Animation is an increasingly popular art form. High-profile productions make the box office explode, and falling costs of the main tools let us enjoy great quality even in independent projects. However, the beginnings of animation were much more humble and demanding than we imagine. From hand-drawn sketches to paper tricks, the pioneers of animation managed to leave the world speechless, and they established an essential foundation for everything that came after. Today we’ll review the history of five animators.
Eadweard Muybridge
The life of Eadweard Muybridge could easily be adapted for film. He arrived in the United States in the 1850s, almost died in a carriage accident a decade later, became a photographer during his recovery, and killed his wife's lover in the 1870s, and set out on a photographic expedition through Central America a year later.
He claimed a privileged place in animation history with his work on animal locomotion, including his famous Horse in Motion, an experiment that resolved the doubt of California governor Leland Stanford, who believed horses lift all four hooves while running. Muybridge used a rig of twelve cameras, and over the next twelve years he devoted himself to perfecting his method, giving rise to devices like the zoopraxiscope.
James Stuart Blackton
Considered “the father of American animation,” James Stuart Blackton was one of the first (if not the first) to merge stop motion and hand-drawn drawing.
Blackton and his partner Albert Smith acquired the technology, founded the American Vitagraph Company, made several films based on the popular character of the time, Happy Hooligan, and in the late 1890s presented The Humpty Dumpty Circus, a film that sadly has been lost.
The best record we have of Blackton's skill is The Enchanted Drawing (1900), a short in which we can see Blackton himself drawing a man on a canvas, from whom he “steals” a wine bottle, his hat, and a cigar.
Émile Cohl
Although his family tried to turn him into a jeweler and insurance salesman, Émile Cohl left deep marks as a caricaturist, under the wing of a giant of the time, André Gill. Cohl's path to animation was established in 1907 thanks to a rather colorful incident: the story goes that the studio Gaumont stole Cohl's art to use it in the promotion of one of its posters, and during his complaint, Cohl ended up being hired.
The short The Haunted Hotel by James Stuart Blackton took the French market by storm, and both Gaumont and Cohl turned fully to animation. The result was Fantasmagorie, shown in August 1908.
Several film historians agree that Fantasmagorie was the first conventional screening of animated cartoons. Its development required more than 700 drawings, and Cohl applied the so-called “chalk effect,” which consists of filming black strokes on a white background and then inverting the negative.
Winsor McCay
Winsor McCay gained great recognition through his comic strips Little Sammy Sneeze, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, and his masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland, so popular at the time that it was eventually adapted into a stage play. His formal entry into the world of animation happened in 1911, inspired by the flip books his son brought home.
Logically, his first short was based on Little Nemo, with 4,000 drawings made on “rice paper.” Even more impressive was what he did in Gertie the Dinosaur, where one can enjoy detailed backgrounds, a notable depth effect, and special attention to the muscular movement of the dinosaur. This required pure brute force, with more than 10,000 drawings.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/TGXC8gXOPoULotte Reiniger
Obsessed since childhood with Chinese paper cutting and silhouette puppets, Lotte Reiniger had a truly meteoric rise. After animating the wooden rats in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” by Paul Wegener and directing Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens in 1919, Reiniger had more than enough merit to rub shoulders with the great German animators of the time.
Finally, Reiniger claimed her place in history by becoming the first woman to direct a full-length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Every scene and every character made of black paper was animated frame by frame, a task so arduous that it took three years to complete (from 1923 until its debut in February 1926).
