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Momotarō no Umiwashi (桃太郎の海鷲, literally Momotarō's Sea Eagles) is an animated Japanese propaganda film produced in 1942 by Geijutsu Eigasha and released March 25, 1943. Running at 37 minutes, it was close to being feature-length, but it was not the first animated feature film in Asia; that honor goes to China's 1941 Princess Iron Fan, which was 73 minutes long. A DVD version without English subtitles was released in Japan by Kinokuniya Shoten in 2004; one with subtitles was released in the United States by Zakka Films in 2009. Although recorded as being produced with the cooperation of the Japanese Naval Ministry, there was in fact no cooperation in order to protect military secrets, although the Japanese Imperial Navy endorsed the film. Featuring the "Peach Boy" character of Japanese folklore, this film was aimed at children, telling the story of a naval unit consisting of the human Momotarō and several animal species representing the Far Eastern races fighting together for a common goal. In a dramatization of the attack on Pearl Harbor, this force attacks the demons at the island of Onigashima (representing the Americans and British demonized in Japanese propaganda), and the film also utilizes actual footage of the Pearl Harbor attack. A sequel, Momotarō Umi no Shinpei (1945) also exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momotar%C5%8D_no_Umiwashi

In the wake of the Disney animators’ strike of 1941, several staff members left the company. Among them was John Hubley, who believed that the medium of animation was constrained by Disney’s painstaking approach to realism. Hubley joined the emerging United Productions of America studio, where he would go on to create the iconic Mr. Magoo. He, together with other animators, would also break the mold in American animation and prove that animation could have as much variety as the imagination allows. UPA introduced the concept of “limited animation,” which brought a modernist design to the medium. The studio used single blocks of solid color and a few lines to indicate a location, influenced by the flattened perspectives and bright colors of Picasso, Matisse, and other modern painters. This style would later be associated with Hanna-Barbera, which used the technique to save time and money, but it was UPA that made the choices that changed how animation was perceived. The creativity that was possible using limited animation was evident in Gerald McBoing-Boing, a short about a boy cursed to speak only in sound effects. Produced by Hubley, directed by Bobe Cannon, and based on a story by Dr. Seuss, this short is the perfect showcase for the UPA style, masterfully using limited animation to deliver a modernist film that captures mood through a limited color palette and seamless editing between scenes. The short’s best transition comes after the titular Gerald gets home after being bullied at school. The color palette shifts to reflect his dejection, and when he runs away from home, he finds himself surrounded by black, a backdrop that evokes the woodcut backgrounds of the illustrator Lynd Ward. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html UPA was founded in the wake of the Disney animators' strike of 1941, which resulted in the exodus of a number of long-time Walt Disney Animation Studios staff members. Among them was John Hubley, a layout artist who was unhappy with the ultra-realistic style of animation that Disney had been utilising. Along with a number of his colleagues, Hubley believed that animation did not have to be a painstakingly realistic imitation of real life; they felt that the medium of animation had been constrained by efforts to depict cinematic reality. Chuck Jones' 1942 cartoon The Dover Boys had demonstrated that animation could freely experiment with character design, depth, and perspective to create a stylized artistic vision appropriate to the subject matter. Hubley, Bobe Cannon, and others at UPA, sought to produce animated films with sufficient freedom to express design ideas considered radical by other established studios. In 1943, Zack Schwartz, David Hilberman, and Stephen Bosustow formed a studio called first Industrial Film and Poster Service (later known as United Productions of America), where they were free to apply their new techniques in film animation. Finding work (and income) in the then-booming field of wartime work for the government, the small studio produced a cartoon sponsored by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 1944. Hell-Bent for Election was directed by Chuck Jones and was produced for the reelection campaign of FDR. The film was a success, and it led to another assignment from the UAW, Brotherhood of Man (1945). The film, directed by Bobe Cannon, advocated tolerance of all people. The short was innovative not only in its message but in its very flat, stylized design, in complete defiance of the Disney approach. With its new-found status, the studio renamed itself UPA Pictures (UPA). Initially, UPA contracted with the United States government to produce its animation output, but the government contracts began to evaporate as the FBI began investigating Communist activities in Hollywood in the late 1940s. No formal charges were filed against anyone at UPA in the beginnings of McCarthyism, but the government contracts were lost as Washington severed its ties with Hollywood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Productions_of_America

Animated shorts based on fairy tales were a staple of animation in the first part of the 20th century. The Walt Disney Company made more than ten short films based on fairy tales during the 1930s alone, and both Disney’s own feature films and his competitors followed suit. Yet it’s easy to imagine the audiences of the 1940s getting a bit bored with the same handful of stories animated over and over by different studios. Enter Tex Avery, animation’s master of screwball comedy, capable of pushing every comedic button in every short to produce maximum laughter. For his 1943 MGM short Red Hot Riding Hood, he changed the script with one of his signature fourth-wall breaks: Instead of a straight adaptation of the story, the characters directly talk to the narrator and ask for a new take. Then the second title card appears and we get an urban, catcalling wolf that pursues Red, now a sexy nightclub performer à la pinup girls Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner. The short is the perfect amalgam of Averyisms, from meta-humor to pop-culture references, to gags with characters pulling objects out of thin air, to incredibly stretchy and contorting bodies. On top of it all, Avery’s signature risqué comedy was practically guaranteed to give the era’s censors panic attacks within a short’s first few seconds. And while cartoon content would be tamed over the coming decades, Avery’s innovations stuck.me His catcalling Wolf, for instance, has received homages and parodies from generations of animators after him. And the sequence in which Red’s grandma, now portrayed as a hip and wealthy woman living in a penthouse, begins chasing the Wolf around her apartment, all the while opening doors that lead outside the building or reveal cement walls, inspired a similar chase sequence in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

The Wan brothers — Chaochen, Dihuan, Guchan, and Laiming — are the founders of Chinese animation (it’s written right there on Wan Laiming’s tombstone), and their first feature-length film began as an artistic act of resistance. Shanghai was under Japanese occupation in the midst of the Second Sino-Japanese War when, in 1939, the siblings decided to make Princess Iron Fan. They wanted to make something that could match Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had been released two years earlier, as well as represent their distressed nation. The Wans looked to famous source material for their 1941 debut, adapting a section of the 16th-century classic Journey to the West, a novel they’d return to in the ’60s for their best-known work, Havoc in Heaven. Princess Iron Fan expands on an interlude in which the mischievous Sun Wukong and his fellow travelers tangle with a demonic couple over a fan they need to continue on their way. It’s a fight that culminates in a spectacular sequence in which the demon king transforms into a giant bull and chases the characters across the skies and through the woods until he’s defeated with the help of some local villagers. There’s a slapstick logic to the animation that recalls the earlier Disney shorts, but the drawing style and the opera-tinged soundtrack are distinctively Chinese. Princess Iron Fan would, with a touch of irony, be exported to Japan, where it would inspire a then-teenage Osamu Tezuka to pursue animation as well as the commissioning of the country’s own first full-length animated film. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Walt Disney’s most impactful accomplishments, especially in the early days of the theatrical shorts, came at the intersection of storytelling and technological advancement. Such is the case with Silly Symphony’s The Old Mill. For years, Disney had wanted more realism and dimensionality in his cartoons, foremost by ensuring that both the backgrounds and characters moved — as in a sequence for the Oscar-winning Three Orphan Kittens from 1935 — and later by tasking animator Ken Anderson, effects animator Cy Young, lighting expert Hal Halvenston, and engineer Bill Garity to come up with a solution. (Part of this was preparation for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and one of the tests was a shot pushing in on the dwarfs’ cottage.) This led to the invention of the multiplane camera, in which different scenes and characters would be painted on separate panes of glass; the camera would then move “through” the panes at different speeds and at various distances from one another, creating the illusion of dimensionality and depth — a concept Ub Iwerks, by this point long gone from Disney, had been tinkering with for years. Walt Disney biographer Neal Gabler hypothesized that Disney “was anticipating the deep-focus photography that director Orson Welles would use so famously in Citizen Kane.” Whether or not that’s true, the technology was used fabulously in The Old Mill. A wordless ode to nature, the eight-and-a-half-minute film focuses on the titular mill and the animals that inhabit it as a summer storm approaches. Instead of being jokey caricatures, the animals and their action are rendered in a more realistic manner. They are simplified for visual clarity but never personified like in other shorts. It’s an odd and striking conceit, made all the more beautiful by the design of the animals and the exceptionalism of the effects animation — ripples in water, a swaying spiderweb, the way a flower reacts to columns of light, twinkling fireflies — that bring the whole enterprise to life. While Disney intended the short to be a test run of sorts for Snow White, the feature it more closely resembles, with its emphasis on naturalistic beauty and complex effects animation, is 1942’s Bambi. There’s an eerie intensity to the short as well, with an emphasis on some of the less cuddly creatures in the mill (those bats!), that lent its tone not only to the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment from Fantasia but also to more modern, horror-adjacent animated triumphs like Scooby-Doo and Over the Garden Wall. There is a reason that, for years, clips from the short would be used in Disney Halloween compilation specials. It really is that spooky. Also, if you ever find yourself on the Walt Disney Studios lot, pop into the Frank G. Wells Building. There, you can see the multiplane camera that was used on The Old Mill, sitting right in the lobby. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Popeye the Sailor Man made his animated debut in a 1933 Betty Boop short named after him and quickly became Fleischer Studios’ star attraction. The naval pugilist with forearms the size of watermelon had originated from E.C Segar’s daily comic strip Thimble Theatre, where he was only supposed to make a one-off appearance. By the mid-1930s Popeye was the most popular character in America, so it only made sense that Paramount Pictures would push Max Fleischer to produce a more ambitious short starring the spinach chomping strong man. Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor was the first Popeye cartoon made in Technicolor as well as the first American animated film to be billed as a feature (running over 16 minutes, it took up two reels), and it is where the Fleischer brothers’ “setback process” was showcased to its full potential. The Fleischers’ studio had been behind a number of inventions that helped innovate animation during the mediums early years, but arguably none were more remarkable than the process invented by John Burks. First used in the 1936 Popeye short, For Better or Worser, the process gave off the illusion that two-dimensional characters were able to maneuver in a three-dimensional space. Over 80 years after its premiere, the process is still effective, the illusion not aging a day. A vital influence on Ray Harryhausen, who made a Sinbad film of his own, the process would be used for a handful of other shorts and one feature, its heights remaining with Sindbad and its follow up Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves. The pair would be the grandest cartoons Fleischer ever produced — until they began work on the adventures of a mild-mannered reporter from Metropolis. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

There’s a moment, about three and a half minutes into the Silly Symphony short Three Little Pigs, when the Big Bad Wolf is about to blow down one of the pigs’ houses. He gets himself in the headspace to get a-blowin’ and then prepares physically by breathing in more and more air, his chest heaving and expanding with each gasp. Finally, when his chest is about to burst, he lets out a gust of wind powerful enough to knock down the poor piggy’s home. As drawn by Norm Ferguson, perhaps best known as the creator of Mickey’s dog Pluto, the Big Bad Wolf was a benchmark in terms of character animation. Chuck Jones commented that the film made him realize “something was happening there that hadn’t happened before.” Jones said that it showcased a major principle in character animation, that “it wasn’t how a character looked but how he moved that determined his personality.” He even argued that character animation truly began with the film. Disney himself agreed. Notorious for finding fault in just about anything he produced, upon finishing the short, Disney exclaimed, “At last we have achieved true personality in a whole picture!” And as a result, Three Little Pigs was hugely influential both inside and outside the studio. Internally, the short featured an original song by Frank Churchill, Ted Sears, and Pinto Colvig, and the use of original music would become a convention of many Disney shorts that followed. Also, thanks largely to the work done by Freddie Moore, a hugely talented and influential artist at the studio, the storytelling and animation style at Disney began to shift. The “rubber hose” style of animation was out; the more naturalistic and complicated “squash and stretch” style was here to stay. It was a huge success for the studio, too, winning an Academy Award and making a truly unbelievable amount of money; the following year, the studio’s net profit was estimated at more than $600,000 and led to Disney’s expansion. One theater played the short for so long that it started adding whiskers to a poster for the short outside the auditorium; as the run went on, the whiskers would get longer and longer. Most crucially, Three Little Pigs was one of the first of Disney’s films to feature a story department, which included Ferguson, Art Babbitt, and Dick Lundy. (It was also, not coincidentally, one of the first animated films to be fully storyboarded.) While Disney had established a story department before 1932, the success of Three Little Pigs, the creation of which Disney himself was heavily involved in, made him double down on his desire to create specialized roles for talented people that ran in direct opposition to the studio’s earlier, looser, everybody-chip-in ethos. And that story department would prove crucial in the years ahead as he marched toward a feature-length animated film. Culturally, though, Three Little Pigs had an even larger impact. It proved that Walt’s work, far from being trifles for kiddies, could be considered high art, and the short, along with Disney himself, was fêted widely by the Hollywood elite and embraced by critics. As a metaphor for the Great Depression, then in its fourth year, it also spoke volumes, with the wolf representing the country’s economic hardship and the industrious, hardworking pig serving as a metaphor for Roosevelt’s New Deal. It became something of an anthem for a beleaguered country; its audio was played over the radio and its plot satirized in the newspaper. When fascism began bubbling up in Europe, the pigs with houses of straw and sticks were repurposed as a desperate warning call to Western nations not taking the Nazi threat seriously. (It should be noted that the original version of the short featured the Wolf dressing up as a “Jewish peddler,” a distressing moment that has been edited out of subsequent versions beginning in 1948; the choice didn’t help Disney’s case when he was accused of anti-Semitism.) And the song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?,” was influential too, inspiring Edward Albee to title his hit play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Of course Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was always going to make this list, but let’s start with the other technically innovative 1930s animated musical adaptation of the fairy tale. This one stars two of the Fleischer brothers’ greatest creations: Betty Boop and Koko the Clown. Koko was developed in 1918 concurrently with Max Fleischer’s invention of the rotoscope technique, which allowed animators to trace over filmed reference footage to achieve fluid, uncannily lifelike motion in their characters. Betty Boop, on the other hand, was created as a send-up of Jazz Age flappers, with a character design naughty enough to match the times. In the original Out of the Inkwell series, Koko’s filmed movements were acted out by Dave Fleischer while he was dressed as a clown. But in 1933, Fleischer Studios put Betty Boop and Koko the Clown in the seven-minute Betty Boop in Snow-White short animated by Roland C. Crandall, with a rotoscoped set piece in the middle, set to “St. James Infirmary Blues,” performed by jazz artist Cab Calloway. Watching this scene, in contrast with the Disney version of the folktale that would set the template for mainstream animated storytelling, the sheer experimentalism looks like an eerie dispatch from a different, much cooler timeline. The film was a follow-up to Calloway’s popular Minnie the Moocher Fleischer short from the year prior, which opened with live footage of Calloway dancing before rendering him into a walrus. Here, Calloway seems to moonwalk along the animated landscape as Koko, arms out, singing a blues song about death and decay. When the witch casts her mirror over him, he becomes a ghost, at which point the rotoscoping gives seamlessly to impossible contortions. The ghost’s limbs pretzel in on themselves, turning at one point into a gold chain, echoing the lyrics. At the time, character animation — think the Fleischers’ Bimbo, Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mickey Mouse — was often rooted in the visual language of blackface and minstrelsy. Cab Calloway’s Fleischer shorts, and their use of rotoscope, saw an musician able to voice and perform his own art. Playful and surreal, it remains artistically daring nearly 90 years later. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Disney magic wasn’t made by Walt Disney alone. Many of Disney’s early successes, before movies, were done in collaboration with Ub Iwerks, who helped to create Mickey Mouse. Then Iwerks and Disney had a falling out in 1930, and Iwerks opened his own animation studio. There, he created the bow tie-wearing Flip the Frog. And Flip’s big-screen debut short, Fiddlesticks, came as the first complete sound cartoon to use the two-strip Technicolor process. It’s important to note that it was not the first cartoon made in color; that distinction is a matter of debate between 1912’s In Gollywog Land (a lost live-action film based on a racist caricature, which used puppet-animated sequences and was made by the Natural Color Kinematograph Company) and 1920’s The Debut of Thomas the Cat (made by the team of Earl Hurd and John Randolph Bray, who are credited with creating cel animation, at great cost and shot using the Brewster Color process, a Technicolor competitor), neither of which popularized the artistic choice. Fiddlesticks is a simple bit of animation: It starts with Flip dancing and then playing the piano accompanied by a familiar-looking mouse in red shorts playing the violin. But it is still an achievement. Fiddlesticks came two years before Disney’s own Flowers and Trees, which was the first full-color Technicolor cartoon and won an Academy Award. But it was Iwerks who showed that the burgeoning Technicolor process could be applied to the medium. Technicolor was faster and easier than previous coloring techniques for animation, and the finished product was easy for theaters to screen. Iwerks and Disney eventually settled their differences, and he went back to work at Disney’s studio in the 1940s. Today, Disney recognizes him as a “master of animation and technology,” a title he richly deserves. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

In loving memory of my mother, Helen, who was the greatest mom in the world. The full cartoon can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBgghnQF6E4&list=PLDaCgkiO0Q62j41EVfapkpl2PkSrTg0B_ Steamboat Willie, the short that introduced the world to Mickey Mouse, served as a watershed technological breakthrough thanks to its use of fully synchronized sound and a fully post-produced soundtrack. It was also born out of heartache. Starting a little more than a year before the short’s release, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks began producing short films for Universal and producer Charles Mintz featuring a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When Walt traveled to New York to renegotiate the terms of the deal, he was blindsided. Not only did Mintz offer him less money, but he had slyly started to steal Disney’s employees for his own animation operation. Walt quit, and Ub stood by his longtime partner. But Walt didn’t own the character. Universal did. As the undoubtedly apocryphal story goes, Walt began brainstorming the idea for Mickey Mouse on the train ride back from his failed meeting in New York. Disney had a dynamite new character, an intellectual property he could own. Walt could just as easily have given up, but instead the recent experience strengthened his resolve. Iwerks and Disney got to work. Steamboat Willie wasn’t the first Mickey Mouse short they made (that honor goes to Plane Crazy), but it was the first distributed, and its gags incorporated consistent sound and music throughout, a first in the business. When Steamboat Willie hit theaters in November 1928, this labor of love became a sensation, applauded for its technical artistry and entertainment value. And rightfully so — it is still a hoot, and one you can watch on Disney+ right now. And while many of the cultural references have faded from memory (its title is a play on a Buster Keaton movie called Steamboat Bill, Jr.), Steamboat Willie remains a towering achievement of early animation and a testament to Mickey Mouse’s singular, elemental power — a character whose emergence wound up altering the shape of U.S. copyright law. Mickey is no bland corporate figurehead. Rather, he’s downright rascally — at one point, he cranks the tail of a goat who has eaten sheet music for “Turkey in the Straw” and the tune spills from the goat’s mouth. Only a few seconds of Steamboat Willie have truly been immortalized in the popular consciousness — the opening moments, in which Mickey whistles and steers the boat, have become a signature of the Walt Disney Company. But the entire short is of staggering importance — for its technological advancement, sure, but more so for the introduction of an American icon. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Though Disney would later debut Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was the first animated feature in the U.S., The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving animated feature film, period. Directed by the great Lotte Reiniger, the earliest woman animator whose work is still extant and the first to helm an animated feature, it premiered in Germany over a decade before Disney’s first masterpiece. At that time, Reiniger pioneered silhouette animation as a self-taught artist particularly skilled in shadow play. To create the film, she manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera, similar to Wayang shadow puppetry. Perhaps even more impressively, the piece was animated frame by frame, which took three years. In the scene for the Caliph’s birthday, Reiniger animated the sorcerer’s magical horse, a miraculous steed flying through the air, proving both her fantastic imagination and ability to bring it to life through silhouettes. It’s also an early use of fairy-tale storytelling, another area Disney’s films would become known for. Prince Achmed specifically tells stories based on One Thousand and One Nights, including the story of Aladdin, which Disney’s studio would return to decades later. Moreover, Reiniger’s style went on to influence even more modern works, including an episode of Steven Universe, “The Answer.” For years, Lotte Reiniger’s name went largely unsaid in the industry, falling out of the popular canon. Today, there are still too few women with creator credits in animation — but even their success and entry into the medium are owed to those like Reiniger who opened doors and showed that talent and innovation that women could bring to the table. In proving that women could animate as well as men, Reiniger paved the way for those like LaVerne Harding, the second woman in animation history to receive an onscreen credit (known for work on Woody Woodpecker). Later, Walt Disney would hire Bianca Majolie, responsible for much of the early concept work for Peter Pan, Cinderella, and Fantasia’s “Nutcracker Suite” segment. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

While Lady Gaga used “rite of passage” to describe getting a song parodied by “Weird” Al Yankovic, it’s a phrase that can apply to a celebrity being caricatured in animation, too, from BoJack Horseman’s cheeky use of Character Actress Margo Martindale to pretty much any episode of Family Guy or South Park. Even the British royal family is getting the animated satire treatment (blimey) in HBO Max’s upcoming The Prince. But really, it all started with one anthropomorphic black cat hungry for the spotlight. Consider the seven-minute-long silent-era short film Felix in Hollywood. Created by Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer, we can credit this little gem, made nearly a century ago, for what’s now a staple of modern-day animated television. In the short, Felix the Cat uses his ample wits to travel to Hollywood, where he shares the silver screen and rubs elbows with real-life industry pioneers and tastemakers like Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart, Will Hays, Snub Pollard, and Ben Turpin. It was the first animated cartoon to caricature celebrities and along with them the contemporary studio system. Felix even earns his “long-term contract” — bestowed by one of the founding fathers of American cinema, Cecil B. DeMille — after a camera crew catches him rescuing an unconscious, tied-up Douglas Fairbanks from a swarm of angry mosquitoes. The value of Felix’s contract may be nebulous, but the film’s impact is undeniable. Just a decade later, Looney Tunes celebrity caricatures began to emerge as well. In one of the company’s early shorts, Bosko in Person (1933), the titular character created by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising finds himself interacting with imitations of Maurice Chevalier, Jimmy Durante, and Greta Garbo. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

While one may think it is difficult to review a short that lasts only two minutes, no matter how much of a cinephile you are, the fact that you may witness the beginnings of animation in this art, is a reason enough to be "passionate" about the challenge. The short uses precise (though somewhat obvious) camera cuts to give the illusion of drawings being taken off and returned to the canvas by the artist. This could be considered as an early use of special effects that combine two-dimensional drawings with real people and objects, a clear precedent of what we would later see in films like Roger Rabbit and Space Jam. In its time I'm sure it must have surprised audiences. It is not a minor detail, therefore, that one of the people responsible for this little gem is James Stuart Blackton, a major producer and director of that time, who is also considered as "The Father of Animation", and plays the drawer. I highlight his name, since he was a pioneer that worked with revolutionary techniques, and gave birth to one of the most important and popular genres of cinema (despite this work not being completely animated, like his "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces" from 1907, considered the first film almost entirely drawn that was shown in cinemas). With a sense of humor present throughout the very brief footage, and a good use of special methods, one can't help but feel enchanted (no pun intended) to this little, but remarkable gem. review by exe_malaga93 from IMDB https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000300/reviews

What is the world’s oldest animated film? Or rather, knowing film history–what’s the world’s oldest surviving animated film? Many sources will point to the cartoon Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) or “trick film” The Enchanted Drawing (1900), which used stop motion to make a cartoon face change expressions. But chances are you might’ve stumbled across a few sources making the case for an obscure short called Matches: An Appeal–said to have been produced in 1899. It’s a pretty cute little film, too. Via the magic of stop motion, two small figures made of matchsticks work together to write an “appeal” asking the public to donate money to send matches to needy soldiers. To be precise, they write: “For one guinea Messrs Bryant & May will forward a case containing sufficient to supply a box of matches to each man in a battalion with the name of the sender inside. N.B. Our soldiers need them.” The stop motion is surprisingly sophisticated for its early date–perhaps a little too sophisticated. Charmed by this little-known short’s pragmatic purpose during a fairly obscure war (the World Wars get all the spotlight nowadays), I did a little reading and found out that not only is the 1899 date in question, but, there’s also an ongoing controversy about Melbourne-Cooper! Some historians feel he’s been unfairly overlooked and was actually the true creator of some of our most famous ancient films. Allow me to explain, somewhat briefly. The first person to champion the Melbourne-Cooper cause was his daughter, Audrey Wadowska. In the late 1950s, when her father was in his 80s, she went to a film history exhibit and became convinced that a group of early films attributed to George Albert Smith contained shots of her relatives, which would therefore make Melbourne-Cooper the more likely creator. She began searching for documents and memorabilia relating to her father’s career, determined to write his life story and restore what she felt was his rightful place in cinema history. The early films in question were six shorts including The Little Doctor (1901), As Seen Through a Telescope (1900), and the famed Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) (which contains the world’s oldest closeup). Wadowska became very dedicated to her cause, giving lectures and creating an archive of her father’s material (which is currently in Rotterdam). Soon more researchers were championing the “wronged Melbourne-Cooper” cause, most notably Dutch historian Tjitte de Vries (he even co-authored a 570+ page book about him!). The debate heated up in the 1990s with a whole series of articles in the film journals KINtop and Film History, where arguments for and against the obscure British filmmaker flew like ping pong balls. One that I found enlightening was the 2002 Film History article “Smith versus Melbourne-Cooper: An end to the dispute” by Stephen Bottomore, which gives a strong case for George Albert Smith being the rightful filmmaker after all. Bottomore points out that much of Wadowska’s evidence relied on reminisces from family and friends, which is grand and all, but not super objective. (I agree.) So how’s this all related to the contested 1899 release date of Matches: An Appeal? Well, if Melbourne-Cooper was an active and innovative filmmaker around 1900-01, it would seem to make the 1899 date more plausible. However, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he became an independent filmmaker until about 1906, and it’s likely the poor maligned George Albert Smith made the 1900-01 films mentioned earlier. And since the animation is very sophisticated for 1899, it’s possible the “Appeal” was made during WWI. Indeed, many historians–including the BFI–peg 1914-15 as the more believable time frame. Personally, I feel that since more archival material is available online than ever before, it should be easier to lay some of the Arthur Melbourne-Cooper arguments to rest–and perhaps find some clues to the Matches mystery. If I might humbly throw my amateur historian hat somewhat near the ring and make some very cursory sweeps through the Interwebs, I can report: Searching the online film magazines and trade journals on Media History for “Melbourne-Cooper” with the dates limited to 1895-1930 brings up a grand total of: 2 results. (So does “Melbourne Cooper” sans hyphen, mind you.) For comparison, “Melies” brings up a whopping 3223 results. On newspapers.com, whose search engine is dumb and needs you to be more specific, I looked up “Arthur Melbourne-Cooper” from 1895-1930 and found zero matches. “George Melies,” on the other hand, has 121 matches. Which all doesn’t prove that Melbourne-Cooper wasn’t important in retrospect–just that in his time he seems to have been a minor figure. If historians did overlook his accomplishments, it wasn’t a case of taking a famous name and trying to sweep it under a rug (for murky reasons). https://silentology.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/is-matches-an-appeal-the-oldest-surviving-animated-film/

The turn of the 20th century saw a much needed injection of modern filmmaking thanks to the work of experimental French filmmaker, set designer, and magician George Méliès, widely regarded as the innovator of special effects in movies. Méliès’s penchant for illusion and stage magic played a vital role in the way he approached his early movies, with a desire to transfer the whimsy witnessed in theaters to film. Méliès is credited with innovating the first split screen, the first double exposure and the first dissolve effect. After being mesmerised by the Lumière brothers’ groundbreaking moving picture camera, the cinematograph, in 1895 Méliès set about designing and re-engineering his own camera and quickly established Star Film Company, with a film studio famously built entirely of glass walls. It was at the studio that Méliès made over 500 shorts, including his most famous work Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) and not as well known but just as beloved works such as L’Œuf du Sorcier (1902), also known as The Prolific Magical Egg. The film, directed by and starring Méliès, is an example of early stop-motion SFX as the film sees the magician make an egg appear in a deft sleight of hand and then grow the egg until it turns into not one but three giant heads, which then merge into a goblinesque facade. The seamless jump cut editing of the vanishing act and additional use of double exposure to illustrate the giant heads separating and merging were proto-techniques that would go on to be utilized in animation, and are still employed today. While many of Méliès’s films have been lost over time, his impact remains keenly felt. In the Oscar award-winning 2011 film, Hugo — which fittingly won Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects — Martin Scorsese made Méliès a character whimsically played by Ben Kingsley, showcasing how creative magic can elevate any motion picture. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Before the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph, one of the earliest movie cameras, there was a filmic evolutionary link that now feels all but forgotten. Starting in 1892, three years before the Lumières first exhibited their motion pictures, French inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud presented his animations for audiences at the Musée Grévin in Paris. His Théâtre Optique (or “optical theater”) system was a rough precursor of the technology that would come to define both animation and film projection. The films were made of hundreds of individually illustrated cells connected via strips that were perforated with sprocket holes — a first in film history — and wound around spools, which could be run rapidly before a magic lantern, projecting a moving image for an audience. Reynaud’s show, Pantomimes Lumineuses, consisted of sets of shorts that he had drawn. The premiere lineup featured “Un Bon Bock” (A Good Beer), about a tavern boy swiping beers from unsuspecting patrons of a country bar, “Le Clown et Ses Chiens” (The Clown and His Dogs), about a clown directing his three dogs through their tricks, and “Pauvre Pierrot” (Poor Pierrot), a riff on the familiar Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine characters from the commedia dell’arte. These animated performances were not fully premade stories that Reynaud simply played for his audiences; manually operating the Théâtre Optique, he could play each short at variable speeds and repeat certain moments. He could react to how patrons responded to the shows, having a character perform an encore of a winning gag or trick. Sadly, Reynaud was not just a cinema pioneer but also an early victim of the exploitation that would rapidly infect that business. He worked for the Musée Grévin under a stunningly unfair contract. Despite the giant success of Pantomimes Lumineuses, he saw little of the profits and eventually went broke. In despair, he destroyed the Théâtre Optique and tossed most of his films into the Seine. Today, only parts of “Pauvre Pierrot” and 1894’s Autour d’une Cabine (Around a Cabin) survive as testaments to his magic. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Winsor McCay did not create the animated cartoon as he always claimed, but he was responsible for one of its great “big bang” moments. Composed of 10,000 drawings made by the newspaper cartoonist (with the help of his assistant, John A. Fitzsimmons, who traced the backgrounds) and mounted on cardboard, McCay’s third short laid the groundwork for the next century of animation. Taking inspiration from his son’s collection of flip-books, McCay became interested in testing whether he could turn his illustrations into short films, his first being based on his most famous comic strip, 1911’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. His second, The Story of a Mosquito, appeared a year later, and both were incorporated into his vaudeville act. Audiences approved, but they didn’t truly believe that they’d witnessed McCay’s drawings move. That is, until he introduced them to Gertie the Dinosaur. The short marked the first use of key animation, registration marks, animation loops, in-betweening, and, most important, character animation. McCay not only gave Gertie life; he gifted her with a personality. Before Gertie the Dinosaur, characters were blank slates. Now they could cry, which Gertie does when McCay scolds her for disobeying, or eat, drink, or breathe, all of which she does with a playful, elegant charm that many later artists would try to emulate and build empires on. McCay would continue to work in animation until 1921, stepping away shortly after abandoning a sequel, Gertie on Tour, mainly because his editor at the New York Herald, William Randolph Hearst, wanted him focused on editorial cartoons rather than animation. Most of McCay’s work both in comics and in film have been lost, but Gertie the Dinosaur is one of the best preserved; it’s been a part of the U.S. Library of Congress National Film Registry since 2011. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is a 1906 short silent animated cartoon directed by James Stuart Blackton and generally regarded by film historians as the first animated film recorded on standard picture film. In the cartoon, animated hand-drawn scenes appear on a chalkboard, including a clown playing with a hat and a dog jumping through a hoop. In the beginning, though, the cartoonist's hands are included, too, as he draws the first several lines on the chalkboard in standard live action. From there, the stop-motion technique is used to show what appears to be drawings completing—and then moving—by themselves with no artist on screen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorous_Phases_of_Funny_Faces

One of the earliest recorded uses of stop-motion animation comes from the 1902 Edison Company Film Fun in a Bakery Shop. The stop-motion technique is used to speed up the appearance of the bakers dough sculpting. Films like these would lay the foundations for later, more advanced stop-motion effects. https://thatshelf.com/10-great-moments-in-stop-motion-animation/

The United States Treasury Department issued its first war savings stamps in late 1917 in order to help pay for the costs incurred through involvement in World War I. The estimated cost of World War I for the United States was approximately $32 billion, and by the end of the war, the United States government had issued a total of $26.4 billion in debt. Although national campaigns had aimed to sell $2 billion in war savings stamps, they ultimately accounted for about $0.93 billion, or 3.5 percent, of the total debt issued. Despite the low proportion of total debt purchased as war savings stamps, they represented real additional savings whereas other issues were at least partly monetized already. In addition, government and society leaders utilized the war savings stamps program as a vehicle to teach the importance of saving and thrift. Along with the War Savings Certificate stamps, the Treasury also issued a set of 25-cent Thrift stamps, which bore no interest. The purpose of the Thrift stamps was to allow individuals without the means to purchase a War Savings Certificate stamp outright to gradually accumulate enough Thrift stamps to exchange for one later. The Treasury supplied Thrift cards, to which a total of sixteen Thrift stamps could be affixed. A full Thrift card was worth four dollars and could be combined with the appropriate number of cents to purchase a War Savings Certificate stamp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_savings_stamps_of_the_United_States

A pretty simple, one-joke film has an overweight woman doing everything she can to lose weight. She jogs, works out, goes into the steam box and even does construction. Three months later she weights herself and....she's gained weight. The entire film follows a predictable storyline but it was rather funny seeing the weight issue being told in 1916. The movie's animation is pretty rough but this does add a bit of charm as does the female character who is the butt of many jokes. I'm sure some might find the film offensive but I personally didn't take it too serious and got a few laughs out of it. The scene where the woman stands on her head and the aftermath is the highlight. Comment by Michael_Elliott on IDMB https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0007177/

An animated cartoon about a workman who recovers and returns Miss Gotrox's lost purse containing 10,000 dollars, and receives a Canadian dime as a reward. https://picryl.com/media/the-phable-of-a-busted-romance

A cop is assigned the difficult job of stopping speeding traffic in the early days of automobiles.

Mr. Nobody Holme can't get his car to start because it's too cold. Perhaps he needs something really *hot* to get it going! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245297/ Definition of jitney 1: an unlicensed taxicab 2: [from the original 5 cent fare] : BUS sense especially : a small bus that carries passengers over a regular route on a flexible schedule https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jitney

Shortly after Action Comics No. 1 introduced the era of comic-book superheroes, Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights to Superman and wanted its animation studio, Fleischer Studios, to bring the character to series. This was a substantially different task than Max and Dave Fleischer were used to, forcing them to trade caricatured humans and animals for realistic-looking characters. And yet the Fleischer Superman serial ended up as a definitive take on the Man of Steel. We get the origin, a bit of Clark Kent’s daily life as a journalist having to hide his identity, and Superman heroically saving innocents and doing great feats of strength with a smile on his face, all in the ten minutes of “The Mad Scientist,” the first of 17 shorts. The Fleischers’ patented rotoscoping technique seldom looked as smooth as it does here — the brief moment when Superman lands on the ground after saving a building from collapsing and stands tall to stop a laser beam with his bare hands still looks better than most live-action acts of superheroism. “The Mad Scientist” was a huge success. Not only was it nominated for an Academy Award, but its influence on both Superman comics and action animation is undeniable. As the legend goes, the studio got permission from the comic’s publisher to make the Man of Steel fly because they were unconvinced with how giant leaps looked. Likewise, Superman’s iconic pose — fists on the hips, with the cape waving in the wind — first appeared in this short. And the shorts’ Art Deco architecture and noirlike aesthetic influenced animator Bruce Timm’s now-classic Batman: The Animated Series and, later, his own Superman: The Animated Series. Ultimately, though, it was also the series that ended the Fleischer brothers’ working relationship. Amid financing troubles with Paramount Pictures, the Fleischers resigned from their own company having produced nine Superman shorts credited to Fleischer Studios, which was later renamed Famous Studios. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html