultimately bursts, and the coyote’s reaction to it all. If you did all of this in Jay Ward limited animation it wouldn’t work at all.
So, in part, animators sought out complex inventions because they provided exactly the sort of material upon which they could practice their skills of characterization through motion that they excelled at. The kind that got laughs, and, ultimately, requests for more cartoons.
But there’s another part to animator’s interest in inventions. The animators were themselves avid inventors. In the early days, this as inevitable – the field was too new, and so many things had to be invented. Earl Hurd, working a Bray studios, invented the animation “cel” (transparent cellulose acetate sheets) in 1914. This allowed animators to draw the motion of their characters without having to draw the background for every frame (as Winsor McKay did in “Gertie the Dinosaur”).
Max Fleischer invented the Rotoscope (U.S. Patent # 1,242,674), which has been used (at least for studies) by all the major studios. The Rotoscope was a device that projected motion pictures, a frame at a time, onto a drawing board, here an artist could sketch it. The Fleischer brothers’ first “Koko the Clown” cartoons were made by filming brother Dave in a suit he’d made years earlier for a stint as a clown at Steeplechase Park at Coney Island.(In later years, of course, Koko was fully animated.) The use of the Rotoscope has become controversial. Some think that it was “cheating”, and animator Preston Blair swore he never used one. Ralph Bakshi has used the technique excessively (for instance, in his adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings”). But the tracing of photographs is a common and honorable technique for learning to draw the human figure, so why condemn the Rotoscope? In any event, Rotoscoping was widely used. Fleischer heard that Disney used such a device for parts of “Snow White”, and considered suing. Until, that is, he learned that a similar device was used by Bosworth, Defresnes, and Felton of Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania, preceding his own patent by several years.
Max Fleischer was in just the right position to invent such device. He’d been an editor at Popular Science Monthly. His interest in things technical is shown by his employment by the Army in World War I to make technical instruction films for mine layers and mortars. In 1923, he made a film explaining Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, guided by some of Einstein’s associates. He later made a film explaining Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. (Although Max’ name is on the Rotoscope patent, proper consideration should be given to Dave Fleischer – who directed many of he cartoons and claimed great technical knowledge of plotting, and of Joe, who actually built the first rotoscopes, and apparently knew them better than Max, and of Lou.)
Later, in an effort to make their cartoons more “real”, the Fleischers invented what they called the Rotograph” (Patent # 2,054,414) . This was a turntable upon which was constructed a three-dimensional set. A camera was set up to photograph this model as it rotated. A vertically-mounted clamp system held the animation cels in front, so that, when the film was developed, the cartoon characters appeared to be walking through the 3-D landscape. The images this process produced were impressive. It was used to good effect in the (relatively) big budget color two-reeler “Popeye Meets Sinbad the Sailor”.
Meanwhile, Disney’s studio had invented it own device for placing animated characters into a three-dimensional scene. Disney and Ub Iwerks invented the Multiplane Camera (Patent # 2,201,689), in which several different planes could be photographed simultaneously. Each different level consists of a cel or painted glass, rather than the sculpted solid model the Fleischers used. By moving the different levels of background at different rates, a very realistic scene with apparently true depth could be created. This was first used in the 1937 short “The Old Mill”, and saw use in most f the Disney features. The opening to “Bambi” is an extended Multiplane shot, tracking over a forest scene. The flight of the Darling children over London in “Peter Pan” was achieved in part using a Multiplane sequence. One advantage the Multiplane camera had over the Rotograph was that it seems to have been easier to line up and predict the actions of characters over the background.
The use of “dimensional” animation of clay or rubber models required the development of new processes, as well, especially in shots combining such models with live performers. In the making of such films as “The Lost World” (1925), “King Kong” (1933) and “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” new techniques such as miniature rear-projection, Front- and Back-projection, and Dynamation/Dynarama had to be invented or perfected.
Not all animators were inventors, but several of the great animators and directors wore several hats, combining the ability to handle the technical aspects as well as the artistic aspects of the work, being actor and director. And they knew that to best exploit the medium and capture and hold the attention of the audience they had to fill the screen with interesting and original motion. Because of that knowledge they fell back on something of great interest to them to fill the gaps – they made their heroes inventors, like themselves.
Bibliography
Cabarga, Leslie The Fleischer Story (Revised edition, 1988) DaCapo Press, N.Y.
Adamson, Joe Tex Avery: King of Cartoons (1975) Popular Library, N.Y.
Rovin, Jeff From the Land Beyond Beyond (1977) Berkeley, N.Y.
Goldner, Orville and Turner, George E. The Making of King Kong (1975) Ballantine, N.Y.
http://www.geocities.com/argussventon/cartoondistributors/paramount/paramount.html
http://www.digitalmediafx.com/Features/animationhistory.html