Original subtitles

As someone who is a devoted fan of the Disneyland TV show, I can tell you that my favorite episodes

were always the ones when Walt would take us behind the scenes and show us how animated

cartoons were made.

This was also a wonderful way of visiting or revisiting his classic cartoon features,

some of which I'd seen by then and some of which I hadn't.

This show only wedded my appetite for more.

One of the most remarkable shows Disney aired during his first season on ABC was The Story

of the Animated Drawing.

In it, Walt traces the history and prehistory of animation and pays tribute to its pioneers.

You'd have to look far and wide to find a better or more straightforward survey of this

subject.

The wonderful optical devices Walt demonstrates were borrowed from the collection of the Academy

of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but the two best sequences in the film were developed

and dramatized by the Disney staff, a vivid and accurate recreation of Windsor McKay's

vaudeville presentation of the landmark cartoon, Gertie the Dinosaur.

And a demonstration of how a theater organist would accompany silent cartoons, enacted by

the studio's own Ollaker Wallace.

As in other such programs, certain liberties are taken for the sake of showmanship.

The show opens with Walt flipping two animation drawings of Mickey Mouse that are fully inked.

Here an excerpt from Steamboat Willie is presented with a newly recorded soundtrack substituting

for the original.

The book Walt refers to, the art of animation, didn't yet exist, except as a prod.

On the other hand, there's a wonderful and informative demonstration of how subtle concept

art for Fantasia was transferred to cells using innovative new techniques.

The one aspect of animation Walt doesn't discuss is color, because this show, like all TV broadcasts

at the time, was seen in black and white.

The script for this show was written by a bona fide animation pioneer, Dick Hummer, who

lived through a lot of the history he describes, having started during the teens before landing

a job at Disney's studio in the 1930s.

And the optical processes used to present some of this material were engineered by Ub

Iwerks, another notable pioneer who made cartoon history right alongside Walt.

To enter this timeless land, one of these many worlds will open to you.

Frontier land, tall tales and true from the legendary past.

Tomorrowland, promise of things to come.

Adventureland, the wonder world of nature's own realm.

Fantasyland, the happiest kingdom of them all.

Sending this week the story of the animated drawing.

Now your host, Walt Disney.

Most of us are inclined to think of the animated cartoon as a modern invention, like the airplane

or the automobile.

But actually, the idea of imparting life and motion to still pictures is as ancient as

man himself.

But in our time, we've seen this dream come true.

The animated drawing has matured and has taken its rightful place among the fine arts.

This picture is from our Nutcracker Suite, one of the musical numbers in our production

fantasia.

Art galleries all over the country exhibited many such setups from that production.

People bought them as if with any other kind of painting.

Yet consider this fact.

This picture moved.

It's true, it only represents one frame of a motion picture film.

But delicate and intricate, though it is, it came to life.

Now to do this would have been only wishful thinking as short a time ago as the 1920s.

And yet the groundwork for this accomplishment was laid long before that.

Now we in the profession know that we owe a debt of gratitude to our forerunner.

And it is to these pioneers that we dedicate this program on the history of the animated

drawing.

Their story is part of what is contained in this book, The Art of Animation.

Compotting this volume has been a pet project with us here at the studio.

It took considerable time and careful research.

Herein you can read about the artists who dreamed and experimented, had their failures

and successes, but somehow never gave up trying to breathe life and movement into the inanimate

picture.

In effect, this is a history of our craft.

It begins in prehistoric times with the artistic efforts of our first shaggy ancestors, the

caveman.

Here's a reproduction of a wall painting found in the famous caves of Les Coe in France.

Apparently the caveman artist was trying to depict an animal in action the only way he

knew how, by drawing it in a running position.

At the same time, give or take a few thousand years, in a cave near Altamira in northern

Spain another artist was at work.

With a double pair of legs, now if he had been able to alternate these leg positions

as we can with our camera, he would have achieved the miracle of animation, primitive of course

like himself, but basically correct.

Here we have an Egyptian wall decoration of about 2000 B.C.

This mural of two wrestlers has almost the appearance of a strip of film.

If we again take certain liberties and skip from pose to pose, we here also achieve animation

of sorts.

The year 1500 A.D. among the great men of the Italian Renaissance was Leonardo da Vinci,

artist and inventor.

Here is his diagram on which he just intended to show the proportions of the human figure.

But our camera can make it animate.

By emphasizing certain positions of the figure, it moves and dances.

And Leonardo da Vinci becomes an honorary pioneer of the animation industry.

However, so far in our history, no one had actually caused a drawn image to appear to

move.

True animation awaited the recognition of a strange trait of the human eye.

This is a principle known as the persistence of vision.

Way back in 1824, a Frenchman by the name of Paul Roget demonstrated this with a simple

toy called a thaumatrope.

The name was derived from the Greek meaning wheel of magic.

There is a different picture on each side of the disc.

When the disc is twirled, the eye retains for a split second the after image of each

of the pictures.

And so we do not see the separate pictures, but a combined impression.

Thus, by causing the observer to see a picture that did not exist, Roget's thaumatrope clearly

demonstrates the principles of persistence of vision.

Yet this toy did not really generate any feeling of animation.

Credit for doing that for the first time goes to Joseph Plateau, who invented a device that

actually seemed to make pictures move.

He called it a finochistoscope, another word derived from the Greek meaning optical deceiver.

A series of images are drawn in progressive positions of an action.

Each picture is separated from the other by a slit.

I'll show you how it works.

The disc is held up to a mirror so that the reflected drawings can be seen through the

slips.

Now when the disc is spun, the static figures change their positions.

They definitely appear to move.

This germ of the motion picture was a sensation in its day.

Variety was provided for the one-man audience by extra discs containing other actions.

Now here's an innovation and enjoy one action on the outer rim and another on the center.

Looks like in 1832 they already had the double feature.

Plateau's finochistoscope led to many other animation novelties.

One of them was the zoetrope or wheel of life.

It was a drum rather than a disc.

Now the drawings were put on long strips.

Drawings were interchangeable.

They were placed inside the drum below the slits.

Now when viewed from the slits, the drawings definitely appeared to come to life when the

drum was spun.

One-man peep shows came a very remarkable machine that was able to project moving drawings

onto a screen for audiences.

And this was even before the invention of the motion picture camera and projector.

Now here on my movie Ola, I have a film that reenacts the story of Amel Reno and his remarkable

theater optique.

Reno was a painter of lantern slides who lived in a small apartment in Paris in the year

1877.

He was intrigued with the early animation devices.

He studied and read all he could about them in the scientific periodicals of his day.

Finally he invented a machine of his own called the praxeinoscope, which borrowed the interchangeable

action strips from the zoetrope.

But he replaced the slits on the zoetrope with mirrors set edge to edge around a revolving

center.

This individual picture on the outer rim is reflected on one of the mirrors.

And here, with a charm that still enchants and delights us today, the images glide and

flow along with a mysterious life of their own.

Still, Reno wasn't satisfied.

Soon he hit upon the idea of drawing his pictures on strips of black paper.

This enabled him to combine a background on a separate card with the action drawings.

The complete effect was viewed through a tiny proscenium.

He called his improved machine the theater praxeinoscope, here one could see a vaudeville

show in miniature.

Just a simple change of scenery, a new cast of characters, and a brand new act is ready

to start.

It doesn't matter that the entire performance lasts only a few seconds, or that the strip

is made up of only 12 poses, still keeps you spellbound.

You want to see it again and again, but to Reno's mind, there's still that much to

be desired.

He wanted something better and bigger.

At last he had it.

Black picture strips had been expanded to a long band containing 500 hand-painted slides

drawn on transparent gelatin.

Small holes punched between each image foreshadowed the perforations on modern film.

Each hole meshes into the teeth of the large wheel, rotating at the same speed as the 36

mirrors at the center.

Each individual image is lighted up separately.

By an interplay of mirrors and lenses, the ray of light is reflected back to a mobile

mirror, which in turn projects the enlarged image onto a screen.

By adapting the principle of the magic lantern to his machine, he was able to project a background

onto the same screen.

Here his actors were life-sized.

Here he could almost create the illusion of reality.

From a toy in the home, his idea had grown into a form of public entertainment.

Reno called it the theater optique.

Here the people of Paris could view a complete quarter of an hour performance.

In the course of his career as a showman, he produced seven different shows, all accompanied

by appropriate mood music.

For more than 10 years, Reno worked here behind the screen that separated the audience

from his primitive projection booth.

And in this period, he played to over a half million delighted patrons, assume that not

many of his viewers ever gave a thought to the vast amount of effort that lay behind

what they were seeing.

And it is quite probable that not even Reno himself had the slightest inkling of the heights

toward which his first true prototype of the animated cartoon was pointing the way.

By the end of the 19th century, drawings had been made to appear to move, but only in a

limited way.

Progress was again waiting on invention, and this came with the development of the motion

picture film and the motion picture camera.

This new medium opened the door to further experiments with the animated drawing.

In the year 1906, J. Stuart Blackton made a short film novelty called "Humors Phases

of Funny Faces."

The drawings were made with chalk on a blackboard.

The movement was affected by erasing and redrawing parts of the figures.

Stop motion photography created the action.

Mr. McKay, the famous newspaper cartoonist, made several noteworthy experiments with

animation.

Among them was his film "Gertie the Dinosaur."

Gertie was not presented in the way modern films are shown today.

It was part of a vaudeville act in which Winsor McKay appeared on the stage.

Gentlemen, I give you "Gertie the Dinosaur."

I will speak to Gertie, and she will do everything that I ask of her.

Come on, Gertie.

Come on out and take a pretty bow.

That's a good girl.

Now come on up front here.

For the audience, Gertie, stop that nonsense.

Let's get on with the act.

Now will you be a good girl and make your bow to the audience?

Okay.

Okay.

That's enough.

Don't overdo it.

Now, raise your right foot.

Come on, Gertie.

That's good.

Now raise your left foot.

Your left foot, Gertie.

Your left foot.

Never mind that sea monster.

Your left foot.

Now stop acting like a dimwitted dinosaur.

Take it easy, Gertie.

You're a bad girl.

All right.

Now stop that crying.

Here, here's a nice pumpkin for you.

Good, huh?

Now will you raise your left foot?

Thank you.

Now you have an appetite today.

Aren't you afraid you'll spoil your figure?

Well, let's get on with the act.

Good.

Gertie, pay attention.

Jumbo.

Now, Gertie, don't hurt Jumbo.

He's just trying to be friendly.

Aren't you ashamed?

Well, folks, that's how dinosaurs are.

Unpredictable.

But she does have a gentler side.

As a matter of fact, she's a student of the dance.

And if the orchestra will play a tune,

she'll perform for you.

Light on her feet, isn't she?

By the way, this is the latest dance, the dinosaur dip.

Now, Gertie, you had that coming to you.

Now, go and play dead.

That's fine.

Now get up.

Come on, get up.

Let's get on with the act.

Up, up on your feet.

Hey, Gertie, look at that four-wheated lizard.

Did you see that?

You're not going to happen to see things, are you?

How'd you like to have a little drink, huh?

Well, there's the lake.

Go on, take a little drink.

Ladies and gentlemen, we'll show you

that she's not afraid of me.

And take me for a ride.

Alley-oop.

Windsor McKay's Gertie and other animation novelties

stimulate a great public interest and created a demand

for this new medium.

This, in turn, encouraged other pioneers

to creative efforts that, in time,

led to the establishment of the animated cartoon

as an industry.

One of the pioneers, J.R. Bray, invented the basic patents

for animated cartoon production.

For a time, the Bray studios were practically

the creative center of the industry.

His Colonel Heaselier was the first animated cartoon character

to appear in a series of films.

There was Raoul Barry, Canadian artist and painter.

Among the many cartoon characters he created

was Salis Bumpkin, who appeared in his early film series

called The Grouch Chasers.

Zerl Heard, who invented an improvement,

valuable in speeding up production of animated cartoons.

His pioneer film effort was the Bobby Bump series.

And there was Pat Sullivan's cartoon character, Felix

the Cat.

This characteristic walk, animated by Sullivan's collaborator,

Otto Mesmer, became a laugh provoking trademark.

These, then, are some of the pioneers who led the way.

By the mid-1920s, the animated cartoon industry

was flourishing.

This was the era of the silent screen.

And although pictures were made without sound,

they were seldom shown in silence.

Music played a vital part in their presentation.

Here is Oliver Wallace, who, in 1910,

was the first to accompany silent pictures

on the theater organ.

Today, he is still creating music for pictures

as one of our staff composers.

Through the magic of makeup, we'll

try to take him back to the days of the silent pictures.

It's coming, but we need to take off about 10 more years.

10?

Can't you take off at least 15?

Yes, I'm just the thing here to do it.

Oh, why didn't somebody tell me about these things?

It's about right, but there's still something missing.

I've forgotten about those, you know.

Thank you.

How's that?

Now that we've taken Oliver Wallace back to the period,

he will demonstrate how the theater organ was

used to create the music and sound effects for silent pictures.

Are you ready, Ollie?

All right, quiet, everybody.

Roll them.