Reconstruction 8.2 (2008)
Return to Contents»
Technological Determinism and the Poisoned Apple: The Case of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs / Sean Chadwell
Of course, [the multiplane camera] was merely a tool, not an end in itself. It remained for Disney and his creative staff to devise sequences worthy of multiplane treatment - material that would be enhanced by the dramatic possibilities offered them . . . The culmination of all this technical and talent development was the production of Disney's first feature-length film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Leonard Maltin (Of Mice and Magic 1987, 53)
But always there remained the emphasis on the mechanics of production. Virtually everything written on animated films throughout their history has concentrated on the 'how-to' aspects.
Kristin Thompson ("Implications of the Cel Animation Technique" 1980, 110)
<1> Writing about animation - especially for popular audiences - traditionally has sublimated its celebration of the anarchic illusionism of early cartoons to descriptions of technology and precise factory-like production processes; this becomes especially clear in historical narratives that address Disney's multiplane camera or Fleischer's Rotoscope. Often this kind of discourse appears in accounts of mechanical production in animation studios themselves, principally those accounts that locate narrative developments - and even narrative "advances" - in cartoons in the context of such emerging technologies. And cartoons frequently narrativize a similar preoccupation with the uneasy relationship between technology, labor, and creativity (as Norman Klein and others have noted, the machine is among the most common and unlikely of cartoon metaphors).
<2> The tendency to focus on the mechanical aspects of animation has perhaps even have inspired panic: Fritz Moellenhoff, in a psychological examination of Mickey Mouse in The American Imago in 1940, writes that
I called the films an artistic, artificial dream. The word "artificial" was used because the Mickey Mouse films make use of tricks, photographing sketches instead of living things. The lens and other devices which produce the illusion of living movement ought to make us critical. The illusion that something is alive which is not, the artificial imitation of things which were once natural, worries us if we have time to think about it. What worries us? It is what makes possible all these illusions and imitations - the machine. (29)
This is the machine so often alluded to in discussions of animation. The machine bears the weight of Moellenhof's own anxieties about the artificial nature of animation principally because cartoons had come to be understood as the sum of their technical processes rather than as the products of collective creativity; histories of cinema and animation often identify optical toys and trick devices of the nineteenth century as the visual precursors to any kind of visual entertainment. Instead of being a part of a more conventional history of form - one that might, for example, have creative individuals as its focus - the cartoon, virtually trapped in these narratives of visual and cinematic history, is a kind of trompe l'oeil extraordinaire, a simulation whose representative power is always tied to ideas about tricks and toys. From the late 1920s through the early 1930s, the autonomy and aesthetic goals of the artists involved in making cartoons gradually began to supersede the simple technologically-based attraction they may have held for viewers. Cartoons were no longer, like Gertie the Dinosaur, concerned principally with the "exhibition" that Tom Gunning (1986) has called the "cinema of attractions." Early cartoons may "directly solicit spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle" (Gunning 58). But - and Gunning makes this point in his discussion of film - these early cartoons do not necessarily bear an evolutionary relationship to the narrative cartoons that developed later (Gunning 58). In this period, animated characters began to take roles in a film star system. Felix became successful as a character, and Mickey Mouse piloted a steamboat to the first crackling vestiges of sound. The Fleischers animated Betty Boop and Popeye. Animators began to develop cartoon characters - the early chase cartoon giving way to slightly more complex narratives - and animated bodies began to move differently.
<3> At this point, popular ideas about animation and the animation process might have changed to reflect a growing understanding of those people who actually drew the characters, developed the storyboards, timed the music, inked the cels. But popular conception does not appear to have changed much. At the very least, the popular attraction of cartoon stars like Betty Boop might have shed light on creative processes of production; indeed, this seems to be the point of a cartoon like "Betty Boop's Rise to Fame" (1932), which I discuss below. Following the strain of the technological/machine-oriented approach to the understanding of cartoons, animation was still described at this time using a language in which animators are never referred to as artists: in most cases, popular accounts of studio production were accompanied by the evolving language of technology (two of these will be addressed below: "The Complicated Work of Making Film Cartoons," which appeared in the New York Times in 1930; and "Mickey Mouse's Financial Career," which appeared in Harper's in 1934). Animation studios were understood as sites of assembly-line style production - the people who worked in them were not talented artists, but illustrators, animators, in-betweeners (what a job title!), cel washers. In popular discourse, animation continued to be addressed as a cinema of attractions despite its obvious, and, by 1937, rather momentous, forays into conventional narrative structures.
Technological Determinism
<4> In Television Raymond Williams provides definitions of "technological determinism" and "symptomatic technology," and his terms work well in the context of a discussion about cartoons. The approach Leonard Maltin - one among several popular historians of film and cartoons - and so many other historians before him have taken to cartoons, while it does not fail to attribute talent or drive to animators themselves, often locates graphic and narrative changes in the form to the technological apparatus that ostensibly preceded them. In other words, as Williams puts it, "research and development have been assumed as self-generating. The new technologies are invented as it were in an independent sphere, and then create new societies or new human conditions" (1975, 13). The Leonard Maltin passage opening this paper exemplifies this kind of assumption: Disney engineers designed the camera, the apparatus, and then Disney had to find an aesthetic outlet for it. And this outlet had to do with further technologizing the production of illusion.
<5> What is most interesting about the Maltin passage, though, is the fact that Maltin writes this in the 1980s, a period when animators were beginning, finally, to be celebrated as relevant and distinct artists. In general, Maltin's book participates in this celebration, but his suggestion that the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the result of an aesthetic need or void opened by the creation of a new camera is rooted in older narratives about cartoon histories, narratives which locate the origin of animated film in the zoetrope and kaleidescope. Edward Lutz's Animated Cartoons: How They are Made, Their Origin and Development (1920), for instance, the book Walt Disney is said to have learned from, [1] opens with a detailed discussion of the operation of a motion picture camera - "it is by means of wheels with teeth that engage with the perforations and the movement of another toothed part of the mechanism" (8) - and proceeds to an explanation of the persistence of vision: "The thaumatrope illustrates that persistence of vision in a very elementary way . . ." (17). From here, Lutz moves on to the discussion of optical devices and "toys" such as Faraday's Wheel, the phenakistoscope, the zoetrope, the praxinoscope, and the kineograph. Lutz's intention, of course, is merely to demonstrate the nature of the optical "illusion" that is animation. And Lutz almost christens a technologically deterministic core narrative of the origins of cartoons, writing of the phenakistoscope that
from this kind of optical toy it was but a step to the contriving of various types of instruments constructed on the pattern of a slotted disk, or some sort of a turning mechanism with a series of apertures, to use in giving the illusion of movement in connection with drawings or photographs. (20)
And this language and approach have become a standard part of the genre of cartoon histories; it is at least a conventional opening for general-audience works. "The foundation of animation is illusion," Susan Rubin begins Animation: The Art and the Industry, " whether we are perceiving twelve progressing positions of a bird in flight through a spinning zoetrope toy" (1984, 1). Donald Heraldson, in Creators of Life: A History of Animation, astutely points out in the introduction to his book that neither live nor animated films began with "parlor toys" (1975, 3), but the first three chapters of his book are dedicated to understanding the invention and evolution of the motion-picture camera and projector. Charles Solomon's Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation (1989), opens with a discussion of the magic-lantern shows of the seventeenth century and proceeds, like Lutz's, through a discussion of the thaumatrope, the phenakistoscope, the zoetrope and the kineograph. And Gianalbertino Bendazzi's recent work Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, begins in a similar fashion:
The 19th century was the century of science. In physics, and particularly in optics, the scholars, academicians and simple practitioners who determined the course of technological progress in that era found time to study the persistence of images on the retina. . . The interest in moving images, rooted in the ancient human need to reproduce existence as faithfully as possible, was finding its first technological realizations. (1994, 3)
Works that do not begin with discussions of parlor toys or explanations of the mechanics of films projection, such as Gerald and Danny Peary's critical anthology, The American Animated Cartoon (1980), often do begin with narratives about the patent battles between the pioneers of the cel animation process, John Bray and Windsor McCay. This is important because the history of animation is conventionally expressed as a history of technological design and process, rather than as an account of formal aesthetic or narrative developoment.
<6> The ubiquity of the phenakistoscope in accounts of animation history is a testament to the idea that narratives of apparatus and technology are core stories, accounts in which machines beget machines, in which the primary antecedents for the cartoon as visual form are toys and trick devices, zoetropes and kaleidescopes, stereoscopes and phenakistoscopes. This is on one hand a discursive identification of cartoons as an enduring form of the "cinema of attractions;" on the other, it provides - as Jonathan Crary might suggest - an account of animation as a process of training the popular observing subject. In the attention to the evolution of cartoons from toys and "trick" gadgets, this parallel lineage has been a kind of subtext. In popular accounts of the multiplane camera in 1937, the camera is addressed as a kind of latter-day stereoscope. The effect is a naturalization and training of the viewing subject, one that encourages him or her to recognize that the illusion of three-dimensionality is mimetic. Crary, writing about the nature of optical toys, claims that
The production of the observer in the nineteenth century coincided with new procedures of discipline and regulation. . . . it is a question of a body aligned with and operating an assemblage of turning and regularly moving wheeled parts. The imperatives that generated a rational organization of time and movement in production simultaneously pervaded diverse spheres of social activity. (1992, 112)
While I do not mean to imply a determined attempt by Walt Disney to subject the 20th century observer to a new kind of visual training, I do want to suggest that the attention drawn to the camera has its roots in the kind of discourses Crary sees as relevant in the construction of an observing subject.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Whistle While You Work
<7> Accounts of the development of Snow White are almost uniformly filled with justifiably impressed and impressive language: "For six months teams of animators, working in shifts - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - frantically animated, inked, painted and photographed sequence after sequence, snatching a few hours of sleep by their drawing boards whenever they could. . . . It was towards the end of 1937 that the film was completed at a cost of $1,488,423" (Holliss and Sibley 1988, 31).
<8> Given such romantic assertions of the sheer labor involved in the film's production, it seems natural enough to recall the dwarfs' first scene in the movie: laboring in the mines, they also have time and energy enough for a musical number. Norman Klein writes,
Then we meet the dwarfs for the first time. They're hard at work too, syncopated along a happy assembly-line. Nature's bounty is at arm's reach, diamonds are aseasy to gather as seashells. In a free enterprise system like ours, it's a joy to be petit bourgeois - and sharp as a tack besides (except for Dopey, who fools around too much). (1993, 141)
Although Klein's ironic reading is incisive, the scene is not simply a cheerful nod to the potential productivity of capitalism; rather, the song and the scene evoke something about the process of animating the movie itself. Like the slightly out-of-focus background cels stacked downward on the apparatus of the multiplane camera, the narrative of the production of Snow White is yet visible in the animation of the story itself.
<9> Clearly, too, this is a kind of sub-textual narrative, one that is both under and behind, according to the logic of the multiplane device, one of the principle conceptual underpinnings of the film. Much as I would love to suggest that this subtext is a kind of consciously subversive act on the part of animators who see themselves in the dwarfs, all literature about the production process suggests that Disney always maintained close control of the project. Still, a dwarf/animator subtext does emerge from this three-way intersection of technology and production and art, especially in the "Whistle While You Work" sequence. Here, the viewer is introduced both to the dwarfs and their occupation - diamond mining - a labor-intensive and very selective process: almost constant work by the dwarfs yields surprisingly small returns. Swinging away at the rough walls of the mine, the dwarfs frequently retrieve what appear to be gigantic gems, already cut, polished, and gleaming, and many of these are thrown away for some unobvious defect or another that only they perceive. The dwarfs are presented as a highly organized, if goofy, conglomerate of workers involved in a search for a kind of perfect articulation of order from the chaos of the cave. The diamonds themselves, and the economic value usually attached to such enormous stones, are irrelevant to the dwarfs, a fact evidenced by their overtly humble and diminutive abode.
<10> The discarded diamonds, the throwaway work of the dwarfs, hint at the amount of unused animation discussed in popular accounts of Snow White's production. [2] Not only do the dwarfs perhaps allude to the animators at work on the film, but their work and its material rewards reflect many animators' relationships to Disney and to other studios. That the dwarfs live and work like coal miners while turning out diamonds by the dozens does, in fact, sound like the production context of Snow White: Disney expected perfection, was willing to spend $1.5 million and to pay for round-the-clock labor, and left gems of work on the cutting-room floor.
<11> In fact, read this way, the entire "Whistle While You Work" sequence seems deliberately and ironically to remove this labor from larger technical or economic contexts: the diamonds do not apparently correspond to any larger system of mineral valuation or exchange. The key to the diamond storage room hangs on a rack outside the door. The dwarfs work in a heightened sense of communal integration, singing and laboring together in the pursuit of abstract value. They are thus a simultaneous expression of utopia and the ultimate exploitation of the means of production, a group of people with a common interest in producing something of value for a culture that does not exist to value it. The sequence is especially interesting in light of Jacques Ellul's observations about technique; here, we witness a society blissfully - whistlingly, as it were - unhampered by the demands of technique. No apparent connection exists for the dwarfs between the earnestness or efficiency of their labor and their ability to survive. Their tools are pickaxes and shovels and wooden buckets, the objects of this labor are diamonds; the audience, settled as it is into a different kind of technical world, recognizes that explosives would be the most cost-efficient way to retrieve diamonds . . . and that these dwarfs, whose singing is a kind of parody of technique, should not be entrusted with the key to the mine. But of course the scene itself was created by workers using state-of-the-art technology: animators labored to draw, paint, and photograph cels and backgrounds that were indeed technically superior to anything that had yet been made by any studio, and many of these cels were discarded. The animation produced by the staff at Disney was communally produced, the result of a sustained mass effort, the logic of the film's mining scene representing the mode of studio production. Alan Bryman writes that "[Seamus] Culhane and various other animators have written of their dedication to Walt's cause during the last weeks of working on Snow White, when many of them were working for nothing or next to nothing" (16).
<12> The machine is itself a theme in Snow White. Just before the dwarfs' initial scene, Snow White takes advantage of a forest full of animals-become-dynamos to clean the dwarfs' cottage. Birds, squirrels, rabbits, and deer all participate in what may best be described as a highly organized domestication of wildlife, a frenzy of cleaning that involves animals generally using their bodies as cleaning machines in one aspect or another. [3] The film here narrativizes its reconciliation between nature and technology, between "life" and the increasingly technical (especially as the process was popularly chronicled) aspects of the animation of "life." In its drive toward what has come to be understood as a realistic representation of Snow White the cartoon woman - a drive that came to be identified with production technology - this scene offers a negotiation between animal and machine.
<13> And what of these technical processes? What was the role of the multiplane camera in the film? To provide, as Holliss and Sibley and so many others have pointed out, the "illusion of depth." As Hollis and Sibley claim, the illusion of depth had instead to do with "realism": "then there was the perennial difficulty of conveying 'depth', something that hadn't mattered in the early comic cartoons but that was of vital importance in creating the realistic mood Walt wanted for Snow White" (30) And Richard Schickel, in The Disney Version, avers that "what Disney wanted was more and more imitative realism in the movements of his characters, more and more detail (and lushness) in the backgrounds, greater and greater fidelity to nature in special effects ranging from lightning to the fall of raindrops" (176). Schickel explains that
the fantastic is always more acceptable to plain people - and sometimes sophisticates - when it is rendered in the most realistic possible style. So, when offering time-tested mythic material, Disney was careful to present it in every day, down-to-earth artistic terms that offered no difficulties of understanding to the large audience - that in fact gentled them with the familiar instead of shocking them with the aesthetically daring. (1968, 194)
Had Disney desired a cinematically realistic presentation, he would simply have produced the film in live action, given the fact that live action film bore a much closer cultural relationship traditionally to realism. More likely, Disney wanted illusion above all else and he wanted it uncluttered by awkwardness that would call attention to processes of production. Individual animators at Disney's studio - to which he refers on at least one occasion as a "plant" - were to be invisible, indistinguishable among the 83 minutes of film. The illusion was not one of reality or realistic presentation, but one of technically flawless production. Watching Snow White is not a process of forgetting the animated nature of the film, of losing the cartoon to "realism," but of forgetting the animators, whose work on the film has been so highly coordinated as to seem homogenous. The multiplane camera, the device that some writers suggest precipitates this kind of realism, provides a style of focus which, in a cartoon at this point, is alarming. The process does not necessarily make an audience forget it is watching a cartoon; on the contrary, it serves to remind them they are watching a cartoon, the freshness of the incongruity of the image reminding them, perhaps, of a complexity a cartoon does not usually have. Indeed, the film's visual verisimilitude - even, ironically, its sustained narrative - taps into the residual appeal of the "cinema of attractions." That is, even as Disney hoped to profit from the cinema's overwhelming push toward narrative film, the mere fact of a nearly ninety-minute cartoon was itself a non-narrative attraction, as was the multiplane device and the "realistic" animation of Snow White herself.
<14> But even then, according to Solomon, "Disney wanted 'Snow White' to have the look of an old European storybook, a look he found in the work of Albert Hurter and Gustave Tenggren" (59), and this storybook style provides the film with the elements of mysticism and the fabulous that, along with the story itself - a fairy tale - counter the drive toward photographic realism in the film. In other words, though the backgrounds are photographed and drawn such that they produce the illusion of three dimensionality, the characterization of those backgrounds has roots in an earlier form of story, a form whose systems of representations - animal characters and totems, magic, ready transformations of matter, and, notably, magically poisoned apples - are reminiscent of the bulk of cartoons featuring animals as subjects. When Disney eschews animal characters in favor of photorealistic anthropomorphic characters, he simultaneously provides a background that recalls these missing elements.
<15> But all of the movie's attention to anthropomorphic detail is additionally subverted both by the dwarfs and by the "old lady" that the Queen becomes in order to give Snow White the magically tainted apple. Klein notes of the dwarfs' presence that they are "brilliantly unreal, or should I say cartoon real? They move like masked waterbags" (142). The Queen is herself especially interesting as the third component of the narrative triangle of the film: concerned with visual aesthetics and her ranking within them, she is determined to do away with Snow White. But importantly, the Queen, playing the part opposite the dwarfs in the narrative [4], can only succeed in putting Snow White into a deep sleep. And how is her success visibly manifest? Snow White becomes de-animated; the character whose very motion Disney yearns to represent "realistically," the body the animators work at simulating as naturally as possible, has ceased to move. The figure of animation's potential - the one augmented by the technological processes of rotoscoping and multiplane photography - is here stilled by the mystical, the magical spell of a poisoned apple. That the queen opposes the dwarfs on the level of the story is obvious, as they chase her off a rocky cliff to what is presumably her death. But she also represents a temporary triumph of the magic and chaotic over the technological.
<16> The poisoned apple operates on another level, one having to do with simulation and dissimulation, with perception and "reality." Snow White takes the apple, a poison in disguise, from the Queen who is herself in disguise. As an instrument of the film's narrative, the apple bridges the gap between representation and illusion; when Snow White eats the fruit she reconciles the tension in the piece between photorealism and fantasy, ostensibly relegating animation's representational strategies in the years before 1937 to a prelapsarian paradise of forms and narrative ambiguities. Had the Queen been able to understand the absolute of beauty, we may safely assume she could have dissimulated such; instead, unable to get it, she chooses to do away with the woman who comes by it "naturally." The theme of the unknowability of beauty in the film may relate to the impossibility of a perfect representation of Snow White's movement. Is it for both reasons that the princess is stilled?
<17> And what becomes of the dwarfs? Once Snow White assumes her months-long coma, the dwarfs, grieving her loss, entomb her in glass and gold and undertake an "eternal vigil" in the woods; this entombment eerily foreshadows apocrypha surrounding Disney's own death: many have suggested that Disney was cryogenized. Alan Bryman writes that, "After steadily worsening health in 1966, he [Disney] died on 15 December of that year. It is sometimes suggested that he was in fact frozen, since a fifth preoccupation in his last years was the science of cryogenesis, but this is disputed by most commentators" (1995, 14). The dwarfs weep and mourn, their mining work apparently moot in this time of crisis. Importantly, this portion of the story is textual, written out for the audience on storybook pages: animation ceases to be important in this interim, for what is to be animated but the dwarfs themselves? Just before the prince arrives looking for his lost love, the film becomes animated once more: the prince leans over the now-uncovered body of Snow White and kisses her on the lips, re-animating her. The scene, which takes full advantage of melodramatic conventions, is touching: the dwarfs weep happily, the animals in the forest jump and frolic with joy, and Snow White, having given each of the seven little men perfunctory kisses, departs immediately with the prince. The dwarfs, having, we presume, put aside all of their work for the months of vigil, are left with nothing but the resumption of their lives in the mines and an empty crystal and gold coffin that whose inscription reads "Snow White." The film, obviously, is not just animated, but about animation, about the art and technology involved, and about the labor at every level, a labor quickly forgotten: the prince and princess live, we are told, happily ever after. And the dwarfs?
Gulliver Travels to the Box Office
<18> For Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came to represent a technical achievement in animation: the production of the first animated feature-length movie, a production whose attention to popular melodramatic details and conventional visual narrative features sustained its audience throughout. For the popular press, the completion and success of Snow White came to represent something else: the fact that only Walt Disney could do this because Disney had, in addition to the money for the initial investment, access to the technology of photography as well as a corporate talent. The way in which the Disney studio was organized and streamlined during the 1930s was, and still is, a source of fascination among those who write about animation and/or corporate structure. The popular success and contemporary attention to the studio served more fully to ground descriptions of cartoon production in language related to factory and to assembly-line style production.
<19> In a Harper's article that appeared a few years before Snow White, "Mickey Mouse's Financial Career," the writer, in an attempt to convince an American audience that Walt Disney is not a wealthy man, explains the system of investiture of profits back into the studio system and what goes on in the studio. He writes that
For the making of his films Disney has a staff of at least a dozen story men, gag men, and scenarists. There are forty animators who draw the movements of the figures, and forty-five assistant animators. There are thirty girls who trace and color non-moving parts and paint backgrounds. There is an orchestra of twenty-four skilled musicians. Then there are sound-effects workmen, special voices, electricians, photographers, and Technicolor experts, film developers, laboratory chemists . . . In all, there are 187 people in the organization. (719)
Everything Disney produces is subject to the language of the "organization," and this is at least appropriate, given Disney's own intention of having a product as homogenized and regularized as was aesthetically possible.
<20> When Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was an $8 million success for the company in 1938, Paramount responded by pressuring its contracted cartoon studio, the Fleischer Brothers, now in Miami, to make its own feature presentation, Gulliver's Travels. And while the film was a financial success for Fleischer Brothers, it has never been as lauded as Snow White. Like the dwarfs, the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels are clearly occupants of a world of animation that contrasts and complements the representation of the human form. And like Snow White, Gulliver's Travels also has a narrative relationship to its modes of production / animation. [5] Gulliver, like the princess, is anthropomorphically representative, while the Lilliputians are, like the dwarfs, more traditional cartoon characters. Gulliver's entrance into the world of Lilliput seems in many ways to mirror the project at Fleischer: not only were the animators at the studio attempting for the first time the kind of "realism" of the human form Disney had undertaken with Snow White, but they were doing so in the context of the feature film. Oddly, much of the critical attention to the film centers around the "real" Gulliver's incompatibility with the Lilliputians. Klein writes that ". . . the mixture of graphic styles in Gulliver reflects the confusion at the studio. The towering Gulliver is rotoscoped into a linear human being, and lit differently than the Lilliputians, as if he were laughing at a New York bistro, watching them onstage" (85). And Leonard Maltin notes that "the drawing of these pint-sized humans is dull and unconvincing, particularly alongside Gulliver, who is meticulously rotoscoped throughout the film. The combination of ultrarealistic Gulliver, semirealistic David and Glory, and unrealistic cartoon types like Gabbyad the two Kings just doesn't work" (117). But because the same kinds of visual inconsistencies are to some extent also true of Snow White, it may be the case that Snow White had simply done this first, had already successfully cataloged the ambivalences and inconsistencies of animating the human form alongside cartoons. As many writers have pointed out, "Gulliver was doomed to unfavorable comparison with Snow White by everyone who saw it. Some critics were kind, and the public responded well, but the film simply wasn't the success Paramount had envisioned" (Maltin 118).
<21> In order to underscore the ways in which Disney was and is what we might consider a cooperative site for technologically determined description, I would like to turn to the Fleischer Brothers and examine the ways in which they were written about and the ways in which they appear to have responded. It may be an exaggeration to suggest that the studios were opposites, but they did frequently operate in remarkably different ways. While Harper's had addressed Disney, the New York Times had written about the Fleischers. Consider a portion of an article which appeared in the Times in 1930 entitled, "The Complicated Work of Making Film Cartoons." The article indicates that "The [Fleischer] brothers are hesitant about exposing their product" (16). Like Hollywood filmmakers, the Fleischers are naturally interested in sustaining some of the mystique of their films. But the New York Times reporter is adamant; compare the process he thus chronicles to the account in Harper's, above:
a staff numbering ninety works busily for nine weeks to produce a single film running six minutes. Some ten different films are in various stages of production at any one time . . The whole thing is quite informal. Any one who is not busy at the moment drops in and takes a hand in the proceedings . . . The first pencil sketches of the action are done by "animators" . . . The "in-between man" gets the "animator's" work . . . The action sketches are compiled by yet another group(16)
And
so on. This passive-voice enthusiasm continues for several
paragraphs, simultaneously celebrating the technical triumph of
cartoons and politely displacing those who drew, painted, and
photographed them. The point of the article is that this is just another process
of industrial manpower. The beginning of this passage denies the
cartoon any kind of singularity by alluding to the number of films
produced concurrently. In addition, stressing the informality of the
process denies the possibility of any kind of determined creativity.
Finally, by containing the word "animators" in quotation marks,
the writer suggests that the animated cartoon is not really creative
work at all (nor, perhaps, are the animators animators). In fact,
later in the article, the writer describes " . . . the background
men, who are known by their fellows as the 'artists' because of
their talent with the brush" (16).
<22> Certain other parts of the account also attract attention: "The whole thing is quite informal" and "anyone takes a hand in the proceedings." The form of organizational control at Fleischer Brothers is different from that at Disney, even in 1930, and the result is a slightly different kind of cartoon, one which at times resists the stories of technology and the factory. Consider the 1932 cartoon Betty Boop's Rise to Fame. The film itself is a collection of footage from earlier cartoons strung together with scenes in which Betty is drawn on and by "uncle Max" Fleischer, even as she chats with him coquettishly. There is an audience within the film, and a complex precedent for the dramatic structure: Max and Betty are being interviewed by a reporter - these scenes are live action with the addition of Betty. The cartoon opens with the reporter asking how many drawings it takes to make an animated cartoon. Fleischer tells him "twelve to fourteen thousand" and proceeds to draw Betty to life, to animation, from "Out of the Inkwell." [6] Between scenes from her old cartoons, scenes selected to document Betty's development as a "star," Max draws her new outfits so she can fit the upcoming bits; further, she flirts with the audience and the reporter, who is assiduously taking notes on the whole process. What is most interesting and rewarding about the cartoon, however, is the end: Betty Boop, in returning to the inkwell, in what appears to be a rather deliberate gesture, splashes ink in the face of the reporter. Is Betty thumbing her nose at those members of the press who have come by to chronicle and discursively regularize the activity at the studio? Norman Klein describes what he calls the machina versitalis, or "how the cartoon pays homage to the machine":
In the way the cartoon creates a parallel world, there is an unavoidable glorification of technology. Even for an animation cosmos as cynical as the Fleischers', this is so . . . The Fleischers enjoyed revealing their technology as a gag in Inkwell cartoons, in the Grampy series, in Betty Boop's Rise to Fame . . . The Fleischers were very much on … the Modernist side of the debate: modeling experience in terms of the industrial machine. (76)
I think Klein makes an excellent point here, but "homage" to the machine may be a slightly more complex combination of homage and resistance, a resistance which is built into the very structure of animation. Through Betty, animators at Fleischer express a playful resistance to the documentary media that have represented animation studios as factory environments above all else. The ink-in-the-face gag needs a threshold in order to work: here it is between the presumably controlled environment of the machine and the anarchic environment of creativity. It's a familiar threshold in Fleischerproductions.
<23> Two Betty Boop cartoons illustrate this type of homage/resistance, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers (1933) and a fascinating pre-Disney interpretation of Snow White (1933). Parade's opening segment is a dedication to the machine, albeit a typically cartoonish dedication. The film begins with a "shot" of a factory, the entire structure of which shakes and shimmies with the activity of its production - the effect is one of a goofy personification of the factory's buildings and smokestacks. After a few seconds of this cavorting, a single package exits the building and is delivered, by both truck and plane, to a toy store. What's inside? What is the product of this rather silly but earnestly-working factory? Betty Boop emerges from the box, a full-figured testament to the mechanical nature of her very being. And the cartoon, as it turns out, is about animation: after this opening sequence, in which the point has been made about mechanization, Betty is involved in a plot scenario in which toy soldiers come to life. Notably, the toy soldiers, like Betty, are animated: the machine can make them, but the machine can'tnecessarily make them move.
<24> Resistance to the technical paradigm in this cartoon is initially manifest in the sheer silliness of the factory image. The factory's laborious chugging to produce a single Betty Boop contrasts the subsequent animation of scores of toy soldiers. The insinuation, the punchline perhaps, is that machines, quite frankly, do not do the work of animators. Moreover, Betty doesn't actually emerge from the package until she is on the scene, until she has arrived at the toystore, where the narrative of coming-to-life begins. The factory, in other words, can make Betty but not animate her.
<25> A different form of twin homage/resistance to the machine appears in the Fleischer Brothers short version of Snow White, produced in 1933. [7] In this cartoon, an excellent example of the relative anarchy of Fleischer studio productions, Betty plays the ironic lead. And indeed, there is an overt reference to the machine in the cartoon: Cab Calloway is rotoscoped for the antics of a dancing skeleton. A copy of the patent page for the rotoscope, a Max Fleischer invention, appears in the majority of books about animation history, and the device, like the multiplane camera, was popularly noticed in its day. Cartoon figures traced over the dancing form of Cab Calloway appeared in several Fleischer cartoons, along with those of Louis Armstrong, Ethel Merman, Arthur Tracy, and others.
<26> But the cartoon deviates from the rotoscoped image. In discussing the visual theme of metamorphosis in cartoons of the 1930s, Klein writes that "[i]n the underground sequence in Snow White, Cab Calloway turns into a twenty-dollar gold piece to illustrate the lyric. This is the Fleischer signature: an image transmutes, as if by alchemy, into many others; its atomic structure seemingly comes unglued" (64). It is this very concept, metamorphosis, that undercuts the notion of outright homage to the machine in the cartoon. As in the case of the factory in Parade, the rotoscope here becomes the site of technology, of the machine, and visual deviations from the form it machinistically projects are an assertion of art over gadget. The appeal of Cab Calloway's rotoscoped image had to do with a cultural recognition of the singer combined with recognition of the device (or the concept that he could be recast in such a fashion). But instead of simply tracing over the original image, animators played against and around the rotoscope.
<27> It is this playfulness, finally, that provides one of the principal bases for cartoon aesthetics: the animator's relationship to technology - and the framing of that relationship in popular discourse - informs both visual and narrative elements of cartoons from the early 1930s, and, once they had graduated from a novelty genre, for decades afterward. Recall whose hand, finally, it is that manipulates and abuses Daffy Duck throughout Duck Amuck, arguably Chuck Jones' most-discussed Daffy Duck short. As the camera "pulls back" from the scene to reveal an animator's desk and the various technical accoutrements of cartooning, we gradually come to recognize the figure of Bugs Bunny sitting in the animator's chair. This ultimate scene follows the tradition of Fleischer cartoons that both glorify and tease the machine; Chuck Jones is willing to reveal the technical nature of animation, but only as long as he can remind us that it is up to him to reveal it. Because Jones actually occupies the animator's chair, we can read his understanding of his position as both creator and created, artist and employee; he is at once Daffy, disgruntled and unappreciated worker, and Bugs, artist-trickster. Duck Amuck, of course, famously ends with a question for the audience: "Ain't I a stinker?"
Works Cited
Bendazzi, Gianalberto. Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
Betty Boop's Rise to Fame. Dir. Dave Fleisher. Paramount, 1933.
Bryman, Alan. Disney and His Worlds. London: Routledge, 1995.
Cholodenko, Alan. Introduction. The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation. Sydney: Southwood Press, 1991.
"Complicated Work of Making Film Cartoons." New York Times. 28 Dec. 1930. 8:16.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Duck Amuck. Dir. Chuck Jones. Warner Brothers, 1953.
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage, 1964.
Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde." Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: British Film Institute, 1990. 56-62.
Gulliver's Travels. Dir. Dave Fleischer. Paramount, 1939.
Heraldson, Donald. Creators of Life: A History of Animation. New York: Drake, 1975.
Hollis, Richard and Sibley, Brian. The Disney Studio Story. New York: Crown, 1988.
Klein, Norman M. Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the Animated Cartoon. London: Verso, 1993.
Lutz, E.G. Animated Cartoons: How They are Made, Their Origin and Development. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920.
Maltin, Leonard. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Rev. ed. New York: New American Library, 1987.
"Mickey Mouse's Financial Career." Harpers (168) 1934: 714-721.
Moellenhof, Fritz. "The Remarkable Popularity of Mickey Mouse." American Imago. 1.3 (1940): 19-32.
Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. Dir. Dave Fleischer. Paramount, 1933.
Peary, Gerald and Danny, eds. The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology. New York: Dutton, 1980.
Rubin, Susan. Animation, the Art and the Industry. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984.
Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.
Snow White. Dir. Dave Fleischer. Paramount, 1933.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Dir. Michael Hand. RKO Radio Pictures, 1937.
Solomon, Charles. Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation. New York: Knopf, 1989.
Thompson, Kristin. "Implications of the Cel Animation Technique." The Cinematic Apparatus. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. London: Macmillan, 1980. 106-120.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975.
Notes
[1] Maltin notes about Disney in Mice and Magic that "he and most of his staff came from Kansas City, where their major influence was Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables, and their only instruction was from Edward Lutz's 1920 handbook on animation" (27). [^]
[2] Leonard Maltin writes of the "difficult decision" to discard animated footage:
"A lot more than just experimental shots and drawings went into the wastebasket," said one contemporary report. "Two long completed sequences . . . were reluctantly snipped out to save running time. One night, two thousand feet went at one whack. Disney had to order it, and it hurt him more than it did you." Actually, running time was not the main reason the footage was cut; Walt felt these entertaining but extraneous scenes hindered the progress of the story. (53) [^]
[3] Efficient and machine-oriented methods of house-cleaning were apparently popular for animators in 1937: the Fleischers produced a cartoon entitled House Cleaning Blues, in which the character Grampy, an habitual inventor and tinkerer, helps Betty Boop clean house by creatively enlisting the assistance of all of the machines in the house (a player piano's roller, for instance, is used to press and fold laundry). [^]
[4] As a practitioner of magic, the queen is also technically opposed to the dwarfs; Ellul writes:
Magic clearly displays the characteristics of primitive technique . . . In his conflict with matter, in his struggle to survive, man interposes an intermediary agency between himself and his environment. . . .He is able to manipulate his surroundings so that they are no longer merely his surroundings but become a factor of equilibrium and of profit to him. (1964, 24-5) [^]
[5] In fact, the Fleischers had invented the rotoscoping process that Disney's animators had used for Snow White; but the Fleischers generally used the device playfully, a ghost skeleton, for example, animated using the image of Cab Calloway dancing in the Betty Boop Snow White (1933). [^]
[6] "Out of the Inkwell" was the production name given to Fleischer Brothers' cartoons in the late twenties and early thirties. [^]
[7] The Fleischer Snow White, which bears a paper in its own right, is an exceptionally weird cartoon. Produced in 1933, it is very near the apex of Betty's pre-Hayes code stardom; still, the Fleischer studio remained committed to such loose, gag-oriented narrativestructure with its biggest star. Moreover, some of the animators working at Fleischer during the period in which the Betty Boop Snow White was produced were among those who later worked on Disney's feature version of the same story. Perhaps most notable is Grim Natwick, a primary animator of Betty Boop who also worked directly on the animation of the character Snow White in the later film. That animators moved frequently (by some standards) from studio to studio is in itself an interesting topic of inquiry. [ ^]
Return to Top»