Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1982, 1993 by Donald C. Crafton

All rights reserved. Originally published 1982

University of Chicago Press Edition 1993

Printed in the United States of America

10 09 08 07      5 6 7

ISBN 0-226-11667-0 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-226-23102-0 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crafton, Donald.

Before Mickey : the animated film, 1898–1928/Donald Crafton ; with a new afterword. —

University of Chicago Press ed.

p.   cm.

Originally published: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT

Press, c1982.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Animated films—History.   I. Title.

NC1765.C7   1993

741.5'8'09—dc20

93-29048

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,

ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Before Mickey

The Animated Film

1898–1928

Donald Crafton

With a new Afterword

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Victor DeBann The art of the motion picture, Life, December 22, 1927; © 1927

For Elise

and

In Memory of Marilyn Crafton

Note to the 1993 Edition

A two-hour compilation video program, Before Mickey: An Animated Anthology, is available to accompany this book. The VHS cassette (NTSC format only) contains these titles.

The Enchanted Drawing, Blackton, 1900

Animated Painting, Porter, 1904

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, Blackton, 1906

Lightning Sketches, Blackton, 1907

Princess Nicotine (excerpt), Blackton, 1909

Fantasmagorie, Cohl, 1908

Clair de lune espagnol, Cohl, 1909

Little Nemo (with color sequence), McCay, 1911

Gertie, McCay, 1914

Colonel Heeza Liar at Bat, Bray Studio, 1917

Bobby Bumps Before and After, Hurd, 1918

Farmer Alfalfa’s Revenge, Terry, 1916

Out of the Inkwell: Perpetual Motion, Fleischer, 1920

’Twas But a Dream, Barré, 1916

Mutt and Jeff in the Flood, Barré and Bowers, 1918

The Gumps in Taking a Ride, Carlson, 1920

Le Garde-meuble automatique, Bosetti, 1912

Mest’ Kinematograficeskgo Operatora, Starevitch, 1912

Kapten Grogg Bland Andra Konstiga Kroppa, Bergdahl, 1920

The Lost World (animated dinosaurs excerpt), O’Brien, 1925

Alice’s Mysterious Mystery, Iwerks/Disney, 1926

Alice Rattled by Rats, Iwerks/Disney, 1925

The Lunch Hound, Lantz, 1927

Felix the Cat in The Oily Bird, Messmer/Sullivan, 1928

Felix the Cat Dines and Pines, Messmer/Sullivan, 1927

Produced by Piggyback Productions. Distributed by Direct Cinema, Ltd., P.O. Box 10003, Santa Monica, California 90410-9003. (To order, phone toll-free: 800-525-0000.)

Contents

Foreword by Otto Messmer

Preface

Animation: Myth, Magic, and Industry

1. The Secret of the Haunted Hotel

2. From Comic Strip and Blackboard to Screen

3. The First Animator: Emile Cohl

4. Watch Me Move! The Films of Winsor McCay

5. The Henry Ford of Animation: John Randolph Bray

6. The Animation Shops

7. Commercial Animation in Europe

8. Automated Art

9. Felix; or, Feline Felicity

Conclusion

Notes

Afterword, Errata, and Update

Selected Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

The qualities of the documents and frame enlargements are commensurate with those of the originals. Film companies, dates, sources, and copyright information are given in the legends.

1. (frontispiece). Victor DeBann. The Art of the Motion Picture.

2. Eugène Poyet, Le Théâtre optique d’Emile Reynaud.

3. James Stuart Blackton, The Haunted Hotel.

4. Work Made Easy (Vitagraph, 1907).

5. Blackton, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.

6. Gaston Velle and Segundo de Chomón, Le Théâtre de Petit Bob.

7. Walter R. Booth, The Sorcerer’s Scissors.

8. Christophe, Histoire sans paroles—Un Arroseur public.

9. Lumière and assistants, Arroseur et arrosé.

10. Richard F. Outcault, Ruth Henderson, and Tommy Shirley in publicity shot for the 1913 Buster Brown series.

11. a: Detail from Winsor McCay, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend. b: Edwin S. Porter, The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend.

12. James Stuart Blackton, portrait by Mrs. Blackton, 1907.

13. Edwin G. Lutz, The lightning sketcher.

14. Peinture à l’envers (Lumière), with Tom Merry.

15. Advertisement for Blackton’s lightning-sketch act, 1895.

16. Blackton, The Enchanted Drawing.

17. Anonymous, Animated Painting.

18. Brink, Windsor McCay.

19. Blackton, Lightning Sketches.

20. Emile Cohl, circa 1895.

21. Cohl, Fantasmagorie.

22. Cohl, Nos grandes inventions: Le Lit reveil-matin.

23. Cohl, Fantasmagorie.

24. Cohl, Le Retapeur de cervelles.

25. Cohl, Distant lens enchantment to the view.

26. Cohl, A diagnosis; or, looking for a bacillus.

27. Cohl, Clair de Lune espagnol.

28. Cohl, design for the articulated puppets in Le Peintre néo-impressionniste.

29. Cohl, Le Peintre néo-impressionniste.

30. a: Draner, Arts incohérents. b: Cohl, Le Peintre néo-impressionniste.

31. Publicity for He Loves to Watch the Flight of Time.

32. Cohl, Le Rêve d’un garçon de café.

33. Winsor McCay, original drawing for Gertie.

34. Winsor McCay, circa 1908.

35. McCay, Little Sammy Sneeze.

36. Lumière and assistants, Le Repas de Bébé.

37. W. K. L. Dickson, Edison kinetoscopic record of a sneeze.

38. McCay, Hungry Henrietta.

39. Scenes from the play Little Nemo in Slumberland.

40. Advertisement for Winsor McCay ("Little Nemo").

41. McCay, Little Nemo.

42. McCay, The Story of a Mosquito.

43. McCay, Gertie. a: McCay and George McManus. b: McCay at sketchboard. c: Gertie meets Jumbo.

44. McCay, The Sinking of the Lusitania.

45. McCay and Robert McCay, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend: The Pet.

46. McCay and Robert McCay, Dream of a Rarebit Fiend: The Flying House.

47. a: McCay, Little Nemo. b: Detail from Little Nemo in Slumberland. c: Detail from Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.

48. a: Sir John Tenniel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. b: J.-J. Grandville, Un Autre Monde.

49. Detail from McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland.

50. Detail from Zim, Jersey Skeeter.

51. a: McCay, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, from Dream Days. b: McCay, Midsummer Day Dreams, from Dream Days.

52. Details from McCay, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.

53. McCay, Midsummer Day Dreams, from Dream Days.

54. Detail from McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland.

55. John Randolph Bray, 1917.

56. Bray, Little Johnny and the Teddy Bears.

57. Bray, U.S. patent 1,107,193 (detail).

58. Bray, U.S. patent 1,159,740 (detail).

59. Earl Hurd, U.S. patent 1,143,452 (detail).

60. Paramount-Bray Pictograph advertisement, 1917.

61. Artists of the Bray animated cartoon staff.

62. Max Fleischer, in Perpetual Motion, breathing life into the inkblot clown.

63. Max Fleischer, U.S. patent 1,142,674 (detail).

64. Advertisement for Out of the Inkwell.

65. Advertisement for Happy Hooligan.

66. Gregory La Cava, 1924.

67. Walter Lantz, advertisement for the Goldwyn-Bray Comic.

68. Lantz, The Lunch Hound.

69. Raoul Barré, Quatre-Vingt-Treize.

70. Bill Nolan, drawings illustrating the slash system.

71. Advertisement for Mutt and Jeff.

72. Figure showing details of the construction of a camera stand for making animated cartoons and diagrams, from Carl Gregory, A Condensed Course in Motion Picture Photography.

73. Perspective runs, diagrams from Edwin Lutz, Animated Cartoons.

74. Walt Disney, 1921.

75. Margaret J. Winkler Mintz, 1924.

76. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Steamboat Willie.

77. Advertisement for Les Dessins Animés de Raoul Barré.

78. Advertisement for La Série Comique Charles Chaplin, based on drawing by Otto Messmer.

79. Arthur Melbourne Cooper, Dreams of Toyland.

80. Harry Furniss, 1912.

81. Lancelot Speed, Bully Boy.

82. O’Galop, Le Circuit de l’alcool.

83. Lortac, Statuette-charge.

84. Lortac, La Tuberculose menace tout le monde.

85. Walther Ruttmann, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt.

86. Bushkin, Ivanov, and Beliakov, Soviet Toys.

87. Ladislas Starevitch, circa 1920.

88. Starevitch, The Cameraman’s Revenge.

89. Starevitch, Les Grenouilles qui demandent un roi.

90. Lotte Reiniger working on Prince Achmed, Berlin, circa 1920.

91. Reiniger, Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed.

92. Benjamin Rabier, advertisement for Les Fiançailles de Flambeau.

93. Victor Bergdahl, Kapten Grogg bland andra konstiga kroppa.

94. George Ernest Studdy, Bonzo.

95. (Attributed to Bray Studio), Gertie the Dinosaur.

96. Harry S. Palmer, Professor Bonehead is Shipwrecked.

97. Henry Hy Mayer, circa 1922.

98. Willie Hopkins, Swat the Fly.

99. Disney, Laugh-o-Gram.

100. Poster for Colonel Heeza Liar’s Frigid Frolic.

101. a: Bray, Colonel Heeza Liar Hobo. b: Leslie Elton (?), Colonel Heeza Liar at Bat. c: Vernon Stallings, Colonel Heeza Liar’s Forbidden Fruit.

102. a: Hugh Shields, Rats in His Garrett. b: Shields, Two Slick Trappers.

103. Lantz, Dinky Doodles in the Hunt.

104. Wallace A. Carlson, Dreamy Dud: He Resolves not to Smoke.

105. Earl Hurd, advertisement for Bobby Bumps’ World Serious.

106. a: Disney and Iwerks, Alice Rattled by Rats. b: Disney and Iwerks, Alice Cans the Cannibals.

107. Barré, advertisement for Bunkum’s Boarding House.

108. Robert Sidney Smith and Old Doc Yak, 1913.

109. Paul Terry, announcement for Aesop’s Fables.

110. Max and Dave Fleischer, Ko-Ko the Cop.

111. Disney and Iwerks, advertisement for Oswald.

112. Proto-Mickeys. a: Shields, Rats in his Garrett. b: Disney and Iwerks, Alice Rattled by Rats.

113. Otto Messmer (left) and Pat Sullivan, 1928.

114. Otz (Otto) Messmer, Back to Nature.

115. Messmer, advertisement showing original design for Felix.

116. Tad, advertisement for Tad’s Cat.

117. Terry, Henry the Cat.

118. Sullivan and Messmer, Flim Flam Films.

119. The Sullivan Studio in 1928: Pat Sullivan, Otto Messmer, Raoul Barré, Dana Parker, Hal Walker, Al Eugster, Jack Boyle, George Cannata, Tom Byrne, and Alfred Thurber.

120. Display of Felix the Cat dolls, Liggett’s Drug Store, Grand Central Terminal, New York, 1926.

121. Edouard Manet, Le Rendez-vous des chats, lithograph, 1869.

122. Rudyard Kipling, The Cat that Walked by Himself.

123. Sullivan and Messmer, Felix Dines and Pines.

124. Sullivan and Messmer, The Non-Stop Fright.

125. Sullivan and Messmer, Pedigreedy.

126. Sullivan and Messmer, Sure-Locked Homes.

127. a: Sullivan and Messmer, Felix Gets the Can. b: Sullivan and Messmer, Felix Dines and Pines.

128. a: Sullivan and Messmer, Felix Dines and Pines. b: Sullivan and Messmer, Felix Trifles With Time.

129. Sullivan and Messmer, Felix Revolts.

130. a: Sullivan and Messmer, Felix Dines and Pines. b: Sullivan and Messmer, Sure-Locked Homes.

131. Sullivan and Messmer, Felix Woos Whoopee.

132. Sullivan and Messmer, Oceanantics.

133. Sullivan and Messmer, Pedigreedy.

Foreword

In 1916 I joined Pat Sullivan, who was animating Sammy Johnsin for Universal. He worked alone with one inker, and I did various one-shot cartoons for him. In 1919 I created a character which Paramount named Felix the Cat. I used the style of Charlie Chaplin and kept him alone in his antics, unhampered by supporting characters. Being a loner, he could roam to various locations, without being limited to any fixed place.

At the time many cartoons were using ostentatious actions and extreme clowning. They were all good, but I decided to try a new angle for variety: I used real life as a background for stories. I gave Felix a personality, using many facial expressions. He would be a pet in many homes and businessplaces, solving many seemingly impossible problems with ingenious picture gags and always leaving a happy ending. He would influence young children by exemplifying kindness and lending a helping hand to others. He would fulfill many wishes, such as forcing the weatherman to send sunshine in foul weather. All this was done by handling a serious theme in a comic fashion.

Looking back, we see a door opening slightly on a road that led to a new field of visual arts.

Otto Messmer

Preface

This is the first book to concentrate on the origins and early development of the animated film, so it ends where many accounts of the history of cartoons have begun: with Walt Disney’s first spectacular successes. Even in the most comprehensive studies, those by Rondolino and Poncet, this period has been given short shrift. The authors clearly have regarded the works as being significant as forerunners, but as having little intrinsic interest. A vague technological determinism hovers over their discussion of cels and studios. Casual statements about the animated cartoon’s obvious relation to comic-strip art pepper the texts. Seldom is there any discussion of animation’s relationship to cinema as a whole; rather, it is treated as autonomous or as a mutant strain of graphic art. Misleading auteur and formalist biases have caused about 95 percent of pre-1928 animation to be cast aside as irrelevant. The passing along of anecdotes and hearsay from earlier writing has too often replaced film viewing and documentation.

When I began the research for this book in 1975 I found that the most basic groundwork of locating archival sources, ascertaining dates for films and events, learning the circumstances of production and distribution, and attributing early films had only just begun, led by André Martin, Bruno Edera, and Mike Barrier. Since then work has progressed rapidly, but I hope my book does not create the illusion that much does not remain to be done. I also hope that historians will go beyond the mere facts and study the enterprise of early animation. In this book I have tried to set it against the background of the industrial and cultural environment of the time. It is now clear that the formal structures of the films reflected many sources and influences, including technology, the commercial pressures of the film industry (distributors, audiences, the competition), traditions in other popular arts, individual personalities of animators, and the narrative habits (shortcut formulas for telling stories in films two to five minutes in length) dictated by the filmmaker’s means and expertise. I do not pretend to have unraveled this complicated dialectic fabric entirely, but it is an essential part of the study of the genre.

Some people will no doubt be surprised to learn that there was any animation at all before Mickey. In fact, there was so much that I had trouble assimilating it. No one can see more than a fraction of the thousands of films produced during this period; prints simply no longer exist. But more early animation is available commercially and in research archives than many people imagine. I have viewed as much as possible, and have also paged through dozens of trade journals published in Britain, France, and the United States. The quantity of material necessitated some decisions that might be seen as shortcomings. There are few personal anecdotes about the lives and careers of animators related here. To some extent this is justified by the fact that during the studio years it was assumed that the system, not the employees, was important. Also, forthcoming books by Mike Barrier on the history of animation and by Michael Hobbs on Max Fleischer are expected to fill the gaps. Leslie Cabarga’s book on the Fleischers and Bob Thomas’s on Disney contribute insights into their lives. Some lack of continuity may have been introduced by not adhering to a studio-by-studio approach of the type outlined by André Martin in his family tree wall chart. But Leonard Maltin’s highly readable Of Mice and Magic, which appeared as the manuscript of this book was going to the press, seems to be primarily a studio history. For me the major shortcoming is the lack of extended analysis of specific films, but refraining was judged to be a regrettable necessity. And although the book treats a film genre’s history, there is no detailed discussion of genre theory.

My documentary-theoretical methods required considerable travel, made possible originally by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and assorted Yale University fellowships. Primary research was done in London, Paris, New York, and Rochester.

The gods smile on film historians. As proof, quite by accident I found an apartment six floors above Jean Tedesco’s former Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris, scene of so many cinema milestones. Only later (through Lotte Eisner) did I learn that I was living in the old atelier of Berthold Bartosch, the pioneer animator whose L’Idée was made in my living room in 1934. This extraordinary bit of fortune prepared me for my continuing luck in meeting people who helped shape my research materially and conceptually.

The length of American acknowledgements is a source of amusement to European scholars; nevertheless, I feel obliged to list those whose ideas and information helped form my thoughts.

Anne Hanson and Standish Lawder gave me initial encouragement. In Europe, Jeremy Boulton, Jacques Ledoux, Torsten Jungstedt, Mlle. Mathieu, Henri Langlois, Frantz and Nicole Schmitt, Jacques Deslandes, the Courtet family, Raymond Maillet, Marie Epstein, Mary Meerson, and Jean Adhémar made my stay profitable. Genevieve Acker and Lotte Eisner made it pleasant.

In North America, Ted Perry, Charles Silver, Marshall Deutelbaum, David Shepard, Eileen Bowser, Louise Beaudet, Anthony Slide, Mark Langer, Harvey Deneroff, and Paul Bray, Jr., all performed valuable services for me.

Donna D. Clarke and Caroline Bruzelius translated important texts for me. Other translations from French and German are mine. Very special thanks go to John Cane-maker, for lending me documents and reading the manuscript, and to Mike Barrier, editor of Funnyworld, who offered valuable notes, comments, and corrections. I am also grateful to the veteran animators who were kind enough to share their memories with me: Al Eugster, I. Klein, Shamus Culhane, Friz Freleng, and especially Otto Messmer. In addition to archival sources, many of the films I studied came from private collectors. Special thanks go to Murray Glass, whose Em Gee Film Library circulates the largest collection of commercially available silent animation. I appreciate his generosity.

The rights to the Felix the Cat character are controlled by Joe Oriolo Productions, Incorporated, and King Features Syndicate.

Dudley Andrew, Robert Herbert, and Walter Cahn have assisted me in many ways. Polly Bobroff unveiled the secrets of word processing to me. My department’s front-office staff is not to be forgotten, especially Trina Josephson for her transcriptions. Thanks also to the staff of the MIT Press.

And Marilyn Crafton knows what she contributed to this book, and how thankful I am that she did.

Before Mickey

Animation: Myth, Magic, and Industry

In December 1927 the New York humor magazine Life published a witty drawing that documents the average moviegoer’s regard for animated cartoons at the dawn of the talkies (see figure 1, the frontispiece). The eight panels show two typical New Yorkers arriving for their weekly night at the show. The glistening architecture of the picture palace (probably the new Roxy) dwarfs them as they are ushered into the lofty third balcony. When the picture begins, it is not The Student Prince, Sunrise, Wings, Underworld, or another current hit, nor does the artist choose to depict Fairbanks, Chaplin, or Garbo. Instead he has Felix the Cat pounce into view, to the obvious delight of the laughing couple. The drawing’s caption is tongue-in-cheek: The Art of the Motion Picture.

Felix’s ironic presence punctures the opera-house pretensions of the grandiose theater architecture, with its fake gilt plaster ornamentation and its walls hung with paintings. By implication, the highbrow reputation that intellectuals and critics were self-consciously ascribing to the cinema in the 1920s is also being undermined. Felix, the satirist is saying, is the real art of the cinema.

At the same time the drawing affirms what it parodies; its very existence indicates the attraction felt toward cartoons by artists of the modern persuasion. This bold design, looking forward to art deco, underscores a conception of film—and Felix—as the imagery of modernism.

Felix’s following had grown steadily, commencing around 1922 when Life’s regular critic Robert E. Sherwood had already placed the cat alongside Chaplin, Keaton, and Sennett in his pantheon of cinematographic art.¹ Five years later, by the time of the drawing, Felix had become a ubiquitous fixture of the jazz age, loved by children as a cuddly cat and by adults as a being who shared their own feelings, frustrations, and fantasies, perhaps in his role as a henpecked husband, a doting father, or a philandering speakeasy reveler.

This book appreciates that intelligent and mature adults could participate in a ritual wherein a pen-and-ink representation of a cat is endowed with real status at least as great as that of the screen images of human actors. Clearly, audiences recognized their own behavior in Felix’s and attributed to him the foibles of the human species. Moreover, they perceived in these animated drawings a personality—not just a character or a type, but an individual with his own quirks of appearance and behavior that distinguished him from all others. Felix’s charisma was so subtly defined that he proved inimitable, although the audience was aware of a half-dozen inferior competitors. In the 30-year history of animation this book retraces, the primary concern will be to understand how this individualization process developed to the extent that it did, in the times when it did.

Animation, let alone silent animation, is admittedly a minor branch of the history of cinema. Furthermore, in comparison with mainstream filmmaking in the silent period, it was not commercially important. Film distributors (and alas, until recently, film collectors) tended to regard these cartoons as material better suited for the dustbin than for any other repository. More recently, film scholars have tended to ignore early animation or to condemn it to the domain of film-buffism. Although it can be easily dismissed as esoteric or trivial, we shall also see that this not-so-serious subject can sustain serious consideration from the perspective of film history, cultural history, or industrial history. This is not an easy task. The growth of the animated film was erratic, the quality uneven, and the documentation unreliable. It is a frustrating yet wonderfully variegated area of study, out of which eventually emerges an aesthetically coherent body of work.

Any history must have an arbitrary beginning and end. A terminal event was easy enough to choose. Just when the Life cartoon was arriving at newsstands, Walt Disney, a young cartoon producer from California, was in New York learning the unhappy news that his distributor was forcing him to relinquish control of Oswald, a series he had created. Out of this personal calamity a new mouse character was developed, and when Steamboat Willie opened at the Colony Theater in New York, on November 18, 1928, Disney knew he had made the Jazz Singer of animation. Soon Mickey, synchronized sound, and color would launch the modern age of cartoons, with Disney swept along as a kind of mass-culture deity in the 1930s. It is understandable that along the way to Disney’s apotheosis the earlier achievements of other animators were brusquely swept aside, and that their films were considered obsolete and then forgotten.

Steamboat Willie provides a convenient end bracket, capping the silent period and heralding the glorious 1930s and 1940s, but no similar arbitrary event signaled the beginnings of animation history. No one knows who first discovered that screen motion could be deliberately synthesized by making single-frame exposures. It is likely that many tinkerers had some vague feeling that such a process was possible and may even have made some crude experiments. However, the earliest date at which animation was first commercially exploited was 1898, and although even this cannot be documented that year will be our starting point.

One certainty is that animated cinema could not have existed before the cinema came into being around 1895. Here I depart from the traditional presentation of the subject, which invariably begins with litanies of precursors, often extending back to hieroglyphic friezes, Chinese scrolls, or the Bayeux tapestry. There are references to Kircher’s 1646 treatise on magic lanterns; to Robert’s Fantascope, which scared eighteenth-century Parisians; to Skladanowsky’s rapidly projected slides; to the shadow plays of the Cabaret du Chat Noir; and to a hundred other optical curiosities.² But, technologically, the prehistory of cinema and animation are inseparable. One premise of this book is that the animated film is a subspecies of film in general. Its history coincides with film history at large, running parallel, weaving in and out. Thus, the old-fashioned attempts to animate pictures at best represent common ancestors, which were soon supplanted once photographic motion-picture-making became available.

The example of Emile Reynaud (1844–1918), who has misleadingly been called the father of the animated cartoon, illustrates how little the first cartoonists were indebted to this optical tradition. A teacher of mathematics and science, Reynaud thought of a way to improve on the fashionable persistence-of-vision parlor toys that had been marketed since the 1830s. Originally created by Plateau and Stampfer to demonstrate the mind’s ability to combine discrete images into an illusion of motion, these phenakistoscopes, stroboscopes, and zoetropes all required the viewer to peep through rotating slits. Reynaud’s praxinoscope substituted a cluster of revolving mirrors, which reflected drawings on a horizontal band placed inside a revolving drum. Because the viewer did not look through moving slits, he had an illusion of relatively smooth flickerless motion. Soon (in 1879) Reynaud refined the praxinoscope theater, in which the moving drawings were superimposed onto scenery inside a little proscenium. This tabletop theater was in turn transformed into an audience-oriented spectacle in 1892 when Reynaud opened his Théâtre optique at the Musée Grévin wax museum in Paris. He rear-projected his pantomimes lumineuses onto a screen by means of a complicated mirror-and-lens system (figure 2). The images were hand-painted on long strips of transparent celluloid. Because his apparatus utilized many general principles of cinema, and because he projected moving pictures to an audience, Reynaud may be justifiably considered a forerunner of cinema. But his actual contribution to the history of the animated film is more romantic than real. Conceptually his programs were not far removed from nineteenth-century lantern shows, and there is no sign that his charming Pierrot plays influenced any of the early animators. Reynaud’s method of drawing directly on film had little instruction to offer. It is unlikely that any of the pioneers of animation patronized his productions at the Musée Grévin (which, after all, were replaced by cinematographic projections after about 1900), or even knew of his work.

As many pioneers of animation later recalled, it was not any of these optical devices that inspired them. Rather, it was flipbooks—sequential drawings that produced an illusion of motion when thumbed—that first whetted their curiosity. The widely published motion-study photographs of Muybridge and Marey provided all the data needed for the analysis and reconstruction of movement image by image.

Significantly, the first animated films were concerned with making objects appear to move with a mysterious life of their own—what we would now call tabletop animation.

Figure 2.

Eugène Poyet, Le Théâtre optique d’Emile Reynaud, La Nature, July 23, 1892.

Chapter 1 peers into this mysterious aura and discovers that it arose from a combination of myth and marketing. It was nearly a decade until cartoons—animated drawings—became recognizable. Chapter 2 examines the problematic relationship of these films to other popular traditions, including comic strips, stage, and journalism. Direct iconographic links to precinematic optical traditions are