By Bill Herrfeldt
ERICKSON TRIBUNE
Animated movies have become one of the most popular film genres, especially among the younger set. And because of that popularity, the quality of animated movies today is nothing short of amazing.
But it has not always been that way. Let’s take a brief look at how far animation has come since its meager beginning 100 years ago.
The Age of Animation begins
In 1906, James Stuart Blackton made what some consider the first American animated film, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. It features an artist’s hand drawing the faces of a man and a woman with chalk. The two faces then begin to interact, as the man blows cigar smoke and tips his hat. Blackton used a combination of chalk drawings and cutouts to achieve the movement. By 1910 he ceased his animation experiments, while Winsor McCay and others began theirs.
McCay claimed that his first attempts at an animated film were inspired by some flipbooks his son owned. In 1911, McCay released the film Little Nemo. It consisted of 4,000 drawings using translucent rice paper and india ink.
To create fluid movement, he devised a wooden holder and put crosshairs in the corners of the paper to keep the drawings in register and used a stopwatch to time the movements on paper to the split second.
Subsequent films included The Story of a Mosquito and Gertie the Dinosaur. The latter is one of the most famous and influential of early animated films.
Disney sets the bar high
In 1916, Walt Disney was a freshman in a Chicago high school. It was wartime, so Disney dropped out of school and spent a year in France with the Red Cross. Upon his return, he made ads for newspapers, magazines and movie theaters. Then he was off to California where he and his brother Roy started Disney Brothers Studio.
In 1925, Disney hired Lillian Bounds to ink and paint celluloid. Later, they were married, and Lillian is credited with naming Mickey Mouse.